Cobweb Walking, page 4
He held on to my shoulder and, looking as though he did not like holding it, led me back into the supermarket. There, all the people with their trolleys and their baskets turned to gaze at me with dismay and pity on their faces, and one little child pointed at me from her pram and cried, “Look, Mummy! Is she real?” at which the Mother shook the pram by its handle and said furiously, “Ssssh!”
I walked through the shop under the hand of the store detective, my face red with shame and fear, and dreaded to think what Maggie would say if she ever came to hear of it.
Even now, I felt myself grow hot with the dread of Maggie’s disgust at my behaviour. I shook my head. No good going over all that again, I told myself sternly. Now my most important task was to find some food as soon as possible. And as I thought the thought, I saw a pint of milk standing outside a door down a flight of steps. I looked up and down the street. There was no one at all in sight. The window at the bottom of the steps had a net curtain drawn across it, so I could not tell if anyone was looking out. But I thought it unlikely, for there was nothing to look out on to but brick wall and ugliness.
Not like my home, I thought, poised above the steps, and trying to pluck up the courage to go down and steal that bottle of milk. Not a single window at my home looked out on to anything but beauty. From my own bedroom, right at the top of the house, under the eaves, I looked on to the front field, grazed by Billy’s Ayrshire cows. And beyond it rose the little hill etched with the white path leading to the village. If you walked along it you went over the top, down the other side, leaving Druid’s Clearing on your left, and there, cuddled in rolling hillocks was our village where Maggie did her weekly Little Shop. When I was very little, Daddy used to point to that path and say to me, “That’s the way you will go to school when you are big enough.”
Cowslips and huge mushrooms grew in our front field, and in the summer I made cowslip wine. It was so golden and delicately perfumed that Daddy was always proud to serve it to his guests. We would have to pick the mushrooms early, before the worms got at them, and they were so big, sometimes, that one filled the whole frying pan. Daddy and I would laugh as the great dark thing rose and bubbled in the frying pan, and I said it looked like an elephant’s ear. Once Daddy told me, very serious, with only his eyes twinkling, that last night he thought he had seen me out in the front field dancing under the moon on the mighty mushrooms.
“I can! I can!” I told him, pirouetting round the kitchen to show him my style.
My father’s bedroom window, which had become Cora’s too, looked over our moat. Last winter a pair of swans had appeared there, and Daddy had said that it was a great honour for us. We also had coots on the moat. They nested in the rushes, and ran light-footed right over the water’s surface, or so it seemed. I used to watch them and wonder, when I was very young, if one day I too would be able to walk over water like that dark shrieking bird. That was when I thought a person got lighter and lighter as they got older. I know now that once you are grown up and get troubles you become quite heavy and can’t do any of those things at all.
Our ducks used to lay lots of pale green eggs on the moat banks so that in the rain the water rose and submerged them. Then Billy would say, “Those dratted animals, we ought to have let the fox get ’em for all the use they are.” I had often seen the fox, a heavy muzzled dog, sitting gazing enraptured at the swimming poultry. I suppose he must have often seen me too, and considered me too small and insignificant to concern him. George and I would sit on one bank, he on the other, and sometimes George would quiver, as though filled with a spasm of uncontrollable excitement, but as soon as I put my hand on his head, he would become calm, and sink down, head on paws, to watch the fox through half-closed eyes.
Billy used to bring all the ducks into a hutch each evening to stop what he called “that old devil” getting them, but in spite of Billy’s care, several times a month we would hear the squawks of a duck dying in the old fox’s jaws, and next day there would be soft breast feathers scattered all over the banks of the moat.
Our dining room window looked out on to our topiary, yews planted in the reign of Elizabeth I, and clipped into birds, bears, peacocks and geometric shapes. This garden was surrounded by a tall yew hedge cut with arched doors and windows through which you could see views of our fields.
If I had been at home now, I thought, I would be sitting at our long oak table drinking milk from the cow Primrose, instead of standing here contemplating stealing a bottle of milk that looked cold and thin. Our dining room at home would be filled with sunshine, and I would look out on to fields shining with frost-trimmed grass. And the thought filled me with a longing that was painful. I would have given almost anything to be there, under the portraits of great-grandfather and the Rape of Lucrece. I could almost smell the lavender polish, and herbs hung to dry before the great open fireplace. There would be a smell of soot, and a stale, rather meaty smell that would be the old jackdaw’s nest up the chimney, and I thought how lovely even this last smell was compared to the horrid stinks of car exhaust fumes and wet tarmac that now surrounded me. And I remembered, with amazement, how I begged and begged to be allowed to come to this town when I was young.
“Oh please, please,” I had begged Maggie. “I’ll be so helpful to you. You just ask Billy how helpful I am.” And Maggie had nearly given in, but Daddy put his foot down.
“No, Fairy,” he had said, “you won’t like the town at all. It’s not your cup of tea. You would find it rough and horrid, and Maggie would be too busy doing her Big Shop to be able to protect you from people bumping into you, and, well … staring …”
“Don’t people stare at Maggie, then?” I had asked him. But he had only said firmly, and in the sort of voice which I knew meant no more discussion on the subject, “It’s different for Maggie.”
Chapter 3
At last I managed to make my feet take me down the steps to where the bottle of milk stood. No one was looking through the curtains. No one accosted me as I came up on to the street with it. Trembling, and with frozen hands, I hid the precious bottle under my coat, and crept off out of sight to drink it. The milk was even colder than I thought it was going to be, and it hurt my stomach. When I had finished, cream lay on my upper lip, and I wiped it off on my sleeve, just in the way Daddy had always told me never to do.
“Daddy’s little fairy must be dainty,” he used to say. “Fairies must never be clumpy,” and, imagining Daddy’s horror, I even let out a milky burp, and thought that it was probably just as well that the milk had been so thin. In my starved condition full strength Jersey milk might have made me sick.
At home we had never drunk the milk from Billy’s Ayrshires unless Primrose was dry, and that was only for a few weeks each year. Billy called the milk “a load of old water”, and considered it only good enough for the market. For us was the milk of the old cow, Primrose. Bright yellow Primrose with dark eyes and golden milk on which the cream lay like a blanket. In the morning I would lift this strong cream with an ancient copper creaming spoon, and stack it, layer upon layer, in the jug. Our milk, our butter, our cream, and even our cheese all came from the body of Primrose.
Until Cora came. Then she said that the milk might contain germs, that it was not sterilised, that Primrose had not been inoculated. I told her that I had drunk Primrose’s milk all my life and had never got the least ill by it, but she said that all the same she would not like to risk her own child drinking untreated milk. And later I heard her murmur to my father, “Do you think that’s what might have been the matter with Morgan, Basil? Do you think she might have caught something from the milk?”
But Primrose was never ill. I do not remember her ever being other than bright-eyed, glossy-coated and generously full-uddered. I wondered now if that might have changed, and felt suddenly afraid she might have been affected by fumes from the bomb, and even the memory of Billy’s Ayrshires grazing comfortably did not rid me of the fear.
In the shelter all of us had had to face the idea that an atom bomb had been let off, and the earth had become polluted. Now my mind kept forgetting that the bomb had been an ordinary one after all. Primrose was not sick from radiation. She could not be because no nuclear bomb had fallen. But a moment later that relief was swept away by the memory of the people who had come to our house on the day of the explosion. They had been sick. And in my panic I saw Primrose lying sick at this very moment on the turf under which the snowdrops and cowslips of next year were stirring. There had been no nuclear bomb, and yet I could not rid my mind of the idea that there had.
I became filled with an almost irresistible urge to go home, this moment, this very moment, get far away from this horrible town. I would go home, I thought, and see Primrose for myself. I forced back the urge into the dry heart from which it had sprung, and set about finding somewhere to spend the rest of the day, and, more difficult, somewhere to sleep tonight. Another night like the previous one, crouched among hay bales in some unknown farm barn was something I did not feel I could face.
I spent that afternoon wandering round a departmental store, people staring at me swiftly for a moment, before turning quickly and embarrassedly away. Once a child pointed his finger at me and said, “Is that a gnome, Mum?” The mother yanked him by the arm saying, “Shut up, can’t you,” and hurried past me casting me a look half-ashamed, half-apologetic.
The store shut at five-thirty, and I was driven out into the cold street once more. I was very hungry again, and could see no further prospects for food. I thought again that I had made a bad mistake in coming to the town. In the country I would know how to find potatoes, and I would know how to light a little fire and roast them. I might even be able to drink milk from a cow in a field. And even the thought of a night among cold hay bales seemed preferable to the possibilities open to me here. I could think of nowhere to sleep at all, apart from a bench in the park, which I thought would be very cold indeed, and hard as well.
I began to feel terribly sorry for myself, and helpless and alone. I had never in my whole life lived away from home before, in fact I had not even gone to school. The white path streaking up the hill in the front field at home was one I never took in the end. Daddy took me to see the headmistress, who smiled with huge teeth, patted me on the head, and asked me to wait outside while she spoke to my father. I went outside and stood in the playground, while children, round-eyed, craned at their desks for a glimpse of me from four class-room windows. I could hear the headmistress say, though her voice was soft and muffled through the thick stone walls, “I’m afraid it might upset the other children … perhaps a special school?”
Three minutes later my father came out smiling rather artificially, and rubbing his hands. “I don’t think that will do for my Fairy Queen at all,” he said. “A very clumpy place. We shall have to think of something better.”
Something better took the form of Daddy teaching me himself. Once, when Mummy’s letter came, and Daddy’s heart began to beat very loud and fast indeed, I asked him what was the matter. “She is just fussing about your education, because you don’t go to school,” he said. And then he became suddenly angry, in a way that was quite unlike him, and he said, with his face very red, “She never takes any of the responsibilities, never has any of the troubles! What business is it of hers now! She left me to make all the decisions. Now she can’t turn on me and say I have made wrong ones.”
“What wrong ones, Daddy?” I asked him, feeling very anxious, for I had only once seen him angry like this before, and that was the day the letter had come from the council telling him they were planning to build a motorway through our front field. “What troubles, Daddy?” Then he smiled at me, almost his old self again except that his cheeks were still red, and told me, “Don’t you worry about silly old Daddy’s outbursts, darling. Get on with your essay, and I’ll write a letter to Mummy, explaining everything to her.”
“You will tell her the school was too clumpy, won’t you?” I said. “You will tell her it was because we didn’t think it good enough?”
“That is the only reason,” said my father firmly.
When Cora came, she took my hand and said, “Poor little Morgan, you have got a mother now. Always think of me as your mother, and tell me any problems you have. And we will be like sisters, because I am new here. I am a townee, Morgan, and don’t know anything about the country. You must teach me everything.”
We went for a walk together on the day our bull got a sepsis. Daddy said he would stay behind and give the penicillin injection. I could have done that, but Daddy said, “You go and get to know Cora. Show her our lovely places.”
I took her to the field where the young heifers grazed. As I went under the barbed wire fence she said, “Oh, darling, we don’t need to go inside do we?”
“Naturally,” I told her. “All the prettiest places are beyond the field. You said you wanted to see the bluebells. There they are.” I pointed to our woods. “The heifers won’t hurt you. They won’t even come near.”
By the time we were halfway across the field the maidens had surrounded us as they always do. They pressed close in, almost treading on our feet, and the air became sticky with their buttercup breath. Cora began to cry out, and shoo at them with her hands. George, who did not like to be among them, for he was not allowed to bark at them, and if he didn’t do that they chased him, skulked, watching us from the other side of the fence.
“Chase them off, Morgan!” cried Cora. I pushed my way through the hot fly-buzzing bodies, and joined George outside the field. I heard Cora’s shrill cries as George and I ran into the bluebell woods. I picked a great bunch, while Cora screamed, and the cows milled and mooed. At last I heard the sound of barbed wire twanging, accompanied by Cora’s panting breath, as she clambered back through the fence.
“It was not a good joke,” said my father later. “She is not used to the country, and is this the way to teach her its ways, my fairy? You must be as kind to her as you are to all our other creatures.”
“Why?” I asked.
I thought, as I curled my body into the rear seat of an unlocked car, that Daddy had never answered that question. Not with words, anyway, and I fell asleep and dreamed that Daddy said, “I love her because she is a woman, and has no wings. I could never have married a fairy, you know. All that gadding about among the stars would make me star-sick.”
I woke in the night suddenly, a hand tight on my shoulder, shaking me. I woke and raised my head before I could remember where I was, or what I was doing. My eyes were at once dazzled by a torch shining into them.
“What the hell are you doing in my Mum’s car?” asked a man’s voice.
Then he stopped abruptly. He had seen my face. I knew, though I could not see behind the blinding light, that his eyes must be round with surprise. In a moment he would regain his composure, and go on talking in a polite and compassionate voice.
I said in a trembly voice, “The torchlight is hurting my eyes you know.” The light was at once withdrawn.
The man asked, “Are you in trouble?”
I sat up. “My car’s broken down,” I told him. “I thought I’d walk home — but it’s so cold —” As soon as I had spoken I realised I had made another mistake.
“Good heavens! You poor girl.” The man sounded sympathetic, and spoke just that little bit louder, that little bit slower than usual, like people always do when they first meet me. I am not in the least deaf. Far from it. I can hear an owl drop on to the roof of Billy’s house half a mile away from ours. I can hear the bats crying round our crooked red chimneys. I can hear my father’s heart beating as we sit each end of the monastery refectory table that we dine on.
When my father opened his letters I would tell him, “I know that one’s from Mummy because your heart is racing faster.” Daddy’s heart did not beat so fast even when the letter was from the Income Tax department, telling him he had to pay another two thousand pounds, or when the estimate came for repairing the roof, and it was double what Daddy expected. Even when the council wrote to say they were considering building a motorway right through our front field, Daddy’s heart did not beat so fast as when he got a letter from Mummy. At least until Cora came. After that he did not seem to mind so much about Mummy’s letters any more.
“You had better come and finish off the night in a bedroom,” the man said.
In the light of his sitting room, I saw that he was quite young. Only a few years older than me, perhaps. And his ears stuck out. I sat on a nice low sofa, and watched him poke at a dying fire.
“You must be frozen,” he said, blowing between words. “I don’t know how to get this thing going again,” puff, puff, “it was super when I went out,” … puff, puff, puff…
“I think you have put on too much coal,” I told him.
He turned and looked at me, sitting back on his heels, and raised his eyebrows. “Shall I take some off, do you think?” he asked, as though he would really value my opinion. He was not at all like Daddy or Daddy’s friends.
I laughed and got down from the sofa. “Look, I’ll show you how to do it.” Five minutes later we were sitting side by side in front of the grate, holding between us a sheet of newspaper to make a draught, and laughing as though we’d known each other all our lives.
“You’re a champion fire-maker,” said the young man. “And you’ve got a smudge on your nose.” He took out his hankie, and carefully wiped the end of my nose. For some reason I became suddenly rather breathless, and I could feel my heart going extra fast.
“What’s your name?” he asked me, and was surprised when I said Morgan.
“I thought that was a surname. I don’t know any other girls called Morgan.”
“Do you know a lot of girls?” I asked him.
He went a bit red, and instead of answering said, “My name’s George.” I drew in my breath sharply then. It was just such a surprise, a shock almost, to hear that he was called that as well as my dog.
