“Brigid, how did you know this word?” asked Miss, pointing to the page, while the foxy-faced sister looked sharply on.
Brigid felt her smile break open, because this was her new and favourite word. She had written: “
David was the only one the cannonball did not eat
.”
“I just knew it, Miss,” she said.
The two women looked at each other, and they shared a smile, yet it was not a smile Brigid liked.
“Did you, indeed?” said Miss. “Sit down now.”
That was all. There was no praise. When her back was turned, Brigid heard them laugh, and she was angry. She had written a good story, and they had laughed at her.
That night, Brigid’s mother looked over her homework, hearing her reading and her numbers, and checking her spellings. “Brigid,” she said, looking hard at her, her eyebrows drawn down, “are you worried about anything?”
Brigid looked at her. She thought of saying, I am worried about everything, but said instead: “No, Mama.”
“Good girl,” said her mother, and her eyebrows lifted, and she smiled. “They were a bit concerned in the school. Did you write something about murder?”
Brigid felt her anger return. They had gone behind her back. “I just wrote a story, Mama. A made-up story out of my head. That’s all it was. I could show it to you, but they have it in school.”
“I know,” said her mother. “They telephoned me about it. The word is ‘cannibal’, Brigid, by the way. Cannonballs are large round bullets fired out of great guns called cannons.”
Brigid said nothing. Her mother got up,
smoothed her skirt, and went into the kitchen. Brigid heard tap water hissing into the kettle, the snap and the pop of the gas. In her mind she could see the blue leaping flame. Soon it would be hot-water bottles and bed. Brigid tried to find in herself the content she had known before she went back to school, the simplicity of days and nights with pictures, books and the wireless, but she could not recover it. They had all gone behind her back about the story, laughing at her, all of them. Perhaps no one could be trusted.
Across the table, ink on his fingers, thoughts almost audibly humming behind his eyes, Francis sat at his homework. He looked at her for a moment, and he smiled a little.
“Keep writing them, Brigid,” he said. “Don’t stop.” Then he bent again to his books.
Brigid wanted to tell Francis how much she disliked school, and the people in it, but he looked so burdened, and there was so much ink on him, on his fingers and round his mouth, even on the collar of his grey shirt, that it did not seem fair. She said instead: “Francis, where is Isobel gone?”
He looked up. Shutters had come down on his face. He was no longer smiling. “Isobel’s brother was taken ill,” he said, after a moment. “She had to look after him.”
“What brother?” asked Brigid. “I never heard Isobel say she had a brother.”
“Well,” said Francis, more like himself, “you don’t always listen to what’s going on, do you? She does have a brother. He was . . . away . . . and now he’s back, and she has gone to take care of him.”
“I thought she was supposed to take care of us,” said Brigid, aggrieved, suddenly missing Isobel, after liking her so little when she was there.
“Well,” said Francis, “not at the moment, when her brother needs her.”
“Don’t they have parents?”
“No,” said Francis.
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where was he, anyway, turning up out of the blue?” She liked that: out of the blue. She might use it again.
Francis’ face closed over again. “England, I think.”
“England!” said Brigid, surprised. “What for?”
“Brigid,” said her mother from the door, “get on up to bed, and let Francis do his work. Go on, now, hop.”
Brigid, obscurely unhappy, went up to bed. Yet, if she had been asked, she could not have said why.
That night Miss Chalk came back, grinning at her beside the bed, waiting for her. She did not speak to Brigid, but Brigid knew, without words, that Miss Chalk had not really gone away. She had been in England, and now she was back. Brigid screamed, and they all came, her parents as well as Francis. Miss Chalk was clever. She disappeared as soon as she heard the scream. Brigid had no proof, and all she could say was: “Bad dream.” They settled her, and went back to bed.
Only Francis lingered at the door. “Call me if she comes back?” he said, and Brigid was able to let herself sleep.
The next morning, and every weekday morning after that, there was school. Francis could not be with her there. He never talked about his own school, but Brigid felt sure that he did not like it either. Why would he tell? She told no one how, in the days after she was called up over her story, the other girls began to mock the way she spoke and, at lunchtime, tore two buttons from her burberry and scraped her shoes against the brick until they were rough and ugly. She could not tell, when Miss had said they must never tell, or she would know. And she would know: Brigid was sure of that, now. So, every morning, she went to her prison, and stayed quiet, and offered no more stories.
Then, one day when the wind was whirling and the sky was cold as blue water, he came for her. He waited for her outside in his car, and it made her heart turn over. She forgot the jeering girls and the teachers who could not be trusted. She forgot the green schoolroom and the spiders and cockroaches in the outside lavatories. She forgot the bottles of warm curdled milk at break. She forgot that she must not run, and ran to him, utterly happy, and he bent down to her as George had done, and he said, from behind his glasses: “Mama’s in town with Francis. You and I are going to my office, and I will show you the birds arriving for their winter holiday.”
Brigid threw out her arms and wound them round his neck. School did not matter any more.
Chapter 8: A Sky Full of Starlings
On autumn afternoons down town, all the heavy buildings tried to touch their tops against the darkening sky. In the smoky twilight, large department stores showed the beginnings of their winter brightness. Brigid knew that her mother and Francis were probably buying fireworks for Hallowe’en, but she also realised that it would be a secret that she would not be supposed to know until the night itself, when they would wear their falsefaces and stand well back while their father lit the squibs: rockets and sparklers and Jumping Jacks and all the spinning colours of the Catherine wheels. She could see already the brightness, the rush and explosion of lights in the air above her and the ground about her, a smell like matches tickling her nose.
Best of all, she had her father to herself, from the time he opened the car door for her and put her into the front seat, through the excitement of the slow cranking lift which carried them slowly through the air to the other world of the office. The lift sat hidden behind the entrance to a shoe shop, a secret door suddenly appearing, with whirring and clanking, dark looping wheels and pulleys first, then the slow majestic descent of the travelling room. Crossed bars stood in front of it, open black diamonds. They had to be pushed back, and there was a strange moment of stepping in, over a space of black, yawning emptiness. Then slowly, and a little sickeningly, the lift lurched, wheezing and grinding, and pulled them up to the second floor.
Now there was the almost-office, a little square place with wooden panels and misted windows. Then another secret door in the panelling opened, and there was the high room, full of slanting white light, its bright curved window like the moon in the sky. Francis said it had once been the studio of an artist, but now it was the office. Tall men in suits, ladies in cardigans and tweed smiled down at her, and biscuits and orange juice appeared from nowhere, more magic. An old man, gently spoken, sat on a stool and wrote in beautiful numbers in a fat ledger, like the ones her father pored over at home, before he was ill.
A young lady sat Brigid in front of a big typewriter, huge and gleaming black, with all the letters crowded round like people in a theatre. The young lady helped her to type out her name on the heavy keys. Each time she pressed a letter, it jumped up, eager to see itself written on the page. The young lady said Brigid could write a letter to her teacher, if she liked. Brigid typed out her name several times, but she did not write a letter to her teacher. Instead, she asked the young lady what her name was. She said it was Maureen, and Brigid wrote:
dear Moren i like you thank you love from Brigid
. Then she wrote, on impulse, for no reason she could think of:
ned silver
.
She stared at the words. She had scarcely thought about Ned Silver since the end of the summer. She was still wondering at herself, her hands above the waiting keys, when Maureen appeared above her.
“Are you stuck?” she said, then “Oh!” and she clapped her hands in pleasure. “Thank you, Brigid! I don’t get too many letters like that. May I keep it?” and she swiftly rolled and swished the paper out of the typewriter, and just as quickly rolled in another fresh white sheet. “Were you not going to write to your teacher?”
Brigid shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said.
“But who’s this?” said Maureen, pointing at the two words Brigid had written at the end of the page. “Who’s Ned Silver?”
Brigid shook her head. She said: “Oh. Sorry. He’s not anybody. He’s just a boy we play with sometimes.”
“Oh,” said Maureen. “Well. Let’s type it all out again. Will we?” Leaning over Brigid’s head, not waiting for an answer, her fingers clicked and flew, and all the letters jumped to attention.
Dear Maureen,
I like you. Thank you.
Love from
Brigid
Underneath, she wrote:
Ned Silver
.
“You see?” said Maureen. “Capital letters for names – especially for your boyfriend!”
Brigid grew suddenly hot. She slipped down without help from the high stool.
“Thank you,” she said, and in her head she spoke like her mother, “but he is not my boyfriend.” She looked around, wanting to place distance between herself and this too rapid friend. “Please, where did my daddy go?”
Maureen had already turned away to answer an insistent telephone. Brigid, relieved, wandered across to the high window, and climbed on a chair below it. She was entranced by what she saw. There were always birds in the sky, but now, above and around her the sky was crowded with birds, wheeling and conversing, clear and cold as the evening air, higher and louder than the cars on the street far below, swooping in circles and semi-circles, darkening the deepening blue.
Then, close to, at her ear, she heard her father’s voice. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “The starlings come here for the winter, from far away up in the north of the world, because it’s warmer here.”
“Warmer!” said Brigid in astonishment. “Here?”
“For them, yes,” said her father, “because they come from cold, cold places. Look, there’s one coming across to speak to you,” and his arm above her pointed to a ledge outside the window where a little bird hovered, ruffling feathers purple and green and blue, just spangled with creamy white.
A dark eye like a shining bead looked at her from a round, neat head. Then the bird spread its wings, pulled up its legs and swiftly, directly, launched itself into the air, gliding until it joined the calling, chattering crowd above.
Brigid was entranced. She was a starling, spinning and dipping and weaving in the evening sky. She drew in her breath. “A sky full of starlings,” she said, almost to herself, as her father lifted her down from the chair, turning her head to look back at them through the enchanted space.
When they went outside, the noise of the starlings was louder, though less intense. Down on the street, she was once again part of the heavy earth, and it was as though her body felt too solid to move through the busy crowd. Her father’s hand, warmly round hers, was all that kept her from floating away.
By the time he took her into his favourite store, she was back on the ground, back in this world with him, in yet another place of delights. This square shop, quiet and brown on the outside, was almost opposite the office. As they were turning into it, her father said: “Some men spend their time in a public house. This is my public house.”
Brigid did not know what he meant by a public house, but she knew she was drawn by the smells and the colours in this bright house of books. She felt her heart turn over as they went in. In its quiet, she no longer heard the starlings. This was where books came from.
“Now,” said her father, “a girl who has been sick deserves a nice book,” and Brigid was flying again.
She inhaled the books. She picked them up. She felt them and smelt them, shiny pages, matt pages, brown wolves and green woodcutters, princesses with bronze tumbling hair, trees that talked and carpets that flew and in one, a young boy looking down into a cave where all the bright glittering jewels of the world were stored. Lost in the wonder of it, Brigid forgot where she was and, surprised to hear his voice, looked up to see her father above her, and to hear him say: “The shop is about to close now, Brídín. Have you decided?”
Brigid’s heart thumped in her chest. How could she decide? She wanted them all. She picked them up, set them down, decided on this one, saw another, went back to the first, remembered a third. Her father did not hurry her. He waited, and watched, quiet and still. Finally, with a deep sigh, she held up a tall red book. Its name was
Children of Many Lands
, and in it she knew she could travel all over the world. “This one, please, Daddy,” she said. He took it from her, pleased with her choice, and walked the length of the shop to the elderly bookseller. It seemed a long time to wait while the paper was folded and smoothed along the edges of the book, and the string tied. Brigid became impatient. She could spend that time looking at other books.