Cobweb Walking, page 5
“What’s the matter?” George asked. “Don’t you like my name? You’ve gone quite pale.”
I shook my head and found it quite hard to talk for a few moments. Then I said, “It’s — only that — someone of whom I was very fond was called George, and is now dead …” I bit my bottom lip and told myself all the things Daddy used to say when I was about to cry.
George said warmly, “I’m terribly sorry to hear that,” and put his hand on my shoulder.
It felt lovely, and I stayed quite still, holding my breath almost, like you have to do when you’re very near a wild animal.
But then he said, “I’ll get you something to eat. I expect you’re famished.”
“Absolutely famished,” I told him sincerely.
I heard him clattering about in the kitchen while I sat by the now roaring fire, looking into the flames, and thinking about George’s hand on my shoulder. The memory had driven, briefly, even sad thoughts of the other George from my mind. When he came back with a tray on which were two mugs of cocoa, and bread and marmite for me, I tried to bring up the subject of the other George again.
“I was terribly unhappy when I discovered he was dead,” I said. But George did not touch my shoulder again. He only sat beside me on the sofa, stirred some sugar into my cocoa, and said, “Yes, it must be terrible to lose someone you love. How did it happen? Was he ill?”
“Shot,” I said.
“Shot!” George asked, rather horrified. “An accident?”
“Oh, it was no accident,” I told him, with quite a big tremble in my voice.
But George just stirred his cocoa, and said, “How terrible. Poor you.”
After a while he moved over to the armchair by the fire, and began to throw on more coal. Then he stood up abruptly, and, dusting his hands, said, “Let’s have some music! Do you like music?” I was going to say that Daddy and I used to listen to records in the middle of the night like this, if we both could not sleep. But something stopped me. Suddenly, perhaps for the first time in my life, I did not want to be thought of as Daddy’s girl.
With a touch too much enthusiasm I said, “Yes, I adore it.” Really, this was not quite true. I did like some music quite a lot, but did not know very much about it. Daddy and I just played what we enjoyed without worrying about who wrote it, that sort of thing.
George was pulling out records, reading the titles, saying, “Which would you like?”
They were all foreign names and I had not heard of any of them. I said quickly, “That one would be lovely.”
George pulled the record from its sleeve saying, “You like modern music, do you? That’s quite unusual in a girl.” His voice was pleased. The music sounded like a hundred milking pails being clashed together, with Shep howling in the background.
“Well?” asked George, when the awful din was over. “What did you think?”
“Very pretty,” I told him, and smiled brightly.
He stared at me wide eyed for a moment, then he suddenly burst out laughing. “You don’t know a thing about music, do you Morgan!” And I laughed too, not at all ashamed at having been caught out. That night I lay awake for hours, reliving the feel of George’s hand on my shoulder, the way he wiped the smudge from my nose with his handkerchief. When at last I fell asleep, I slept fitfully because of the headlights of passing cars. If they had built the motorway through the front field at home, I suppose my bedroom would have become like this one, lit at intervals with bursts of yellow growling light.
I woke to the sound of a receding lorry, and saw that it was very late. Later, in fact, than I had ever slept before. I lay looking at the ceiling for a few minutes before I remembered where I was. Then I heard George’s voice. He was talking on the phone in a funny language. Daddy and I had had our own private language like that, that we had talked in when we didn’t want anyone else to understand, a language Daddy and I had called dooreegoo. But I could not understand what George was saying, because his language was a different one to Daddy’s and mine.
Pulling on my clothes, I came downstairs. George saw me, and quickly said into the receiver in ordinary English, “Righto darling, see you this evening,” and put the receiver down.
“She and I talked like that when we were children. Silly really to keep it up … We were at school together you see …” He was laughing a little, but as though with embarrassment, and his face was red. Then he asked me, as if eager to talk about something else, “Are you as good at cooking breakfast as you are at making fires?”
I fried his bacon and eggs with enormous care, just as I would have done them for Daddy, and I thought that if I did them well enough he might invite me to stay here for a long time.
During breakfast, George said, “My goodness, what a perfect egg. How do you stop the yellow breaking? Mine slop all over the frying pan.” And he praised my toast, telling me that he had to make at least six slices before getting one that was not burnt. When we had finished breakfast George said, “Well, we’d better see to your car. I expect you are in a hurry to get home.” I drew in my breath to tell him that I was in no hurry at all, but he was already slipping on his anorak, pulling on his gum boots. I said nothing.
He opened the front door, letting in a blast of raw foggy air.
“I told you a lie!” I blurted out.
He turned and stared at me, the wind blowing his hair up like a gollywog’s.
“I don’t have a car,” I said.
“What?” He closed the door, and came back inside. “You are a little whopper teller, aren’t you?”
I flushed. “It was the bomb,” I whispered. “I have lost everything because of the bomb.” This was almost not a lie.
“My goodness,” said George, looking at me carefully. Then he said, “But you must have some relations. There must be someone you can go to.”
I sighed, looked at my feet, waited, but he just stood staring at me, waiting for my answer.
I realised then that there was no alternative — I should have to go home again. I knew that home was the last place in the world I ought to go to, but I saw now that I was not designed to survive away from home. I could stand no more days in the streets, no more nights in the open.
“I would have said you could stay here,” George was saying, “but Mum comes back today, and there’s no room. It’s my sister’s bedroom you’re in.”
I sighed, and told him, “I have an auntie.”
George smiled, and clapped his hands, apparently greatly relieved. “I’ll drive you!” he said. “Mum lets me use her car. Wait, I’ll get the keys.”
This return journey to my home was certainly better than the one from it, on the train with that group of horrible schoolchildren.
“So you are a victim of the awful bomb, Morgan,” said George as we drove along. “You poor thing. What a lot you have been through lately. Do you feel like telling me about it?” And he patted me gently on the knee.
Chapter 4
On the morning of the bomb I had been washing up after breakfast. A vast bubble rose from the soapy liquid, and floated before my eyes, revolving slowly round, and reflecting in a tiny and rounded form George having hunting dreams before the stove. His hind legs twitched wildly, and he whimpered like a puppy, while the apple log fire burned brightly in the grate. Into the bubble’s iridescent surface floated the herb bunches I had hung at the end of the summer from hooks on the ceiling: rosemary and sage, comfrey and lavender. I sprinkle herbs everywhere, in bedding and on clothes. I put thyme on the scullery floor, and eau de cologne mint in the bath. Wherever Daddy and I walk in our house or garden, there is the beautiful smell of herbs.
“I really enjoy washing up nowadays,” said Cora. “So lovely with marjoram in the water. That was a good idea, Morgan.”
My bubble grew, it swelled, it rose higher, and I watched it, thinking that I might just put my hands up, and grasp it gently. It would carry me up, up to the sky, to the stars and the Fairy Queen. It would lift me once again to my enormous silence. I think I even raised my hands in the air, I was so full of longing. Then the bubble burst. It burst with a huge noise that smashed the window-panes over the sink, and caused George to leap, barking, from his nightmare. It burst with a roar that shook the house, and sent the washing-up water flying from the basin. Cora came rushing down the steps crying, “What on earth is that! What are you doing in there, Morgan?”
And from far away in the garden I could hear my father, who was splitting logs, shout, “My God! Have the motorway bulldozers come?” Some smaller crashes followed the first great bang, and these were things that had been dislodged by the explosion, slates from the roof, long logs leant for splitting, and finally a couple of precious ancient plates from the oak dresser in the dining room.
My father dashed in, chopper in hand, looked and looked at the broken and fallen things, the cracked panes, at the water swilling across the floor, while Cora bustled about with cloths and mops, saying bracingly, “Must have been a gas explosion! What a mess!”
“Ssh,” said my father.
Far away, very shrill, came the sound of police car sirens. And through the broken window-panes we saw rise into the sky, very slowly, a dark puff of smoky dust, a column of dirt that stood in the sky for several minutes, before even more slowly subsiding.
“I just feel I can’t talk about it yet,” I told George, my voice choking, and he nodded sympathetically.
We drove on in silence for some time, as gradually the landscape began to be familiar.
“Left there at the green,” I said, “and third right after the Cricketer’s Arms.” And the nearer we got to home the lonelier and sadder I began to feel. I had never come home before feeling anything but bubbling excitement at the thought of getting back. Now I felt as though I could really cry, and the shining things that fell from my eyes would certainly not be jewels! And I remembered how, when I had been little, Daddy, who always told me not to cry, would cry himself, into his pillow in bed at night. I could hear him sobbing from my little room two floors up, and used to long to go down and comfort him. I longed to get up and go to him saying, “You think you have no one who cares about you any more, but you do. You have me! I am here, Daddy. I will never, never leave you!” But I didn’t say a word. I lay there in my bed, with the sound of the kitchen cricket drilling in my ear, and the ploddish phoo phoo of the barn owl before she swooshed into our yard after the feral kittens.
I would lie awake for hours after my Daddy became silent, and long and long to kiss him, to put my arms round his neck and bring the smiles back into his eyes. And I did nothing at all. In the morning, at breakfast, after these nights, he would appear, his eyes shining, not at all reddened or ringed with dark like one who has wept through half the night.
“Good morning, fairy bird!” he would say. “Mm, that smells nice,” as I carefully served him up his grilled tomatoes, and scrambled eggs sprinkled with a little of our own chives from the garden. Even this changed after Cora came. Daddy didn’t cry in the night any more. In the night he and Cora did other things. He would grunt, and moan, and she would let out wild cries like a cat on heat. They never guessed I heard. Through two doors, and two floors, how could they imagine it!
Then, next morning Cora would say to me, “I’ll get breakfast. You have a lie-in dear.”
“I like it,” I would tell her. “I like to get up early. For me this is fun.” But several times she beat me to it. I would arrive to cook the breakfast and find her already there, her broad back blocking the stove from me, an apron tied over her hips, spatula wielded over the fried eggs and the bacon she had made a special trip to town for.
“We never eat meat,” I told her. “Meat hasn’t been in that pan before.”
“Oh, you need some meat in the diet,” Cora said cheerfully without turning round. “You won’t grow if you don’t eat meat. Oh … I mean, oh dear.” And she laughed with embarrassment.
She would slap the egg on to Daddy’s plate, and often the yoke would split and burst yellow over the tomatoes. He never seemed to mind. He would reach up, and throw his arms round her neck when she bent over him to put the plate down, and say, “You’re as hot and smelly as a fried egg yourself”
I always took such care to see that Daddy’s egg was the most perfect little yellow ball sitting on its perfectly circular white, with the bread I had baked myself toasted to a golden brown, and decrusted. Cora often burnt the toast, which she made from soft white sliced bread bought in the town, and then the smell of burning would creep up the house, wormlike, to lodge finally, unable to progress any further, in my little room under the sky. Opening windows, and burning rosemary over a candle flame would eventually expel it, but often by that time Cora would have created some new vile odour: fried sausages, boiling mutton, or even cow tongue.
“It’s horrible, Daddy,” I said, and he laughed and cuddled me, and said, “We agreed, didn’t we, not to force our principles on to others. There is no harm in her, Morgan … She would become fond of you if you would let her …”
Even when Cora became pregnant she was unable to stop smoking, though Daddy told her, “The baby will not grow.”
“Well,” she laughed, “that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I’d be better with a little one to start with. I’m quite old for my first baby, you know, and a tiddler would be an advantage.”
Once I heard her ask Daddy, “Did Louise smoke, when she was carrying Morgan, Basil?” Daddy said “No” very sharply. I think that was almost the only time I remember Daddy talking crossly to Cora.
I was always hearing them talking, though they never knew it. I could hear better than a horned owl, and smell as well as my dog, George, though after Cora came these senses began to lose some of their sharpness. And, although I didn’t become any fatter, or any taller, I became heavier after Cora came. The marvellous lightness of my body, that seemed to be hardly gripped by the earth at all, left me. I began to trudge like other people. The wonderfulness of the time when I could walk across a field without leaving footprints became only a memory. In fact sometimes I even began to wonder if I could have imagined the whole thing.
I had been about seven the first time I had noticed it. I had woken even earlier than usual, and the throats of the blackbirds were full of silver. I walked across the front field, and a little way up the slope. The sun had just risen, and the whole sky was rosy, tingeing the dew on the grass with glittering pink. I stopped and looked down on my home, my darling home snuggling smokily in the trees. I stood and looked in the hush of the blackbirds’ beautiful singing, and then I saw that my feet had left no prints. I had walked across an entire field, and halfway up a hill without crushing a single blade of grass or bursting one dew drop. I was very light for years after that. But after Daddy took me on his knee, and told me, between kisses, that I was going to have a little baby sister, I became heavy, and my feet left prints everywhere I walked.
“You will love your little sister,” Daddy said. “She will look up to you, and you will be able to teach her everything. You will have to be very kind and patient with her, though, just as you are with little baby animals. She will be small and delicate, like a fragile rose petal.”
And all the while Cora’s swelly belly bumped and jumped as though a loony was inside it.
After Cora’s belly began to swell, she stopped telling me she and I must be like sisters, or that she was to be a mother to me, and instead I sometimes caught her looking at me reflectively, almost apprehensively. Once I heard her say to Daddy, “What about sending her to a special school? Oh, I don’t mean a home or anything like that. Good heavens no! But might it not be nice for her … good for her to mix with others of her own age … her own kind?”
When The Sister arrived she was not small and delicate like a rose petal at all, but extremely clumping.
After I began to grow heavier, my desire for food grew. It was that way round. I did not get heavier because I ate more food. I ate more because I became heavier. Before Cora, and The Sister, I had had a different sort of stomach. I remember Daddy telling me, “You must have an egg and toast, my fairy. A handful of blackberries eaten straight from the hedge is not enough for anyone’s supper. Every child needs some protein in its diet.”
“I am not every child,” I told Daddy proudly.
Maggie would say sourly, as she cleaned the grate, “No wonder she don’t grow, Sir. She don’t eat enough for a fairy.” But after Cora came I ate a lot. I used to try to resist eating the extra food, try to not look at the cream sponges or hot crumpets that Maggie put out for tea. In the end I would always give in, and then I would seize the food, and gobble it like someone half starved, with Cora and Maggie watching smiling, and saying, “Ah, she’s got a nice healthy appetite at last. Perhaps she’ll start growing now.”
In the fall-out shelter there never seemed to be enough food to quench my furious appetite. Daddy used to dole out the food with precise fairness, giving me exactly the same as him and Cora. Yet somehow it never seemed enough. Me, whose daily diet had once been ten hazel nuts, a saucer of milk, and a little yellow apple from our own orchard, had suddenly become unsatisfied after a plate of beans, sausages, tinned tomato and three water biscuits.
“I thought you did not eat meat, ever,” Cora said, scrutinising my polished plate. “I could have given your sausage to Abigail if you had not wanted it.”
And The Sister would cry, “I wan Morgan’s thothich! I wan Morgan’s thothich!”
Once I heard Cora whisper to Daddy, “I think she’s eating it all to spite me, Basil, I really do.”
George was talking. I had not heard a word.
I shook my head. “What? What?” I asked him, and he laughed and said, “You were a million miles away! I said tell me about that other George, the one that was shot.”
“He was my dog,” I said.
George the man was silent for a moment, then he said, “Oh, I see. Isn’t it terrible when your dog dies? The saddest thing in the world. When my dog died last year I cried for a week.”
