Opposite the Cross Keys (22 page)

What was I to do with the ghastly thing? In the end, I went round to the dustbins, in their niche by the bicycle shed. Not to throw the hairbrush away. You didn't throw away silver: it was unthinkable. After agonized excogitation I climbed up on to a dustbin lid, reached up and hid the hairbrush in the gutter of the bicycle shed.

When the day of my birthday came round Maud gave a sniff at May Bowden's birthday card – padded silk scented with Parma violets, expensive as cards go, but her sole apparent acknowledgement of the occasion. That was only to be expected, and I felt that both I and May Bowden had got off lightly. What I had not expected was the latter's continuing interest in the welfare of her birthday present.

‘Have you brushed your hair today with your lovely brush?' she would waylay me in the street to ask. Or, accusingly, if she came upon me in my normal state of dishevelment, ‘You didn't brush your hair today with your lovely brush!' Until one day, strained beyond endurance by the guilty knowledge of what I had actually done with it, and the necessity of fending off Maud's puzzled ‘Wha's the old geezer on about?', I flung out, ‘It isn't a lovely hairbrush! It's a rotten old mouldy one!'

Having listened impassively to my tearful admission as to what I had done with her gift, May Bowden sent me to retrieve the evidence. The brush was not improved by its three weeks' sojourn in the gutter. I brought it back, already mourning the imminent loss of the little cloth bags with their inimitable contents. And not only the cloth bags. As if nine were a water-shed which, surmounted, revealed a totally different landscape on the further side, I suddenly understood what it meant to be rich. I mourned my lost inheritance.

May Bowden took the hairbrush from me. She turned it over in her hands as if she had never seen it until that moment; as if the monogrammed M and B on the silver back meant nothing to her. At last, looking up, she demanded, ‘And who had the cheek to give you this bit of rubbish?'

‘You did,' I faltered.

‘Poor old May Bowden,' said May Bowden. ‘She must be soft in the head.'

Next day a dressing-table set of silver and tortoiseshell arrived for me from the best jewellers in the city – brush, comb, hand-mirror, a covered cut-glass bowl with a swansdown powder puff inside it, and a little silver stand with branches for hanging rings on. When I went over to May Bowden's house to say thank you, she gave me a little gold ring set with three emeralds to hang on my new ring-stand.

That night I brushed my hair with my new brush, looked at myself in the new mirror, and went to bed with my emerald ring on my finger. I lay against the pillow thinking luxurious thoughts until Maud poked her nose through the door and inquired sardonically, ‘Her Ladyship got everything she wants for the night?'

‘Oh Maud!' I jumped out of bed, ran to the bedroom door and threw my arms round her unluxurious figure. ‘I'd much rather be poor like you, honestly I would!'

‘Oh ah? And I thought May Bowden was the only one round here with a screw loose!'

I hadn't been to the cemetery with Maud after all, when I got back from St Awdry's. That was because she had found a new recipient for her Woodbines and slabs of Dairy Milk. His name was Curly and he drove the pirate bus which, operating out of the carters' depot in Duke Street, was trying to undercut the fares of the official buses based in Recorder Road. Curly's fare was three ha'pence less each way, which more than made up for seats without upholstery and the general dilapidation of the equipage.

Besides, Curly was a lovely man, always laughing and joking, and a great one for the ladies who formed the majority of his customers. Once when the engine gave up altogether, outside St Awdry's, they piled out of the bus and pushed it bodily into the village, Curly at the wheel shouting encouragement, all the way to the smithy, where Mr Ames, the smith, patched it up fit for the road again. With such a bright new peg to hang her dreams on, Maud – for the time being, at any rate – had cast off melancholy.

So I went to the cemetery alone.

The day after my birthday I took some of my birthday money and went to the Market Place to buy a bunch of flowers.

The Market flowers, packed tight into their metal vases, seemed not at all the right kind for a gypsy's grave. I finally settled for some tiger lilies, not because they were any more suitable than the rest, but because of their name, wild-sounding and dangerous. They were expensive – fivepence each – so I could only buy three.

I took the tram to the Earlham Road terminus. The tramlines finished exactly at the cemetery gates, which always disturbed me a little, as if the terminus really was the end. The way in was by a broad avenue, quite imposing. The graves nearest the entrance gates were those of people who had died a long time ago. The more recent burials stretched further and further into the distance, making the dead seem very far away, which, after all, was what they were – further than you could ever see, no matter how big the cemetery grew: until, as was bound to happen in time, it was the size of the whole world.

I once asked Maud who would bury the last person left alive, since, obviously, he would be in no position to do it himself. It seemed a reasonable enough question, but Maud snapped, ‘Don't be daft!' Adding – rather as an afterthought, it seemed to me, ‘God, o' course!'

A short distance into the cemetery was a little house where I intended to ask the way to the grave of Mrs Smith, the gypsy princess who had died the year before in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. Only, somehow, as I drew near the sign which said ‘Inquiries', I grew reluctant to ask, reluctant to be told. The truth was, I was not all that keen on naked graves: too little separated you from their occupants. I preferred them dressed up with urns and angels and broken columns, with names on them and dates that were past, so that you could be reasonably sure the people inside were decently dead.

A man in uniform came out of the little house, took a look at my flowers and asked, ‘Need any help, girlie?'

‘No thank you,' I answered, deciding then and there to give Nellie Smith time to earn enough to pay for an angel before I paid my respects.

I left my flowers instead on the admiral's grave, the one with the ropes and the anchors. As it said he had died in 1897 I didn't suppose he had had many flowers recently. I pictured him looking out of heaven and exclaiming with surprised pleasure, ‘Well, shiver my timbers! If there isn't a dear little girl down there putting some tiger lilies on my grave!' I put on my holiest expression, just in case; strained my ears and thought I almost heard a faint ‘Ahoy, there!' sliding down the wind, though I couldn't be dead certain.

One evening my father returned home looking puzzled. It was the third time running he had gone round to Mr Lee's for his handwriting lesson and found the shop locked, with a sign saying ‘Closed' hanging on the inside of the glass door. When he had pressed the bell which rang in the flat above the shop, nobody had answered.

‘I don't understand it,' my father complained: ‘It's not like Mr Lee to go off without letting me know.'

My father was upset. He loved his Chinese writing. In China, he was fond of saying, handwriting was regarded as the noblest form of art, surpassing even painting which, in the classic Chinese view, was only a debased form of calligraphy anyway. Watching him as with seriousness and concentration he used the brushes he took out of the jar with the pattern of butterflies, first touching their tapered tips to the lovely little blocks of ink, I sometimes felt, in my inchoate, childish way, that he was not really writing at all but performing a kind of music whose rhythms and harmonies I was not equipped to hear.

‘He's usually so punctilious.'

My father sighed and tenderly put away his rolls of paper. In those days there was not so much as a Chinese takeaway in the city. Copying out classical Chinese texts must have been a lonely pursuit in that easterly bump of England which was the only thing oriental about it.

A week or so after that third unsuccessful visit to Mr Lee, I came home to find my mother and father looking distressed, conversing together in low tones which they cut off altogether immediately they became aware of my presence in the room.

‘What's the matter?' I asked.

‘Nothing,' they said, both together, and would doubtless have gone on saying it if Maud hadn't come into the room.

‘Tin't no good covering it up,' she advised tartly. ‘It's bound to be in the
News of the World
.'

It appeared that, the night before, some hooligan had chucked a brick through the window of Mr Lee's shop, breaking not only the glass, but some of the Chinese vases on display; and naturally enough, the police, once called in, needed to get in touch with the owner of the premises. They spoke to the neighbours who said they hadn't set eyes on either Mr Lee or his daughter for – how long was it? – two weeks at least, going on three. What with one thing and another, the police got hold of the fire brigade who fetched a long ladder which stretched from the street to one of the upper windows. A fireman climbed up the ladder.

As a result of what he saw, the police broke the lock of the side door and went upstairs to the flat, where they found Mr Lee hanging from the electric light fitting. Of his daughter, Miss Lee, there was no sign.

As the story unfolded, my parents watched me anxiously. I can't honestly remember feeling anything but a kind of shame-faced pride at actually knowing somebody who was going to get into the papers. That, and my mother's tremulous observation that only a frail little man like Mr Lee could have hanged himself from an electric light fitting without bringing it down.

‘What on earth could have happened to the girl?' she wondered aloud.

‘I can guess,' my father replied grimly.

I, on the other hand, knew.

Next morning I awoke to an understanding of the meaning of delayed shock.
What mischief had we wrought with that spring water?
A waking dream, as vivid as the night had been sweet and dreamless, projected Mr Lee slowly revolving underneath his chandelier, his little feet pointing to the floor, the hairs of his wispy beard moving in the draught. I saw the beautiful Miss Lee, her blue-black hair streaming behind her, hurtling her red sports car round blind corners, oblivious of the oncoming traffic, driving hell-for-leather to the end of the world.

I knew myself to be doubly damned for having given away Tom's secret, after I had promised. If I hadn't said anything, nothing would have happened, and my father would still be going happily to his handwriting lessons. As it was, others, innocent of offence, had been punished for my sin. Mr Lee revolved first one way, until the cord by which he hung was all twisted, then the other, as it slowly unravelled itself.
I
was the murderess who ought to be in the
News of the World
.

I was filled with an overwhelming desire for the company of Nellie Smith, my companion in crime. I longed to speak to her. I wanted to see her black curls bobbing, see myself reflected in the enormous eyes which took up so much of her face. I needed to check up on which of her appalling dresses she had on that day, and if she were still wearing my scabs.

Breakfast was an uncomfortable meal, my father and mother preoccupied. I noticed that the little jar with the butterflies was no longer on the sideboard.

The two of them looked on with pleasure as I ate with unimpaired appetite. Differing as they often did over the right way to bring me up, on one point they were in accord. Nothing fundamental could be amiss with a child who finished up its porridge.

My mother said, ‘We really must go to Green's this morning and order your new school coat. If we leave it any longer and it needs altering, there won't be time before school begins.'

‘It's much too warm for trying on!' I protested. I had other plans for the day. ‘If we get it now I may have grown again by the time I need it, and then you'll be sorry you didn't get a bigger size.'

My good sense was recognized and applauded, and I left the table a free agent. Only Maud remarked suspiciously, as she wielded the crumb tray, ‘You're up to something. I can see it in your face. What you up to, then? Don't deny it!'

I dithered between wide-eyed innocence and hurt reproach, and plumped for the latter. For all the good it did me.

‘I only have to breathe and you suspect me.'
‘Not without cause.'

I took the bus as far as Salham Norgate, an extra penny each way, but worth it. I didn't want to risk the Fenners knowing I was in St Awdry's. As the bus drew up to the Cross Keys stop I kept my head down, pretending there was something the matter with the buckle on one of my sandals. The Salham Norgate stop was a fair way past the encampment, but I wasn't sorry for the walk back. Now that I was on the point of reaching my destination I became less and less certain of what I had come for. The blackberries in the hedge were large and luscious and for a moment I thought of retracing my steps to the Norgate grocery shop, begging the loan of a basin, and filling it with the berries as if that alone were the purpose of my outing.

‘
That's
what I was up to!' I saw myself crowing triumphantly, as I presented the brimming bowl to Maud, for turning into blackberry pie or blackberry fool or blackberry and apple pudding. ‘
That's
what I was up to, so there!'

I kept on towards the encampment, but slowly, my lips purpling with blackberry juice. I found a whippy length of privet and marched along, flailing the wilting greenstuff which edged the road. Almost, so preoccupied was I, I passed the gypsy camp without so much as noticing it.

Almost.

The Smiths' caravan was gone. In the middle of the maltreated oblong where it had stood, somebody had been burning rubbish. Half-consumed nastinesses and some things which had resisted destruction were humped in a slatternly mess – bits of Turkey carpet, a frying pan without a handle, a breadboard blackened with smoke. The old un, sitting in her usual place on her caravan steps, took her pipe out of her mouth and inquired, ‘Lookin' fer someone, dearie?'