Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (20 page)

Aunty Joyce is in such a flap, tearing through the rooms and rebuking herself for not having packed everything earlier.

“Just
look
at all this I've got to do! They'll be here straight after dinner and it's nearly eleven now! It's all my fault – I should've sorted this out last week!”

I try to point out that then I wouldn't have had anything to wear, but she is intent on bearing the full burden of guilt for it and nothing will stop her. Since I came without a bag or suitcase, I do not have one to leave with. But my belongings seem to have multiplied tenfold. Aunty Joyce wraps all my woollens in brown paper and string, and marks the parcel “Kitty Green, Paddington station”. Since there are only soft cardigans to support the paper, her pencil goes right through and she starts to fret even more. “Now I've broken the ruddy paper! What am I going to do
now
?”

Uncle Jack comes through the door after his night shift and does not even tell her off for bad language. Instead he clonks around upstairs for a bit and comes down with a dusty old brown suitcase.

“There!” he says, putting it on the table. “We never go anywhere.”

“Oh, thank you!” says Aunty Joyce, as if giving away their only suitcase were a gift from the gods. “Now we can really get things going.”

I suddenly take a notion to fling myself at Aunty Joyce and give her a great long hug. “I'm going to miss you two so much!”

She's a little taken aback, but holds me too.

Uncle Jack chuckles when I go and give him a hug too. “What were we then?”

I look at him quizzically.

“You know … Miss Lavish, never been ravished, Mrs Marsh with the small moustache … what were
we
?”

I shrug. “I never had one for you.”

“Go on!”

“I didn't.”

“Well, if you had to, then …”

“Hmm. Aunty Joyce without a voice. Uncle Jack … with God on his back!”

“Am I like that?” she asks. “Don't I speak?”

“I just made it up – off the top of my head. It's only because it rhymes.”

At about that moment there is a knock on the door. I go to answer it, and a telegraph boy holds out a small brown envelope.

“Miss Kitty Green?”

“That's me.”

He hands it to me, and waits while I read it, in case I need to reply. It is typed, and brief, so I don't take long to work it out:

“The captain of HMT Alexandrina regrets to inform you that Thomas Stuart Glover was drowned at sea.”

My first thought is that they must have got it wrong. Perhaps there is another Tommy Glover who calls himself Thomas, or perhaps he just decided to swim ashore. Then I see the telegraph boy's face: the sad, sympathetic squeeze of the eyebrows. “Bad news, eh?”

I feel a great rush and everything starts to gallop inside me.

“Any reply, miss?”

I must have shaken my head, for he walks to the front gate and throws his leg over his bicycle, and I loathe him for having the audacity to ride up here, bold as brass – whistling probably – and hand me his skinny little envelope from his efficient little bag and turn my world upside down.

I put the telegram on the kitchen table next to the open suitcase.

“It's my fault,” I whisper, as Uncle Jack picks it up and reads it silently, handing it ashen-faced to Aunty Joyce. “It must be a punishment. What have I done wrong?” I'm shouting now. I lift my red face to them both and implore them: “Tell me! TELL ME!”

Uncle Jack perches on the wooden arm of the fireside chair and covers his face with his hands. Then he reaches out a hand to my trembling shoulder.

“This isn't a punishment, littl'un.” He stops and swallows hard, as if searching desperately through the Bible in his head for an answer. “God is a kind God … it may be hard to see it now, but this is a
challenge
, not a punishment. Through it you will gain a strength you never knew, an understanding and – ”

I run to the bottom of the stairs. I already have a bone to pick with God and he's not going to be wheeled out now to piss me off. I harness all my anger and fling it at the pair of them.

“If that's true, then why can't
you
see it as well? Why can't you see that Rosemary's death wasn't a punishment, and stop blaming each other! Stop it! STOP IT!” I am screaming now, my face aching, prepared to deliver any cruelty in the reckless hope that it might soothe my pain.

Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce look across at me from the table like two lost children, but I just keep going. “Her death wasn't a punishment – it was a fackin'
challenge
!” My fury knows no bounds. I ignore their pathetic, beseeching faces. “And just
look
at you! You've fackin' failed it, haven't you? Just
look
what you've done to each other!”

I can't shout any louder, and my whole head is aching. I stomp off upstairs and slam the door to my room. A corn dolly falls off the wall. Jesus stays resolutely in place, looking intently over my shoulder from underneath his halo. Then I lie face down and wail out my hot anguish to the bed springs, raising my head only to lob contempt at the one available face. “And
you
can stop looking at me like that!” I scream. I thwack Jesus of Nazareth with a flying copy of
Farmer and Stockbreeder
and he falls face down off the wall.

They have both come up the stairs to speak to me, and when they open the door, I dash past them and down to the back door. I run up the garden path sending the hens chuckling in all directions, and I scale the low back wall into the field. I run and run and don't stop until I get to the oak tree. I kick the old furrowed bark and wail and wail and it does not mind. But I can't sit down, can't stop. I run towards the farm, down the lane, across the road and over the five bar gate. I run and run and don't stop until I reach the buttercup field, and Boomer's grave, and all the valley spread out before me, which Tommy said one day would be ours. I let out what is meant to be a huge scream, but it comes out as a whimper. I sit down on the spot where Tommy once told me, in his coy way, that I was his idea of heaven. I rip up handfuls of buttercups. Rip, rip, rip. I pummel the ground with my fists and send up wafts of wretched sweet grass, and I sink into it, spread-eagled tummy down, and let the anger give way to tears, and I hold the earth like a mother and cry and cry until my face stings with tears and snot.

*    *    *  

It is Uncle Jack who finds me eventually. He picks me up and carries me home, saying nothing but “Poor lamb” from time to time. I find it comforting to be carried, and to hear him justify my behaviour with his soft words, and I nuzzle into that old blue jacket and smell the coal smoke of a thousand train journeys and the vanilla of his tobacco for the last time.

My mother arrives at three o'clock, although she said she would arrive at two. She rolls up in a Ford motor car with her own driver. She is dolled up to the nines, with stockings and lipstick and a hat with a feather in it matching her dress. All beams, she is, as she comes up the path, walking two little toddlers in their Sunday best.

“This is Maurice!” she says valiantly, before she reaches the door, “Maurice Trigg. He's my foreman where I work and he's kindly offered me a lift and he's going to drive us to the station. Isn't that kind, Kitty?”

Maurice, all teeth and moustache behind her, tips his hat at us.

“He's dead!” I mutter, from the doorway. Uncle Jack and Aunty Joyce are poised in the hallway to shake hands, but now they hold back.

My mother stops in her tracks and looks at me, shocked.

“I just got a telegram,” I say tearfully.

She lets go of Shirley and Peter and rushes at me with her arms outstretched. “Oh, my darlin'!” she says, kneeling down to my height at the front door. “Oh, my poor darlin'! I didn't know you'd had a telegram! I thought … Listen! It only says ‘missing in action', you never know … he might still be alive … you never know …”

“No, it says ‘drowned at sea'.”

“Drowned? How can he be drowned?
Mine
didn't say nothing about him being
drowned
!”

She pulls back from me, and I pull back from her. As we look at each other, and as we hear Aunty Joyce say, “Mrs Green, I think …” we both understand there has been a mistake.

“Oh, my Lord!”

“You don't mean Tommy, do you?”

Peter and Shirley have toddled off into the garden and are in danger of following Kemble back out of the gate into the road. Aunty Joyce squeezes past my shoulder to go after them, and Lady Elmsleigh arrives.

“I've some news,” she says at the gate.

“Lady Elmsleigh – oh, dear. I'm afraid this isn't a very good time …” Aunty Joyce drops her voice a little, but I can hear it – I can clearly hear it say: “You see, Kitty's just heard that her father is missing, presumed …” – and this she whispers – “… dead.”

“I'm so sorry. I'm
so
sorry. I'll call back later. I don't want to miss her before she goes.”

And that's how I know. Did they all know? When were they planning to tell me?

It is deemed appropriate to invite my mother and her beau in for an hour or so to break the journey, and this is an hour I can barely recall. There seems no point left to anything at all. I am a dead girl walking. I am food for worms.

I resent it when my mother dips a biscuit in her cup of tea, and when Maurice Trigg smiles at something I loathe him. I don't want my mother's erratic sympathy, her sudden smothering hugs. There is nothing nor anyone who can console me, but I find myself going over to where Aunty Joyce is sitting, and silently wrapping my arms around her until it is time to go.

*    *    *  

There isn't time to speak to them all. I am ushered into the car by my mother, who dumps Shirley in my arms before I can bid anyone a proper farewell. I sit on the springy leather of the back seat and turn to look out of the window. There they all are, the faces that studied me so curiously when I arrived, gazing at me all forlorn.

Everything is happening too quickly. I want some time to say goodbye. It is all wrong, and inside I can't help blaming my mother with her fancy new man and her blundering bad news and her poor time-keeping and this wretched posh car.

Uncle Jack leans in the front door and hands my mother some tickets.

“First Class!” she squeals. “Ooh! Ooh … you shouldn't have!”

By way of response, Uncle Jack explains which platform we'll need to get on. Meanwhile Aunty Joyce leans in the back door and gives me a basket with a lid. “Just a little going-away present from me.” She gives me a quick peck, strokes my hair sadly, and we are off. Out of the back window I see them all waving, and Lady Elmsleigh running up, panting, shouting “Kitty! Kitty!” and then flopping her arms by her side.

I am so bereft, so all at sea, and I thank God for Aunty Joyce's gift. For the sound of frightened mewing makes me lift the lid to see a black and white kitten – the spitting image of Boomer – just crying out to be cuddled.

I don't know how much of all this I told them, and how much just came drifting back as I was talking: there can only have been time to tell them the bare bones of it all. I'm sure I was careful not to use surnames – they could've been those of the little faces peering up at me – and I'd called Jack and Joyce by different names. But when the bell went it was as though I were being lifted out of a trance. And the oddest thing is, I felt physically sick. I looked around and saw that the boys in the back row had already got up to go or were shuffling in their desks. Those were the same ones who had fidgeted for the first half-hour and had swapped things under the desks. I didn't tell them off then, because I wanted to be liked, and I was afraid they might turn on me and I wouldn't know what to do. Then they had all gone quiet as mice when I got to the killing of Rosemary by the stream. They all knew that stream, had pirated galleons on it, been shipwrecked on its fallen branches and scored their names into the hawthorn bark with knives. There had been such a hush then, and it had lasted until playtime, when everything fell apart and they were out of the door with a great clatter and thud before I realized what was happening.

After playtime Miss Pegler still hadn't returned and I was terrified as they began to thunder back in. I gave them all some paper to draw their ideal picture of the new school at Heaven House, and while they were drawing they started asking questions, wanted more of the story. I told them about going back to London, and how when we got back to Maurice's mother's house – where we were going to be living with him and his daughter when they joined us later – it too had been hit and was like an open doll's house, but with everything looted and crumbling. But I didn't mention that when I opened my suitcase I saw that Aunty Joyce had mounted Tommy's sketch of me in a frame I recognized as belonging once to Jesus of Nazareth, and she had packed all the things that remotely fitted me from Rosemary's wardrobe.

I did write to them once, but then I forgot to put my address on the letter – partly because we didn't have one for a while, and partly because you forget these things when you're nine.

“Miss, you 'aven't done the register, miss. You 'aven't.” A girl with a chest smaller than her tummy looked earnestly up at me from the front row.

“Right … I'll um … stay where you are! I'll just …” I found it on Miss Pegler's neat desk, clearly labelled with a hurriedly written note: ‘
Essential: take register
'. Even at speed her writing was classically neat. “I'll be quick – surnames only … Ardlan … Bunting … Capper … Chudd … Fletcher … Glass … Hubble-Schmidt …” I looked up and murmured the name again, searching to see who said yes. “Could you put your hands up as well as saying yes, please?”

“Yes.”

I gazed at the beautiful brown face of a boy who probably didn't know he once played Jesus, and couldn't help a little smile of triumph. They were all there, the same twisted noses and heavy brows and pointed chins, the same big ears and buck teeth and blocked sinuses, passed on from generation to generation. Nothing had changed dramatically, but everything had changed a little. A slight shift in the combination of genes, and there was a whole new set of possibilities. “… Rutter … Shepherd …” I looked up like a startled fox. She was a little version of Joyce, with Jack's dark curls.

“Miss, yes, miss,” she said tentatively for the second time, because I failed to continue.

“… Tugwell … White.”

Miss Pegler came in as I was finishing off, and made them all stand in silence before letting them go home for dinner, row by row.

She was full of apologies. The architect hadn't been on the first train so she'd felt obliged to wait for the second, but he'd not been on that one either, and so on. She invited me home for some dinner, but I made my excuses: I wanted to stretch my legs and explore a bit. Before I closed the register I glanced at it again to check the Shepherd girl's name. It was Kitty.