Authors: Monica Dickens
The thought of them all going to the hut so gaily and selfishly without her made her boil with anger. She hated the lot of them. She would never play with them again; never have any fun any more. She wanted to scream and tear things up. She opened a drawer and scattered her socks and hair ribbons over the floor, but that did not relieve her feelings. She tried to tear the curtain, but it was tough and hurt her fingers as if it too was against her.
She saw a policeman crossing the end of the street and it made her hope that they would get caught and go to prison. Serve them right, and they needn’t think that
she
would dig a tunnel to get them out. She had half a mind to call out to the policeman and tell him to go and look in the hut on the edge of the Scrubs, but he was too far away.
‘Copper!’ she called. ‘Hi – Copper!’ But he did not hear.
She would tell the next one. Why shouldn’t she? It was a good idea. They had done the dirty on her; she had a right to do as much to them. The thought comforted her and soothed
her temper. She’d show them they couldn’t do without her. She’d make them take notice of her.
She hung out of the window, but no policeman came. Presently with one foot on the pavement and one in the gutter, sneaking along looking this way and that like a weasel on the hunt, came Sidney. As he passed the Corner Stores, he turned his head and spat at it.
‘Ooh!’ called Jo. ‘I seen you! You wicked boy, I’ll tell my Mum.’
He looked up and came under the window to cock a snook at her. She cocked one back. Because he was neither Moore nor Goldner, she felt a wave of affection for him. ‘Come up and see us, Sid,’ she said.
‘Not me.’ He squinted up. ‘Your fancy friends can go up if they like, but not me. I seen that Billy Moore.’ Hardly a door could open in the Portobello Road without Sidney knowing who went in or out of it.
Jo had an idea. Sidney would do it. He didn’t like the Moores.
‘Do come up, Sid,’ she urged. ‘I want to tell you a secret. A good ’un. I got some fun for you. Do come. I got some choc up here.’
‘What sort?’ he asked cagily.
‘Whipped cream walnut and – wait a sec – ’ She ran to look under her pillow. ‘Half a cracknel bar.’
‘Honest?’
She drew her hand across her throat. ‘Cut me throat and hope to die and spit in the eye of ‘oo says I lie,’ she gabbled, and he sidestepped as she spat into the street.
‘I might,’ he said, and slipped away along the shop window and out of sight under the porch.
‘The boy’s lying, of course,’ said the assistant chief warder in a bored voice.
‘I’m not so sure, sir.’ Constable Roberts stood with his hand on Sidney’s collar, where he had kept it ever since the boy had sneaked up to him like a tipster and whispered his fantastic story out of the side of his mouth. He looked a slippery boy. A
boy to ring doorbells and run; a boy to tip a policeman’s helmet over his eyes with a stick and vanish.
‘Of course he’s lying,’ repeated Mr Pennyfold. ‘Look at him.’ Sidney’s sidelong eyes slewed still further round until it seemed they would turn the corner and never come back. ‘Anyway, the story’s too good to be true. Things like that just don’t hap pen. Wish to God they did.’ It had been a long and deadly Sunday, the hours shuffling by as monotonously as the shuffle, shuffle of the men’s feet round the grey exercise yard.
‘But that’s just it, sir.’ Constable Roberts, who was young and keen, had hoped to make more sensation than this. ‘It’s such an oudandish story, I don’t see how he could have made it up. Truth stranger than fiction, you know, sir,’ he said briskly.
‘Are you trying to fool us, boy?’ Mr Pennyfold bent his prawnlike brows ferociously to where Sidney stood hang-dog.
‘It’s true, I tell you,’ muttered Sidney. ‘You go and see for yourself.’
‘And you say one of the gang told you? A squealer, eh? Who is it?’
‘Shan’t tell you,’ answered Sidney, more from secretiveness than loyalty. ‘Any case, I knew about it long ago. I know more than they think. I was biding me time.’
‘Hm.’ The warder considered him. What fun if it were true. Two hours more on duty; this was just the thing to liven up the evening.
‘There’s only one way to find out, sir,’ suggested Roberts. ‘Go and see.’
‘And have this young blighter laughing himself silly at our expense? I don’t believe a word of it.’ He resumed his bored voice and leaned back in his chair, making a little upward gesture with his hands as if chucking up the whole idea.
‘Let me go then, sir,’ urged the young policeman. ‘Just to make sure.’ He cleared his throat. ‘It’s my duty to investigate any report of misdoing, however irregular.’
‘I’m not going to miss the fun. I want to see these master criminals at work – if they are at work.’ Mr Pennyfold had boys of his own, who, perhaps through vicarious contact with crime, had a genius for intricate misdeeds. But they had never yet
attempted anything on this scale. He wanted to see how it was done.
‘Tell you what.’ He lowered the front legs of his chair again decisively. ‘Hand this young scoundrel over to the duty room – no need to tell them anything about it. He can stay there while you and I take a little stroll round the premises, just to see that everything’s in order. I’m not expecting to find a thing. But – ’ he pounced forward suddenly at Sidney, who jumped, and threw up a defensive arm – ‘if we don’t find anything, boy, if you’re trying to play merry hell with His Majesty’s prison, I’ll take your scrofulous neck and – ’ He twisted his hands in the air, making a noise in the back of his throat like a tortured screw.
Sidney began to run at the nose. ‘You wait,’ he snivelled. ‘It’s true, all right, you see if it ain’t. I ain’t done no wrong, mister.’
‘Take it away,’ said the assistant warder, ‘and throw it into irons in our deepest, darkest dungeon under the moat among the man-eating rats.’
‘You mean the duty room, I take it, sir,’ said Constable Roberts, with a hint of reproof. He had no children of his own and no imagination. He did not like facts tampered with.
‘Just so,’ said his superior solemnly. ‘Under the gate house among the man-eating card players.’
When Roberts came back, Mr Pennyfold stood up. ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Do I take handcuffs?’
‘Well, it’s customary, sir, isn’t it, when making an arrest?’
‘I suppose so. So long since I made one. You haven’t been in the Force long, have you? Made many arrests?’
‘None, sir,’ said Constable Roberts, blushing like a boy. ‘This will be my first.’
It was all over. It was finished. All Mrs Abinger’s hopes, plans, and pride crumbled about her ears in a dust heap of mortification.
But life had to go on. Money had to be earned. Ellie blundered miserably about the shop, trying to keep up appearances before customers, uncertain who knew and who did not. The Lane being what it was for gossip, probably everyone knew.
Even those who did not made some remark – comic, or sympathetic or sarcastic – seemed to give her funny looks, as if they knew about Jo, as if they pitied her. Poor Ellie, they were thinking, so pleased with herself, believing that the Moores were taking Jo a step up in the world, when all the time Jo was dragging the Moores as low as they could go, right down to the Goldners, and crime.
Miss Loscoe knew about it, of course. She came into the shop more frequently, for a packet of salt here, a quarter of dry biscuits there, so as to be able to say: ‘And how is dear little Josephine?’ and see the heads turn to hear how Mrs Abinger would answer.
‘I came by the Moores’ house just now,’ Miss Loscoe would say. ‘They’ve got new curtains in the downstairs, or did you know? Ahem – pardon me, my tickle cough – of course, I daresay you wouldn’t know.’
Once she came in especially, for she could not really have wanted to know the price of China tea, to say: ‘I saw your friend Mr What’s-his-name – Pennyfeather – Pinfold – down at the Bush.’
‘He’s no friend of mine,’ retorted Mrs Abinger, trying to control her feelings.
‘Of course not, Ellie dear. How stupid of me. I don’t know whatever made me say such a thing.’ She went out, delighted with herself for having said it.
Dot Loscoe would go the same way as her mother if she were not careful, thought Mrs Abinger, shutting the door quickly before the buzzer could make George shout. She was getting as bitter and dried up as the pickles and second grade prunes which were almost the only things she bought these days. Never a smile except when she thought she had touched you on the raw.
Mrs Abinger’s feelings were very raw. The shock had done her health no good either; it was going to take her a long time to feel herself again. She did not know which had upset her most: the visit from Mr Pennyfold, with his sarcastic air of enjoying himself at everyone else’s expense, or the stupefying, vociferous visit from Commander Moore, which rang in her ears yet.
As if he were the devil’s instrument of torture, Sidney had to ask: ‘Any orders for Mrs Moore?’ as if he did not know quite well that Commander Moore had made his wife change her grocer.
When he had gone out, Mrs Abinger said: ‘We shall have to get rid of that boy, George. He’s made trouble enough. Oh, he makes out to have done no wrong, I daresay, but I reckon he knew about it all along. If he’d have spoken out before, we could have stopped it.’
‘The harm was already done,’ said Mr Abinger, ‘and by you know whom, no matter at whomsoever else’s door you try to lay the blame.’ He was very fond of Grammar. He had recently joined a Debating Society, whose oratory, like a monogram, strove after intricacy rather than lucidity. He was an apt recruit. He spoke slowly enough to be able to build into his sentences a panoply of pronouns.
‘You mean,’ said his wife, ‘by those Goldners. Lucky for them they’ve been packed off to that special school. If I was to get my hands on them – ’
Mr Abinger cleared his throat. ‘I was actually thinking of someone nearer home,’ he said, and opened his mouth to sling in sultanas, as if he were having six shies a penny.
‘George, you won’t hold it against her?’ she begged. ‘You’ll forgive and forget? We must stick by each other. We can be happy rubbing along together in the way of life to which we’re called. I was wrong to try and fly above it.’
‘Don’t preach at me,’ he said, catching a sultana with a snap. ‘I never ran after the Moores. I was too busy working to provide a home for my family, which, to their cost, they were far from appreciating.’
Mrs Abinger sighed and went upstairs to put the kettle on for tea. She always regretted appealing to him for sympathy or support. It never brought him closer. Although she knew him through and through, and he knew her, she sometimes felt that they were no more intimate than fifteen years ago when he had met and wooed her in language as formal as his collars. She had been proud then of marrying someone cleverer and of better education. She was still proud, she told herself loyally.
It was she who was to blame for any lack of understanding.
At the top of the stairs, she paused to get her breath. She hoped it was only the winter coming on that made her so short-winded these days. George’s respect for illness did not extend to her, who had scarcely missed a day’s work since she married him. Ellie could not possibly be ill; he would not hear of her going to a doctor. He did not hold with doctors, anyway, preferring to prescribe for himself. He had given her some heart and blood pills and would not believe they had done her no good.
Mrs Abinger was afraid to go to the doctor, for fear of what he might tell her. If the noises in her head meant anything, she did not want to know. What would become of Jo if anything happened to her?
Forgetting about the kettle, she went into her bedroom. A glimpse of herself in the mirror brought her short arms up for the familiar movements among the pins and coils of her back hair, but her mind was on her top drawer. Opening it, she took out the photograph she had cut from the evening paper, and tore Sir Rodney Cope and the Hon. Lydia Manning-Day into little pieces. He was nothing to do with her now. Throwing away the scraps of paper, she was throwing away the last hopes of Jo being an aristocrat by birth. Blood will out; instinct will never let you down. She knew that Joy Stretton would never have chosen such low company as that to which Josephine, the foundling, had migrated as if to her natural element.
Who could her parents have been? They might be anybody, anybody. Reaching to the back of the drawer, Mrs Abinger took out a little twist of paper, which was hidden under her stockings. Who had given this little cross to Jo? The initials B.C. were scratched on the back. Who was B.C.? Was it her real mother or was it herself? And if it was hers by right of birth and baptism, was she wrong to withhold it?
Mrs Abinger had nothing against Roman Catholics. She had not been brought up to think much of her own church, and since marrying George, it had meant still less to her, for no church meant anything to him. He was an atheist and proud of it, as he never tired of informing anyone who would listen.
He claimed to back his own reasoning power against the superstitious nonsense of any clergyman, and as for the Roman Church – well, you did not mention that in George’s hearing, unless you could stand a buttonholing tirade.
She looked at the crucifix with its frail broken chain, lying tarnished and tiny in her clean red palm. If George got to know of it, he would hold it against Jo to the end of her days, as if it were her fault to be born a Roman Catholic. She could never give it to Jo, because Jo must not find out that she was adopted. Not yet, not until she had found her place in the world. Perhaps not ever.
‘What you got there, Mum?’ A listless figure, pathetic in the overwhelming school hat appeared in the doorway.
‘Nothing, dear.’ Mrs Abinger hastily wrapped up the cross again and thrust it to the back of the drawer. ‘Just some old trinket.’
‘Let’s see.’
‘Not now. How was school then?’ she asked brightly.
Josephine stood at a little distance, drooping, not bothering to take off her hat or undo her satchel. Mrs Abinger’s heart yearned with pity. She knew the child’s unhappiness, yet since the catastrophe she had been unapproachable, shying away from confidences or consolation. It had been impossible to punish that forlorn, remote little figure, yet Jo did not even seem to know that she had been forgiven. She seemed to be beyond emotion.