Little Bones (6 page)

‘Orange cream?’ asked Mrs Swift.

‘Do sit down and warm your bones,’ the doctor smiled. ‘Please. It is Christmas Day after all.’

Sleepily, Jane watched the fat flakes of snow as they danced between the branches of the tree, which was already shedding needles, and listened to Mrs Swift lamenting these quiet festivities, when once they’d held great parties, with wassailing, dancing, and a raucous blind-man’s bluff.

‘Was that in Brighton, ma’am?’

‘Brighton?’ she bristled. ‘What do you know about Brighton?’

Dr Swift rose from his armchair and started poking at the fire. ‘We were talking about the stars,’ he said. ‘It was I who mentioned Brighton.’

‘The stars?’ said his wife. ‘George Leybourne? Sam Cowell? The lovely Lottie Collins?’

‘No,’ he smiled stiffly. ‘Orion.’

SHE WAS LYING
in a warm bed facing a window, watching the birds sitting in the tree, the branches criss-crossing the panes. The birds, big and black, were nothing like the canary or the finches her mother had kept. Jane wondered if the birds in the tree could see into the room. Her father said they were rooks. Could the rooks make out the steaming bowl of chicken soup? Her plate of bread and butter, or the knitted blue coverlet? Could they see Dr McKenzie wrapping the poultices over her legs? Would they make her legs any straighter? No, he’d said, but they might ease the aching. She had retched with disappointment. The doctor’s hands were long and wrinkled. They shook a lot. Sometimes he had cherries or a twist of barley sugar hidden in his pocket. When he took out the sweets, the birds seemed to move a little closer. They tilted their heads. In the sunlight, their dark eyes twinkled, like very small marbles.

The snow had been falling for days and the house was full of water. Pipes cracked. The fires were almost impossible to light. Agnes cried with the cold. Her long straight fingers were patterned with chilblains. Outside, the boys from Dock Street had made a deathly slide, their orange-box sledges powered with streaks of grease and candle fat.

Jane stood at the top of the hill, her breath forced from her chest, winding out through her mouth like tobacco smoke or steam. The boys were quick to slap her on the shoulders, grinning, saying she was the only little girl with any nerve at all, the rest having gone home teary-eyed and wailing to their mothers. The world creaked. Slowly, Jane rocked on her broken boot heels. Here, the outstretched world was brilliant. The ground was clear and dazzling, like sugar, or grated washing soap. The orange box was pushed towards her. ‘Go on, girl,’ they sniggered. ‘You can do it.’

Hitching up her skirts she positioned herself on the crate. She could feel herself tilting, and now someone, without even thinking, gave Jane a more than generous push. The air belted her face. Her hands ripped as they fell across the ice. The sky dropped towards her. She had never moved faster in her life.

Whooping, the boys ran to where she had fallen. Suddenly, they stopped. Their faces looked afraid. The orange box had crashed into a wall. Was Jane breathing? Was the girl alive? The boys paled.
It’s not our fault, she did it, she wanted us to push, we’re not the ones to blame
.
But
then the heap came to life, shaking the snow from her head, her bloody hands now moving to her face, where a grin had broken out, and the boys were grinning with her. ‘Again,’ she said, much to their amazement.
‘Again!’

The picture had been torn from a long-lost book. Her mother had made a flour and water glue and pasted it onto the wall to hide a fist-shaped hole in the plaster. The sky was the same blue as his eyes and the glimpse of the water behind him. If you blinked very quickly, over and over again, the fishes in his hands, and in the baskets, looked as if they were wriggling.

‘How did he know there were five thousand?’ asked Jane. ‘Did he count them?’

She had already tried counting all the people in the picture, the men with their outstretched arms, the wide-eyed boys on their knees, but she was five years old, had never been to school, and she could only get to twenty.

‘Of course he did,’ said her father. ‘Otherwise, how would he know how many fishes he’d need?’

Jane tried again with the counting. She used her fingers. Lost her place. She wondered if she’d counted some people twice. And were they all inside the picture? She looked at their faces. One or two of them didn’t look very happy. Perhaps they’d been hoping for beefsteak, or sausage, and were very disappointed with the fish? Still, she told herself, if they didn’t like
it
they could always have the bread, though it might be very dry without some butter.

She heard it in her sleep. Her father singing. A fiddle playing. He sang songs about an ocean, girls in America, bright cornfields, his mother. When Agnes was running outside, or playing tag, or skipping, he would sing Jane special songs, and she would close her eyes and see the pictures, the room of couples dancing, tall cities, red dresses. The music would be racing. She could feel the vibrations through her fingertips. Sometimes, he would hold her in his arms and sing as they bobbed between the furniture. ‘It’s our ballroom,’ he’d say. ‘Don’t forget to curtsey when you see the Prince of Wales.’ The walls were gold. There were plump painted cherubs. Giant chandeliers. Plates of cake and juicy black grapes. A woman held a fork to her lips. The cake was vanilla. She could taste it.

While her mother worked at the coffee house, and her father made his rounds of all the local taverns, singing heart-wrenching songs that had grown men sobbing into their ale pots, Jane and Agnes were watched by a woman called Liza Smithson. Liza had the sisters sorting beads by size and colour for the
stringers
who worked in the rooms upstairs making complicated necklaces.

Liza liked to talk. Had the girls ever noticed how her skin was lightly tanned, like a biscuit?
Was she a foreigner?
Not likely! She was a Londoner, and proud of it, born not ten minutes from this place, where her mother still lived with her over-fed greyhound and costermonger dad.

‘Yes, I have lived with foreigners, and though God made us all, He certainly made us different,’ she said, rattling a bead box, ‘and don’t let them preachers tell you otherwise.’

Liza had recently returned from India, where she had worked for Mrs Eloise Dunstan-Harris, initially as her maid, but on arrival in Madras she had been shunted into the kitchen where the cook needed taking in hand.

‘And what a scene of horror I came across,’ Liza shuddered. ‘The tables were crawling, the air black and buzzing with strange-looking flies, and the door was blocked with rubbish. Oh, the cook was a brown woman who didn’t know any different, but I couldn’t have the mistress and the little ones perishing from the filth. Now
him
I wouldn’t have minded coming down with the worst kind of ague, because – and may God forgive me – he deserved it, for things you would not like to hear about.’

‘I would,’ said Agnes.

‘No you wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Believe me.’

Jane’s left hand was full of small red beads. The sun was shining. On Liza Smithson’s mantelpiece there were rows and rows of strange foreign objects, small mirrored
birds
, painted vases, and bright paper elephants standing trunk to tail. Pouring the beads into a wide clay pot, Jane looked closely at Liza, who with her scraped black hair and deep brown eyes might have been mistaken, at least once or twice, for a bone-fide Indian. She wore a pale lemon dress with embroidery on the sleeves. Had someone sewn those interlocking diamonds in Madras? Jane imagined the room to be scented with fat foreign flowers, pink probably, and perhaps upstairs a tiger was guarding the stringers, weaving in and out of the tables, flicking his orange-black tail like a whip.

‘What’s India like?’ asked Jane. Agnes groaned. She’d had enough of India. She’d had enough of beads. She was seven years old and should have been in school, sitting at a desk, learning numbers and doing things with chalk. Her friend Grace Pooley went to school. Grace Pooley could write her name and more. She said her teacher, Miss Howe, smelled like warm batter pudding.

Smiling, Liza leant back in her armchair, sending dust motes from the cushions flying into the sunshine. ‘Like most new things, it was terrible at first, but then you get used to it, and then you miss it when it’s gone.’

‘Can’t you go back then?’ said Agnes, in such an insolent manner that Liza sent her straight upstairs to help the stringers form their necklaces.

‘Why do people go to India?’ Jane asked, rolling a bead between her small clammy fingertips.

‘To do their duty to the Queen,’ she said. ‘To show them how it’s done.’

‘How what’s done?’

‘Oh,’ she said, flicking back her hand. ‘Everything.’

Liza told Jane that as a cripple she might do very well abroad, where the Empire’s colours were usually cheering and the sun would burn the pain from her bones like a deep and constant mustard bath. The food, when prepared in a hygienic manner, could prove very interesting to the taste buds, if you were willing to take a leap in the dark and try it. ‘To this day,’ Liza told her, ‘I add a good shake of spice to everything, from mutton chops to porridge.’

As Jane continued sorting beads, pulling them from the great mixed pot, some beads so small they slipped inside her fingernails, Liza carried on with her tales of Indian life. Sipping ginger and hot water, she described the great white house with liveried servants, the men wearing wrapped sheets around their heads, a thing they called a turban. Mrs Dunstan-Harris and her children liked to keep inside the house and well-trimmed gardens, though grand invitations often stood against the mirror, from maharajas, viscounts and missionaries. Like most of the English abroad, the mistress had been terrified of disease and would inspect the servants’ hands whenever she saw them, buying enormous blocks of coal-tar soap, boracic acid and turpentine, though she never entered the kitchen, saying her appetite would certainly be ruined.

‘Tell me about the food,’ said Jane. The clock was moving slowly. She’d had nothing that morning but a glass of buttermilk and a small piece of bread. Her mouth was watering. ‘Please?’

As Jane sat salivating into the beads, Liza, now in her element, went into great detail describing such dishes as chitchee curry, pilau and burtas, a greasy vegetable
concoction
served up at breakfast. ‘The master ate this food with gusto, but the mistress and the children required English food, food they could recognise, or at least attempt to recognise.’

‘Like what English food?’

‘Game pie, toad-in-the-hole, apple fritters. Of course, we did what we could in the circumstances, and though I was generally pleased with the results, the children turned their noses up, the girl was wasting away, and the mistress said things might look the same, but nothing
tasted
English.’

‘I would have eaten it,’ said Jane. ‘I would have eaten the curry and the burtas.’

‘I did make a good breakfast burta,’ Liza laughed.

Later, walking home with Agnes, who was grumbling about the knots she’d had to tie and the thread that kept breaking, Jane was still in India. She looked towards the sun, sitting in a dirty blanket of cloud above the river. Could that really be the same yellow sun that glared down on the Indians, where the servants used fans to cool the air and flick away the flies? ‘Oh, they can do it in their sleep,’ Liza had said.

‘I don’t like Liza Smithson,’ said Agnes.

‘Don’t you like the necklaces?’

‘I don’t like the necklaces and I don’t like the smell. It makes me feel sick.’

‘I like the smell,’ said Jane. ‘I like everything.’ Liza Smithson’s house smelled of smoky flowers and spices, smells that were a lot more pleasant, Jane thought, than those hovering in their own back room. Sitting down to a supper of pig’s liver and cabbage, Jane asked her mother if she’d ever heard of burtas.

‘Is that another name for bunions?’ she said.

That night, watching Agnes unfasten her plaits and brush her hair until it crackled, Jane could see her own breath. It was freezing.

‘Ma didn’t fetch the heated brick, I’ll not sleep for the cold,’ said Agnes.

‘Think of hot things,’ said Jane. ‘It will make you feel better.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Like the flat iron.’

‘Like hell,’ Agnes said, repeating the words of her father and thinking of the laundry. ‘I’d rather freeze than think of that.’

Jane dreamed of heat. Of fine yellow spice and gardens bursting with flowers, like open umbrellas. The world shimmered. In the wide clear sky, birds with musical wings darted in and out of the trees, where tigers growled gently and peacocks licked honey from the brown hands of the servants wearing long wrapped sheets around their heads. Monkeys chattered. A girl peeled fat ripe mangoes and fed them to an elephant. Liza Smithson was there. She was stirring a cooking pot. A place was set at the table.

‘Jane!’ Liza called. ‘Your burtas are ready! Come wash your hands and eat!’

Jane ate. She had two platefuls. Three.

In the morning, she could smell the onions on her fingers, the silky wet butter, and the bitter-sweet tang of the lime.

IT WAS ALMOST
1900 and catalogues, some from as far away as Milan, New York and Montreal, were being perused for the latest viewing instruments. All across England, telescopes were being dusted off and raised as men looked for answers in the deep celestial heavens. In towers, on high windswept hills, on the rocking bridges of sailing ships, in poky offices and paper-strewn studies, books were read, papers written, charts were drawn and carefully consulted.

Mrs Swift was getting nervous. ‘People say the world is going to end,’ she said. ‘Or at least it will tremble when the clock strikes midnight.’