Marking Time (12 page)

‘Everybody spread out and start picking!’ Nora called. She made it sound like a school outing, Louise thought, as she noticed the others moving quickly as far from Nora as possible,
which left her, Louise, feeling that she’d have to stay with her cousin or it would look rude. They put up a cock pheasant between them, but before it flew, it ran, with its drunken, stilted
gait, a few yards away; then, when Lydia ran after it, it rose in the air and whirred away.

Neville soon got tired of picking and upset his colander, which discouraged him even more. He went exploring the rabbit holes: he had a secret desire to see the inside of a warren, and thought
that if only he could widen the entrance, he’d be able to slip in. He did not even want to tell Lydia this plan; it would be far more fun to mention it casually when they were having their
baths. ‘I went into a warren today,’ he would say. ‘It was just like Beatrix Potter – little frying pans hung up on sticky-out roots from the walls, and the floor all smooth
and sandy. The rabbits loved me coming to see them.’ He imagined them hopping onto his knees, all soft and furry with their lovely ears lying down on their backs and their bulging eyes
looking up at him in a trusting way. But he couldn’t make any headway with the digging at all. He tried with the colander, but it simply wouldn’t
dig
, and then he tried
scooping earth up with one of his wellingtons, but it was too floppy. And then when he put the wellington on again, it seemed to be full of little sharp sandy pebbles, so he took it off again.
He’d have to pinch a trowel out of McAlpine’s shed, he thought, as he limped towards the others thinking of what he would say about not having any blackberries, and then, of course, he
trod on a bramble and thorns went into his foot, and when he tried to go on walking it really hurt.

This made everyone not notice about his not having any blackberries and Nora was really nice to him. She made him sit down and took his foot and found where the thorns were, and squeezed and
squeezed and got two of them out, but the last one was too deep. ‘It could be sucked out,’ she said, and everyone who was standing round looked doubtfully at his grimy foot.
‘He’s your brother,’ Nora said to Clary who did not seem very keen.

‘Although if he’d been bitten by an adder and would die if I didn’t, of course I would,’ she said, ‘but just a
thorn
. . .’

‘It’s only a
bramble
,’ Louise said.

‘No, it’s a rose thorn and quite a big one. It’s broken off. If he walks on it, it’ll simply go in deeper and deeper.’

‘Then it might come out the other side,’ Lydia said, ‘come sprouting out of the top of his foot.’ They were full of unhelpful suggestions.

‘All right,’ Nora said. ‘Give me your foot again.’ She sat down opposite Neville and took his foot in her hands. Then she spat on it and rubbed it with her dress, which
wouldn’t show, Louise thought, because it was a rather nasty mixture of orange and black in sort of stripes and blobs – a cross between a zebra and a giraffe. Then she sucked for a bit,
and then squeezed, and finally the thorn, black and quite large, came out.

‘You should have worn socks inside your wellingtons,’ she said mildly. ‘There you are. Has anybody a sock to lend him?’

Lydia obliged. ‘Although if there’d been an air raid, I bet you could have run,’ she said.

‘Let’s go home,’ Polly said at once, and Clary could see that this idea hadn’t occurred to her, but that now that it had she was definitely nervous.

‘Thank Nora,’ Clary said.

‘I was just going to,’ Neville said sulkily. ‘And now you’ve spoiled my thanks. I’ll thank you on the way home,’ he said to Nora, ‘when I start to feel
like it again.’

An ordinary afternoon, Polly thought, as they made their way back. How many more of them would there be? She looked at Clary trudging beside her. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I was trying to describe that pheasant. You know – exactly how it looked –
you
know – like a bird in fancy dress – a bit military, and the way it ran
– a sort of swaggery stagger . . .’

‘Why? I didn’t think you were interested in birds.’

‘I’m not, particularly. But I might want to put one in a book, and I have to keep remembering things for that.’

‘Oh.’

Aunt Rach weighed the blackberries and altogether they came to eleven pounds three ounces, and the Duchy gave them each a Meltis Fruit after tea, and Dottie cried because Mrs Cripps said she
hadn’t cleaned the preserving pan properly, and that now it might catch. In the early evening, the nutty fragrance of the hot seething blackberries seeped into the large hall and could even
be detected on the top landing by Great-Aunt Dolly as she went to the bathroom to put water in her tooth glass for soaking her senna pods.

Everyone was summoned to hear the King broadcast at six o’clock, and remained motionless and silent listening to his strained and halting speech as he battled with his stammer. ‘Poor
King!’ Lydia said. ‘To have to speak when you hardly can!’ And Louise said how lucky it was that he hadn’t wanted to be an actor, because that would have been a tragedy; he
would just have to walk on in plays carrying a spear. Then there was someone called J.B. Priestley who read from something he’d written, and just as there was wonderful Sandy Macpherson on
the cinema organ, the maids were told to get on with laying dinner which they felt was very bad luck, and the children were told to go off and have their baths, whereas the grown-ups, who
didn’t have to do anything, switched off the wireless and didn’t even listen to him.

‘They won’t let us listen to what they don’t even
want
,’ Clary complained. She had once seen Sandy Macpherson coming up out of a pit playing his organ in a large
cinema in London and had been looking forward to boasting about it. ‘And we have to listen to
them
playing for hours. Sometimes,’ she added, as she recognised that this was not
quite true.

‘Anyway, France has come into the war,’ Teddy remarked cheerfully. ‘Oh – sorry, Christopher, but you know what I mean. It makes it all more
friendly
.’ They
were watching Christopher, who was kneeling on the floor wrapping small pieces of liver round bits of rabbit fur. The owl, a tawny, sat on the top of the wardrobe watching him. Christopher had
found him as a baby on Hampstead Heath: he had a broken leg and had been in a poor way. Christopher had put the leg into splints and nursed him back to health and now he was very tame. Simon longed
for one, but he knew that he wouldn’t be allowed to keep it at his school. The owl suddenly flew down and landed on Christopher’s shoulder with a papery thud. Christopher held up a
piece of food on the palm of his hand, the owl took it and flew back with it to the wardrobe: its expression of inscrutable outrage did not change.

‘Do you ever let him out?’ Teddy asked.

‘I tried once, but he just flew into a tree and stayed there all day. And in the evening, when I brought him his food, he flew down and came back into the house with me.’ He did not
add that he had only done that once, as a token towards the owl’s freedom; secretly he wanted him to stay for ever. But now, he’d been boarding at his school ever since they moved to
Frensham, and his school might be evacuated into another school, and he knew that this might make keeping an owl difficult, although somehow he’d have to manage it. The owl flew down for
another piece: this time he nearly lost his balance, and dug his talons in to get a firmer hold on Christopher’s shoulder. Christopher had permanent claw marks, Simon had noticed, but he
didn’t seem to mind.

The first evening of the war was spent like so many other evenings: the succession of bedtimes mechanically contested by each child as a matter of pride. ‘Any minute now
we’ll be going to bed
before
Wills and Roland,’ Lydia grumbled, ‘and Wills is only two, and Roland is
nought.’

‘Yes,’ Judy said, ‘and at Berkeley Court Monica and I didn’t have our baths until after supper which made it about nine o’clock.’

She had been fetched by her father that afternoon from staying with a school friend, and had been insufferable, the other two thought, about how grand and wonderful it had been. They’d
already heard about how Monica had two ponies, and there were éclairs for tea, and a fridge that made ice and a swimming pool, and a lake with a rowing boat, and Monica had had her hair permed and
possessed a necklace of real pearls.

‘Swank, swank, swank,’ Neville muttered. He was sitting on the floor of the room they shared seeing whether he could have sucked out the thorn from his foot himself. He could.

‘Whatever are you doing?’ Judy cried.

‘Just biting my toenails. To make a change.’

‘How repellent! Lydia, don’t you think that is simply repellent?’

‘They’re Neville’s feet – he can do what he likes with them,’ Lydia said loftily. She did privately think it both clever and disgusting of Neville, but they were
now united in their dislike of and boredom with Judy’s treat.

‘Monica had her very own bathroom,’ Judy went on, as Ellen appeared to say their bath was ready and hurry up.

‘Yes, and I suppose she had her very own head and nose and teeth—’

‘And bottom,’ Lydia finished and Neville burst into hoots of laughter.

At Home Place, the older children had supper in the hall, as they were too old to have milk and biscuits upstairs, and the grown-ups wanted the dining room to themselves, so there was a sense of
grievance that no two of them were to have the usual privilege. They were eating mince and mashed potato and runner beans and the sky in the domes above them turned from violet to indigo segmented
like a melon by the struts between the glass which, Clary noticed, were dark when the sky was light and seemed pale when the dusky dark began. Upstairs they could hear baths running, doors being
opened and shut, general sounds of the grown-ups getting ready for their dinner. Bessie, the Brig’s large black Labrador, lay at Christopher’s feet, her brandy-snap eyes fixed on his
face with a terrible greed that she thought she concealed by sentiment. He stroked but did not feed her. A year ago, he thought, he had his camp in the woods, a dream of adventure and escape. It
now seemed impracticable, and therefore childish to him, but there also seemed nothing to take its place. The reality of being a pacifist had been brought home at school to him during this last
year: the teasing, the downright bullying contempt in which he was held by almost everyone.

Only Mr Milner seemed to understand. Mr Milner was the classics master, and Christopher, who had started by not liking Greek very much, had found he was liking it because he liked Mr Milner, and
the way in which he talked about what he thought so much. Christopher was always drawing things, mostly birds and sometimes animals, and he often did it in his exercise books that were meant for
homework. When Mr Milner came upon a portrait of Tawny, with some sketches of simply his talons, or an unfurled wing, he hadn’t been sarcastic or condemning about it, had just exclaimed,
‘I say, that’s awfully good, you know, really awfully good! Do you do much of that sort of thing?’ And when Christopher had mumbled, quite a bit, he’d said,
‘Absolutely right. If you want to be an artist of any kind the great thing is to practise
all the time
– that’s what being a practising artist means. I’ve never
been able to abide those slim volumes, that single cello concerto. However good they are, one knows perfectly well that if the chap had done more he’d be better.’ And then, just before
the summer holidays and after the exams, he’d suddenly given him a block of the most beautiful paper, very thick and white with a lovely feel to it. ‘I just happened to have it,’
he had said, ‘and you could make far better use of it than I.’ Mr Milner
knew
he was a pacifist, and was literally the only person who behaved as though that was a perfectly
natural thing to be – had simply asked him why he was one, and listened to the reply. Then he had said, ‘Well, Christopher,’ (Christopher had noticed that he only called people by
their Christian names if he liked them, otherwise he would have been Castle) ‘principles are very expensive things – or can be . . .’ He was fat and rather bald, which made his
eyebrows look even bushier, and had a sort of wheezy voice that cracked when he got excited, which he did about a lot of things. He always wore the same tweed jacket with leather patches on the
elbows and the sort of boots that were for going up mountains, and his ties were never very clean, and when he laughed it was ‘Ho ho ho!’ followed by more wheezing. Boarding had meant
being free from Dad getting at him, but certainly not good in other ways, except for Mr Milner.

My being against it won’t make the slightest difference to it happening, he thought, because I don’t really count, and then he heard Mr Milner’s voice saying, ‘Everybody
counts, dear boy, if only to himself. Don’t turn yourself into an abject exception.’

‘What are you smiling at?’ Neville asked.

‘Nothing much,’ he said, and then he thought, That’s a lie and I hardly noticed. He decided to count them up all the next day just to see how often it happened. Only, of
course, he thought, if I know I’m counting them up there won’t be so many of them. It was a bit like what Mr Milner had said that somebody had said about the state of mind in which
people wrote diaries.