Opposite the Cross Keys (23 page)

‘Please –' I called across, still not daring to put a foot inside that foreign country, the unexpected endearment putting me even further out of countenance – ‘could you tell me if Miss Lee has gone away with Mr Smith in his caravan?'

‘Chu-Chin-Chinaman!' The old woman put the middle finger of each hand to the corner of her eyes, pushing the flesh up to turn herself into a parody of the stage Oriental. ‘Wha's Miss Lee to you?'

‘She's …' I hesitated. ‘My father knows her.' It seemed a shorter way than having to explain about his hobby, and the lessons in the flat over the curio shop.

‘I bet he does!' The old un cackled, as if she had said something funny. ‘Well, you can go home an' tell your pa the bird has flown!'

Confused, I stammered that actually it was not my father who wanted to know, it was me because – I broke off in the middle of the sentence, the old woman puffing away at her pipe as if whether I spoke or stayed mum were a matter of profound indifference. Instead of her turban, which had given her a certain dignity, she wore, probably in acknowledgement of the damps of the turning year, an ancient deerstalker whose ear-flaps, hanging down on either side of her long face, gave her the look of a decayed spaniel. For the first time it occurred to me that she was as much to blame as anybody that poor little Mr Lee had hanged himself from his chandelier. More. Whose idea was it to get the spring water in the first place?

I pointed out, with a satisfaction which I am sure she understood perfectly, ‘She came back after all. The water didn't work.'

‘No good putting it on to me!' The other brushed my words aside. ‘If I told that Nellie once I told her a hundred times – get on with it, yer silly chai! Not my fault she didn't get round to doin' something till that Chinky bitch were three months gone.'

‘Gone where?' I asked stupidly.

‘Up the spout – down the drain – in and out the keyhole!' Again the cackle. ‘Oh you ladies of high degree!' She drew deeply on her pipe, let the smoke out with an air of voluptuous enjoyment. ‘An' I suppose you don't want to know, neither, if Nellie went along o' them, or if she didn't? Not on talkin' terms any more, are we? Not good enough for the likes of you, hey?'

‘She is! She is!' I cried. ‘And I
am
on talking terms! Did she go with them? Did she?'

The old gypsy heaved herself to her feet. She poked an exploratory finger under an ear-flap and scratched. I had never seen her standing up before, never realized how tall she was, not bent with age at all. She mounted the steps sure-footed and turned at the top, her back to her caravan door, commanding, contemptuous.

‘Please tell me,' I begged. ‘Please!'

The old woman took her pipe out of her mouth. I waited, breathless. For a moment I dared to hope that Nellie was inside the barrel-shaped abode, from which the old un was about to produce her like a magician producing a rabbit out of his hat. Instead, she opened her mouth wide enough for me to glimpse the few brown stumps embedded in her shrunken gums. Slowly, with the deliberation of an adder uncoiling itself in the sun, she stuck out her purple tongue. Long, longer, longest it emerged, flowing over her lower lip, the crescent-shaped hollow beneath, all the way down to her chin. She let the incredible object hang there for a moment, then whipped it back quick as a flash, and disappeared indoors.

‘Nellie!' I called, pouring my love like spring water into the name. ‘Are you there, Nellie Smith?'

No answer.

So. Now that I have put you into the picture and you know all about the Fenners of Opposite the Cross Keys, I can return to that summer afternoon when I first rode – if you could call it riding – my sister Maisie's bike to Salham St Awdry, a day on the surface indistinguishable from all the days of my life up to then, but one after which my life was never the same again. I can return to the dread board at Horsford Point –
Ma gerto o ca!
– the angry man in the pony and trap who lashed out with his whip and flicked off my bicycle lamp, the men piling their telegraph poles by the roadside. I can smell again the creosote, or whatever it was, and put the smell of it into your nostrils: the stuff that stuck to the backs of my legs and, according to Mrs Hewitt the washerwoman, put paid to a perfectly good pair of socks.

I can go back to Chicken.

The Saturday after that momentous afternoon, Mrs Fenner came up to Norwich positively quivering with news of the lovely bor who had moved into the cottage next door. Not even Maud's natural scepticism, which made her instantly retaliate that nobody who could bring himself to set up home in that rat hole could be up to much, could moderate her mother's enthusiasm.

‘Jest you wait till you see him!' she prophesied. ‘You'll be same as the rest of us – wondering how we ever got along without him.'

His name, she told us, was Chicken.

‘Chicken!' Maud echoed derisively. ‘What kind of name is that?'

‘In't it a laugh?' Mrs Fenner's face shone with an innocent love. ‘But arter you've known him a day or two it seem to fit, somehow, an' you couldn't think of a better if you tried.'

‘Wha's so special about him, then?' Maud, who was still getting over the defection of Curly, the pirate bus driver, who had just been run in for bigamy, spoke out of disillusion with all male mankind. ‘Got two wings an' crows every time he lays an egg?'

‘You'll see,' Mrs Fenner returned comfortably.

Next day, squashed in the back of the car between my mother and Maud like a sandwich filling between two slices of bread, one fresh and yielding, the other hard as a brick, I mouthed,
‘Ma gerto o ca'
with silent fervour as Alfred veered right at Horsford Point. It was, as I saw it, only this which, every time, prevented him from forking left to Horsford and Holt – and Timbuctoo, for all I knew to the contrary.

‘It won't be long now,' said my mother, ‘before you'll have grown into Maisie's bicycle, and then you'll be able to ride to St Awdry's yourself.'

‘With Maud on the back,' added Alfred.

‘Don't talk daft!' said Maud, who could never take a joke against herself.

I had been out to St Awdry's lots of Sundays during the months that had passed since Nellie Smith had disappeared from my life. Twice – during the Christmas, and again, during the Easter holidays, I had stayed a week there – good times, but different, lacking the excitement with which the gypsy girl had infused every single day of our acquaintance.

For that was all it had been, I was forced to acknowledge, sorrowfully. An acquaintanceship, if that. I felt I knew the gypsy princess lying buried somewhere in Norwich cemetery, trapped like a wild bird and imprisoned in a cage of earth, better than I knew her daughter. As it was, I had actually got myself another friend, sort of: Dora Chapman, a large, cheerful girl whose unfailing readiness to go everywhere I wanted to go, do everything I wanted to do, bored me to tears more often than pleased me. What drove me round the bend was her placid acceptance that, coming as I did from the city and speaking posh, I was different from the rest of the village, and superior.

I had spent enough time at Opposite the Cross Keys to know that I was not superior, and I hated to be told I was. To compensate, I suppose, the moment I arrived at the Fenners' I got myself into a state of scruffiness the most intractable native would have considered overdoing it. It was a happy day for me when Mrs Fenner, taking a good look at me one morning – my matted hair, my dress with the hem hanging, plimsolls with the lace missing from one and a toe poking out of its fellow – remarked, ‘Know somethin', Sylvie. You're getting me a bad name in the village. Know what Her Majesty (she meant the ex-kitchen-maid at Sandringham) said to me? “Don't she ever wash?” she said. Cheek!'

‘What did you say to her?'

‘What you think I said? I said, “Not if I can bloody help it!”'

Looking the way I did it was no surprise that Patricia Livermore, coming upon me in the Post Office, had hesitated before coming over to speak. If I'd seen her first she wouldn't have seen me for dust. Patricia Livermore was a new girl at Eldon House, who had moved to Norfolk with her parents from Birmingham. She was plain, uninteresting, and none of us at Eldon House cared for the funny way she spoke. There was nothing about her to induce us – little horrors that we were – to open our closed circles of friendship and let her in. Her father was something at the Midland Bank in Norwich, which made me glad my father banked with the National Provincial. When I heard that the family had moved into a house with mock-Tudor beams called Old Saffrons just outside St Awdry's on the Spixworth road, I was furious. I didn't want my Norwich life and my Salham St Awdry life to touch at any point.

Unfortunately, Patricia took my presence in St Awdry's during school holidays as a heaven-sent opportunity to get herself a friend at last. I tried to put her off by letting her see the interior of Opposite the Cross Keys, but still she stuck like a burr. The Fenners aroused her horrified but titillated curiosity. ‘Sylvia, they're so
common
!' she breathed to me in wonder. She said the same about Dora Chapman. Girls who didn't wear school uniform were common by definition. That was the kind of girl she was.

Still, there was a limit to the number of times you could say no. When I said I couldn't come to play tennis – there was a tennis court at Old Saffrons – pleading in excuse that my racquet was back in St Giles, she assured me there was a spare I could use, just the right weight and a Slazenger, to boot. And when I said I couldn't come to tea on Monday, she would ask me for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday – any day I fancied, so long as I came.

As it happened, Mrs Livermore was a very good cook, and I wouldn't have minded going to tea at Old Saffrons so much if it hadn't been for the fuss. I was too young, too wrapped up in my own selfish concerns, to see the pathos in her laying on of those cakes and jellies and sandwiches cut into fancy shapes, all to snare a friend for her unattractive daughter. God knows the poor woman must have felt she was scraping the bottom of the barrel to be encouraging such a ragamuffin as I.

The Sunday I arrived with Maud for our formal introduction to the new tenant of the cottage next door, Patricia Livermore was hanging about outside the Cross Keys, waiting to ask me to tea.

‘I can't possibly come.' I dismissed the invitation with scant courtesy and secret mirth. ‘We're having Chicken!'

Chicken was sitting at the table with the rest of the Fenners, already so much part of the family that it seemed inconceivable he had not always been there, in his black clothes which were not at all mournful, his black cap on his head, his white teeth shining in his dark face. When we came in through the door he got up from his seat, came across and took Maud's hand with a mock gallantry, a little bow from the waist which made us all laugh yet contained an essence of genuine courtliness which had Maud colouring to the eyebrows. To me he said, one eyelid drooping in a wink imperceptible to the others, ‘So this is the famous Sylvie! I'll have to mind my fuckin' p's an' q's, won't I?'

I can't hope to pin down the man's raffish charm: only that we all – and not only the Fenner ménage, the whole village, with one or two exceptions – succumbed to it. He kept us all laughing: but then, round that table at Opposite the Cross Keys, we had laughed a lot before he came. Simply, I think, when we were in his company we all felt more alive, full of potentialities previously unsuspected. The fact that, on the face of it, he was as poor as, if not poorer even than the Fenners, carried no weight at all. Had he a mind for it, we did not doubt, he could conquer the world.

Chicken was very foul-mouthed. Next to him the Fenners sounded like a Sunday School class. Yet that is to do him an injustice. ‘Foul' betokens a predetermination,
mens rea
, and Chicken, I could swear, had no such evil intent. My guess is that – as with the Fenners, except that, having travelled further afield, he had garnered an expression or two out of their ken – the obscenities which peppered every other sentence were the only way he knew of breaking out of that narrow cage of language in which circumstances and lack of educational opportunity had imprisoned him.

Before we ate tea, he took Maud and me next door to see what he had done to his new home; myself, of course, pretending that I had never before seen the place. The derelict cottage was in any event transformed even since my earlier sight of it; the loose plaster cleared away, the walls whitewashed. There was still no furniture, unless you could call a rolled-up mattress, a couple of crates, and an old-fashioned cobblers' last set up by the window, furniture. Where the divider between front and back rooms had been taken away, the ceiling was no longer sagging. On either side, it was supported by what – despite some shortening since our last acquaintance – I had no difficulty whatever in recognizing as four of the telegraph poles I had sat on by the roadside.

‘Careful not to brush up against them bloody uprights,' Chicken warned, contriving another wink in my direction. ‘You might get black all down yer sodding socks.'

Maud observed innocently, ‘They look like telegraph poles.'

‘They do, don't they?' Chicken agreed, smiling widely in compliment to her sharpness of eye. Maud glowed: a different kind of glow from the glows she summoned up for an Eric or a Curly. I knew instinctively that she would never try to woo Chicken with Woodbines and slabs of chocolate, the way she had tried to woo
them
.

‘Pines, tha's what they are,' Chicken said. ‘Special kind, what put out cones as look like china eggcups.' Maud said she didn't remember seeing any like that. ‘Common as dirt,' said Chicken. ‘On'y temp'rary this lot, though. Aim to put up marble pillars once I get me curtains up.'