AMY DID NOT find the Anna Bonner School for Girls an appalling place full of nasal little rats. She enjoyed writing and cutting out paper figures more than she enjoyed school, but she liked school, too. She had no best friend, for she was not the kind of child that has a best friend, but there were three or four little girls with whom she usually walked round eating biscuits at Break and had mild little jokes with. They exchanged the gossip of school—so bright within its narrow frame—and said isn’t-it-ghastly to one another about the homework.
Perhaps no other school in London would have made such a satisfactory refuge for a secretive little girl who was grieving passionately for her dead mother, for the Anna Bonner was a good place for dreamers. It was a private school of some ninety girls, founded in the ’eighties by a rich brewer’s daughter who had been a pupil-teacher under the famous Frances Mary Buss, and was housed in a grey stone building in one of the quiet roads of Highbury not ten minutes walk from where Amy lived. It cannot be said that the Anna Bonner worked hard and played hard. Indeed, one ambitious and energetic member of the educational world had been known to refer to it as a nest of lazy hounds. But the Founder was still alive, a very old lady living at St. Leonards-on-Sea, and although it was many years since she had retired from active headmistress-ship, the school was still her chief interest and she dealt very sharply with any attempts to pep it up. Miss Bonner had not been deeply influenced by Miss Buss’s ideals, much as she had respected that pioneer, and she had her own ideas about the education of girls and what a girls’ school should be. “A cool frame for most seedlings, not a forcing house,” she was wont to say to her staff, for she was a devout gardener.
As a result of the Founder’s influence, carried on by one of her great-nieces as headmistress, the Anna Bonner was an old-fashioned, pre-War type of school in which the best of the Victorian virtues were inculcated, and a well-balanced character, with proficiency in needlework and the domestic arts, was regarded as being of more use to the type of girl who attended there than the higher education and proficiency at games. The staff was contented if unambitious, and the girls had a quiet, pleasant place in which they could get through the time while waiting to grow up. No one at the Anna Bonner was earnest. While no one actually said to a girl who had muffed an exam: “Never mind, dear, worse troubles at sea, and tea’s nearly ready,” the words were implied in the slow-paced, unselfconscious atmosphere of the plain little school building. The daughters of prosperous tradesmen and managers of departments in big North London shops who went there always kept an affection for the old place; and most of them remembered what they had been taught about cooking and sewing and cutting out clothes. Miss Anna Bonner asked for nothing more ambitious.
In this mild little world Amy’s intense grief for her mother was not suspected, and no one cared what her home life was like so long as her fees were paid regularly and she behaved like all the other little girls, which she did. Her work was so faultlessly neat in its presentation that she was rather popular with the staff; otherwise, nothing but her pigtail distinguished her from the other seventy-nine pupils in the school.
Here she came five days out of the seven, moving quietly up and down the long bare corridors where budding branches or sprays of autumn leaves stood in the windows, changing with the season of the year against the white sky of Spring or the yellow sky of winter; or bent daily over her desk while an aeroplane droned above the school, taking no more notice of it than the schoolgirls of the ’eighties at the same desks had taken of the sound made by a passing hansom.
Once every six weeks or so she would ask her form mistress if she might have a new rough note-book.
“But, Amy, you’ve got through the last one very quickly, haven’t you, dear? Let me see it.” (The Anna Bonner was one of the few schools left in London where the teachers called the girls “dear”.)
Amy would silently hold out a note-book and quickly turn over the pages, full of her writing and calculations.
“Yes, it’s quite full, isn’t it! Very well, dear, ask Margery if you can have a new one.”
Then Amy would put away the used note-book in her desk, where it would stay until it came out in another six weeks to deceive her form mistress again; and carry home the new one to begin Volume Four of The Wolf of Leningrad. The school rough note-books were exactly the right size for lavish comfortable scribbling and there was always such a lot to be done with her shilling a week pocket money that she was pleased to get her writing-books for nothing.
This was not the only small deception she had taken to since her mother’s death. Scarcely a day passed on which she did not tell a lie or deceive somebody by keeping silent when most girls would have spoken, but she deceived and lied so naturally that she never felt guilty about these attempts to keep bullies at bay, and idly inquisitive people out of her secret world. Since her mother’s death she had bitterly learned that a child is not even safe if it keeps still, and quiet, and tries not to upset people. Her father and Old Porty, Dora Beeding and Mrs. Beeding, and even Mona, her nearest approach to a best friend, were always picking on her about her accent or teasing her, trying to organize her spare time or worrying her to tell what she did in the evenings with the sitting-room door locked. Against all such intrusions into her secret life she had no weapons except deceit and lies, and naturally she used them. By the time her mother had been dead a year, she was rapidly developing into a sly little girl.
But she was no longer such a coward as when her mother was alive: she knew that, and when she lay in bed at night in the dark, talking to her mother, she would tell her what brave thing she had done that day. Mother, I touched the wheel of a motor bus while I was waiting to cross. I waited in Sainsbury’s for the butter and looked at the cut-up rabbits for ever so long and I didn’t feel sick. Mother, you are pleased, aren’t you? I do remember what you said about being brave. I’m not really afraid of anything now, except Dad when he’s had a drop too much and Mrs. Beeding reading The Wolf of Leningrad. I can’t bear to think of anyone reading it except you. Please, please, God, let me dream about Mother. Amen.
On the evenings when she did not feel like writing, she would bring out the cardboard box in which she collected her pictures and sort them into two heaps, one for pasting up in her bedroom and one for cutting out, and spend the evening cutting out paper figures.
Sometimes she flew cut-outs out of her bedroom window on long pieces of cotton. It was exciting to murmur a story about some lovely girl from the cover of a fashion paper, as she fluttered near the branch of a tree, and when she was hopelessly tangled there to send her lover out on another piece of cotton to rescue her. He usually lost his life in the attempt, either getting torn in half when Amy tried to pull him free of the branch or else fluttering away on the night wind when the cotton snapped. Far, far over the dim gardens lit by the faint autumn moon he would sail, and Amy, leaning out of the window to watch his flight, would murmur the story to a close:
“In a remote corner of the savage jungle, far from the civilizing influence of the white man, a lonely figure haunts the glades. None of the wondering cannibals know his name or his history. His leg is shackled with a huge rope. It is Buck Finch, who gave up his heritage as a white man for love. Will he ever return? Who knows … who knows?”
Then she would draw her head in and shut the window. The room seemed very bright and cosy after the dimness and scudding silver clouds outside, and she felt hungry, so she would eat a slice of bread and treacle while turning over the contents of another box neatly labelled “Curios.”
There was a sprig of white coral wrapped in a paper inscribed “White coral from Capri (Italy). Given to A. Lee, 12 Highbury Walk, Highbury, London, England, Europe, The World, Space, by Mr. X, a friend of her father, T. Lee (Mr. X’s name is unfortunately forgotten as A. Lee was only eight years of age at the time the coral was given).” The box also contained a green jade heart labelled “Jade heart from New Zealand. Bought for the sum of £2,000 (twopence) from a tray outside a second-hand shop in Holloway Road. The vendor told A. Lee that it came from New Zealand.”
And into this box she had put the coin given her by the American boy outside Kenwood House on her birthday, wrapped in a paper on which she had written:
“American coin given to A. Lee as a birthday present by Robert Somebody, an American boy from Vine Falls, Paul County, New Leicester, America, on the said A. Lee’s twelfth birthday, October 31st, 1928.”
She was still not quite sure whether he had given it to her in mistake for a shilling or as a spiteful joke, and each time she unwrapped the paper to look at it, this doubt crept in and disturbed the tranquil pleasure of her collector’s mood; but, remembering his face and the way he had looked at her and making allowances for the fact that boys always hated girls and thought they were soppy, he had seemed a kind boy, not the sort that would play a spiteful joke on a person, especially when he knew it was their birthday, and much nicer than the boys whom Amy, through Mona Beeding, occasionally had dealings with in Highbury.
That boy, Robert Somebody, had made her think of the brave boys her mother used to read to her about; the fourteen-year-old Pony Express rider who shot half a score of Indians in a dead end of the mountains before their arrows got him at last, whom the Redskins would not dishonour by scalping because he was so brave and his hair (they said) “was like the rays of the sun”; and the fifteen-year-old Nelson on his Greenland voyage leaving the ship at night with one of his comrades to pursue a bear across the ice, which he attacked crying “Do but let me get a blow at this devil with the butt end of my musket and we shall have him.”
Amy was sure that the Pony Express Riders and the young Nelson must have looked like the American boy at Kenwood, and she often wondered about him. What was he doing at that particular moment, far away in America? Had he any brothers and sisters? She had found New Leicester and Paul County and Vine Falls on the big tattered old atlas which she used as a hunting ground for names of places in her stories, and now they were as real to her as the American boy himself. She wished that they could be friends. She had often wished this about boys in books, but never before about a real boy, because the Highbury boys had such a way of rushing out and bumping into her, bursting open her attaché case full of school books and sending them all over the pavement, that it was quite impossible to imagine being friends with them. But she was sure that if she had been friends with that American boy he would have been different. He would have taken her on exciting expeditions without once reminding her that she was a girl, and when she saved his life he would have thanked her in the proper way in a voice that trembled as he wrung her hand.
On the evenings when she did not feel like cutting out or writing, she would take one of the shabby old novels from the bookshelf and sit in front of the stove, dreaming over it rather than reading, for she knew all the books in her father’s small library almost by heart. Most of the books had belonged to Tim as an undergraduate and had travelled round with him as his later fortunes rose and fell, getting some rough handling. But they were sturdy late Victorian editions that wore well enough to shame the cardboard backs of to-day; and their thick paper, good type, touch of gilding on the cover and charming end-papers, thrown in out of sheer grace, made any reader sensitive to books feel that here was a friend; a good story well dressed. Tim did not care for reading nowadays, but he had grown up with books like these, and their stories were part of that mental furniture which stays in a man’s head through the steepest ups and downs. His own taste was for the minor classic, a type of book that has perhaps given more pure pleasure to more readers than any other kind, and as soon as Amy could read he had put her on to The Cloister and the Hearth, A Gentleman of France, Tom Burke of “Ours”, King Solomon’s Mines and many others.
But Amy also had her own library, and it was chiefly one of books about America.
The Wide, Wide World, given to her by her mother on her tenth birthday, had first fascinated her with its pictures of life in New England, its domestic details which were so different from those of England and yet so cosy-sounding. Ellen Montgomery had had biscuits and fried chicken for breakfast! And there was the mysterious incident of the birch-bark, when Miss Fortune (Amy hated Miss Fortune) dipped all Ellen’s white socks into a brew made from it, and turned them grey. America sounded a lovely place; Amy longed to hear more about it. The people talked English. If you went there, you would not be frightened because they were foreigners, and yet they were different enough to be interesting. And Amy began to linger by second-hand bookstalls, hunting for stories about America. Presently she found What Katy Did, and the other Katy books; and then Little Women and Good Wives, and later on the Indians of Fenimore Cooper crept into her imagination, treacherous and brilliant as swamp snakes. And then she found Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the wild-voiced slaves of the South, and Dred: a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp by the same author, and a wonderful book called Down the Mississippi, about some children and a little negro boy who were swept away in a flood down the mighty river on the roof of the cabin in which they lived. And she found St. Elmo, with its wicked Southern hero and Edna, its lovely, learned heroine and the rich house bowered in magnolia flowers. She found Daisy and Daisy in the Field, and Say and Seal, with its shy saintly heroine, and leisurely blue rivers on whose shores the characters held clambakes. And last of all (but these belong not to America but to the world) on a misty November evening, on a stall of filthy and dog-eared books guarded by a shivering old man, she found a copy of The Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and the magic circle was complete.
The volume was illustrated with blackish drawings taken from old wood blocks, and these, with the poems and tales, exercised upon her imagination a haunting spell, half horror, half fascination. After her mother’s death, when she began trying to be brave, one of the tests she set herself was to read one of the Tales without putting her hand over the picture to hide it as she read. But gradually the stories and poems began to charm as well as to haunt her, and at length she came to love them, part of her pleasure coming from her self-taught power to look at the picture of The Pit and the Pendulum, or the Lady Ligeia’s Burial, without fear (or with fear driven so deeply below the surface of her mind that she no longer knew it existed).
In all these tests of courage her only desire was to make herself the brave girl that her mother had wanted her to be. She herself did not care if she were brave or a coward. She never thought, “It would be nicer and much more comfortable if I didn’t mind things, like Mona”; she secretly despised Mona because the latter never noticed the cut-up rabbits, the strong smells and noises and brutal wheels that frightened herself. Had her mother not tried to make her brave, Amy would have accepted her own cowardice without a second thought, for she was as unselfconscious as it is possible for a female organism to be; and her pretences at being a cowboy, a spy, the young Nelson, went on without ever tapping the sealed wells of introspection.
When her mother had been dead for a year, an enormous space of time in a child’s world, Amy’s picture of her had become crystallized yet dim, and she could no longer think with certainty, “Mother would have done this or that.” Thus it never occurred to her that her mother would have teased her wholesomely about this desperate effort to make herself brave. The last thing Edie had wanted was for her beloved little daughter to be solemn, and she had loved to make Amy’s rare laughter ring out, to see her still, light brown eyes dance with amusement over some shared joke. She used to say that Amy had the nicest laugh she had ever heard, a fat deep sound that made anyone who heard it begin to laugh out of sheer infection, and all the funnier because it came out of such a serious little face.
But since Edie died no one could make Amy laugh like that. She giggled with her fellow biscuit-eaters at the Anna Bonner and with Mona Beeding but she never—literally never—laughed, and so lonely was she and so uninterested in her were all the people by whom she was surrounded that none of them ever noticed that they had in their midst a child of twelve who never laughed.
It would not be true to say that she was unhappy. Her life was full but sunless. The sun went out when her mother died, and she lived from that moment in the strange light (like that lying over the landscape before rain, magnifying trees and making distant objects seem near) of her mind’s natural country. It was inhabited by heroic figures slightly larger than life-size, and of these the little American boy, whose real nature and background were so completely the opposite of Amy’s own, was one. She thought of him, from time to time, as her own American, her own special and private representative of the United States of America, and as such he was dear to her as The Wolf of Leningrad and the young Nelson; and all the other dwellers in her private world.
One night just before Christmas Eve, Amy was leaning out of the Highbury sitting-room window to get a breath of fresh air, staring at the glittering lights sweeping upwards on the hills of Hampstead and Highgate and the roofs glistening with frost under the small violet moon. Her head was dutifully wrapped up in an old jersey that had belonged to her mother, because this was what her mother would have made her do. The air smelled of coldness and soot. Her hands, tucked in the rough jersey, felt warm against her cheeks. She was dreaming, not thinking about anything, only feeling how exciting was the scene spread before her.
Suddenly the side door of the house slammed and she looked down. Dora Beeding ran down the street with no hat on towards the public telephone box on the corner. Amy could hear the quick sound of her high heels on the pavement as she ran and once she slipped on the frost and only just saved herself from falling. She watched her jamming the pennies into the box, and impatiently waiting with the receiver at her ear, and saw her talking eagerly and nodding, inside the brightly-lit telephone box like someone on the stage. Then she came running back, and Amy heard the door slam.
A few minutes later a taxi came round the corner and stopped outside the house. The driver climbed out and rang the Beeding’s bell, and when the door was opened he went in, leaving a yellow glow of light streaming across the frosty pavement.
Amy leaned a little further out at the sound of voices and saw a group of people come slowly out of the house supporting someone in their midst. Sentences floated up to her.
“All right, are you, Mum?”
“Yes, thank you, luv.”
“Oh, Mum! Your Stuff! Have you got it?”
“Ay, I have, Mona. You needn’t shout at me.”
“Shan’t be long now, mate,” said the taxi driver heartily, putting his arm round Mrs. Beeding to help her into the cab. “Orl right, are yer?”
“Sure you’ve got everything, Mum?” This was Mona again, hovering on the edge of the group and managing to convey to anyone who might be watching that she was just a bundle of nerves and all this was almost too much for her.
“Ay, I have, Mona. What d’yer think I been doin’ with meself this last fortnight? Dozin’ over them cinema papers o’ yours?” roundly retorted Mrs. Beeding from inside the taxi. “Go on in now, Mona, do; you’ll catch a cold and you know I can’t stand you round me with the snivels. Go on in, now. Come on, Dora, do; yer Dad’ll see to all that.”
Amy saw Dora’s shining butter-yellow head vanish into the taxi, and watched while Mr. Beeding gave some last instructions to the driver and got in beside his daughter and wife. Then the taxi drove off and Mona, having watched it out of sight, wandered disconsolately back to the house.
Oh, blow, now she’ll come up here after me, thought Amy, reluctantly drawing in her head and shutting the window. She did not want Mona to know she had been looking at the moon and the lights; Mona always said such feeble things.
Sure enough, about fifteen minutes later, when she was sitting demurely by the stove reading The Daily Express (from which she gleaned a rich supply of information to make backgrounds for her stories), there came a tap at the door and Mona’s voice called:
“Aime, are you there?” (Mona always shortened even unshortenable names; if she had known a Stella she would have called her Stel.)
“Yes,” Amy answered, not encouragingly.
“What’re you doing?”
“Reading.”
“What?”
“The Daily Express.”
“Can I come in?”
“I suppose so, if you want to.”
On this gracious permission the door opened eagerly and Mona came in and perched on the table, swinging her fat legs in black stockings and gym. shoes. She was a plump girl of thirteen in tunic and white blouse, with a stupid pink face and sausage curls of the same wonderful yellow as her sister’s.
“Mum’s been taken bad,” she began at once. “Dora ran out an’ got George on the phone an’ he said he’d come right away. They’ve just gone off to the Royal Northern. Mum an’ Dad an’ Dora. Dora an’ Dad’ll just see her settled in an’ come back, they said.”
Amy listened, sitting back in the armchair with her feet off the ground, looking politely at Mona. She did not say that she had watched Mrs. Beeding’s departure from the window.
“My heart, Aime, I didn’t half feel awful when it started. I was in the scullery just rinsin’ up a few crocks for Mum ’n case she didn’t feel up to it ter-morrow before breakfast an’—my heart! I heard Dora say to her, ‘Mum, joo feel all right?’ she said. Well, I thought I was goin’ to faint. Honest, everything went black. I sort of swayed—you know. My heart! I thought, I know what that means.”
She paused for breath, extending a rather dirty hand decorated by a Woolworth ring upon her fat chest, and sighed.
“How soon will she be back?” asked Amy, wishing Mona would go away, for though she sometimes enjoyed a gossip with her, this was not one of her Mona evenings.
“No-body can say, that’s what’s so awful,” burst out Mona dramatically. “George says Mrs. Culver was three days with her Peggy, on’y of course Peggy was her first an’ this’ll be Mum’s fifth. Course, the more you have the easier it is.” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth and glanced quickly at Amy, but the pale little face was turned towards the stove and Amy was miles away. Mrs. Beeding’s body was in the Royal Northern Hospital, but her will lay just as firmly upon her daughter as though she had been there in the room with the two girls, and Mona had been told more than once, very plainly, that she was not to say Anything Like That to little Amy, who was still a child. Anything Like That that’s got to be said, I’ll say, had promised Mrs. Beeding. She had a good mother, Amy had, and I know she’d have liked me to keep an eye on her and so I will, while that father of her’s keeps on my top flat. You don’t want to go saying Anything to her, Mona; there’s plenty of time.
And Mona, who was afraid of her big calm mother, did as she was told.
Amy, staring into the purring blue flame of the gas, had not heard a word about Mrs. Culver with her Peggy because she was wondering how she could get Mona out of the room. She wanted some bread and treacle, but did not want to waste bread and treacle on Mona, who got more than enough to eat.
At that minute a taxi drew up outside and Mona slithered off the table, ran over to the window, and opened it.
“It’s Dora,” she announced over her shoulder, leaning out into the cold moonlit air. “Coo-eee! Dora, I’m up here with Aime!” she shouted, leaning far out.
Amy, leaning out beside her, saw Dora look up from her conversation with George the taxi-driver and wave them back impatiently.
“How’s Mum, Dora?” shrieked Mona.
Dora shook her head violently at them, still motioning them to go in, said something to George that made him laugh, and ran over the frosted pavement into the house.
“Heart alive, I hope everything’s going on as well as can be expected,” sighed Mona, drawing in from the window and pushing in one of the five Kirbigrips that held the stiff ridges of her hair. “Come on, Aime, let’s go on down an’ hear the news. My heart, I wonder if I’d better sit up all night in case I’m wanted. …”
They were hurrying downstairs, prudent Amy having first stayed to turn out the stove and the light.
“All night, Mona?” she said, skipping down behind Mona’s heavy tread. “Have you ever?”
“Heart alive, yes, when Mum had Arthur, Dora an’ me never took our clothes off for two solid nights. Dora! Dora! ‘You downstairs? How’s Mum? Where’s Dad?”
“Do shut up, Mona, you give anyone the sick,” said Dora sharply as they came down into the kitchen. She was combing her hair in front of the glass. “Mum’s going on quite all right and Dad’s down at the bakehouse. Hullo, Aime. Come down to see the fun? You’d better have supper with us. Gosh!” settling a ripple of hair with a last vigorous pinch of her fingers, “I’m hungry. Where’re those kippers? Burned to a cinder, I ’spose, since Intelligence was looking after ’em. Where’s Maurice?”
“Gone to the pictures. No, they aren’t, so there, see, clever! ’Cos I turned the gas down soon’s you went off,” said Mona triumphantly.
“Rightee-o. Pop the kettle on, will you, Aime, there’s a dear. You stay and have supper with us, will you? You can eat Mum’s kipper, she won’t want it now, poor old Mum, and Dad says he doesn’t want anything either. What a thing it is to be in love! Here, here, what’s all this? What’re you doing, young Artie? You pop off, back to bed, the sooner the quicker.”
Unnoticed by the busy females popping on kettles and taking kippers out of the oven, a small figure in pyjamas had crept in and was now sidling towards the table, gazing steadily at the lemon curd.
He stopped dead and looked up imploringly at his sister.
“Go on, hop it,” said Dora threateningly, towering over him on long thin legs in pink silk.
“Where’s Mum?” he inquired, blinking.
“Gone for a soldier. What’s the matter?” She knelt in front of him. “What woke you up?”
“Young Mona.” Pointing accusingly and causing a shriek of “Oh, I never!”
“I on’y looked in to see’f he was all right,” she added.
“Well, you’ve done it now and no error. Come on, fish-face, you sit next to Aime and she’ll cut you a doorstep, won’t you, Aime? That’s right.”
She lifted her brother’s lean little body on to a chair and gently worked his arms into the jersey he had wrapped round his shoulders.
“Will you have some lemon curd on it, Arthur?” murmured Amy, putting the bread and butter on his plate.
“NOT HALF!” yelled Arthur, bouncing up and down and banging with a spoon. “Not half!”
“Now, now, that’s enough,” said Dora crisply, setting down the brown teapot. “Eat your doorstep and shut up. Here you are, Aime. With my blessing, and may it make you as happy as it has me. Mona, you don’t want vinegar on that, you’ll give yourself more spots than you’ve got already. All right, all right, it’s your face, not mine. Gosh! I’m starved … clemmed, as Mum says.” She turned to Amy, her mouth full of kipper. “I’d only just got in from Spanish when the balloon went up … not meaning Mum, of course!”
Mona shrieked with laughter, and after a struggle in which she looked down her long nose and tried to be shocked, Dora joined in. Amy giggled companionably, though not quite understanding what the joke was, and Arthur banged with his spoon. The big clean room rang with cheerful noise.
It was nice having supper with the Beedings in the kitchen, thought Amy, looking round at the familiar features of the room; the worn brown oilcloth and shiny green walls, the black range stacked with shining silver saucepans, the old gas stove about which Mrs. Beeding was always complaining, and the dresser and draining-board that had been scrubbed until they were bleached white as driftwood. The two things Amy liked best in the kitchen were the red, black and white rag carpet in front of the range, its colours softened by Time and washing, and the red clock ticking loudly on the dresser; they made pretty colours in the clean, rather bare kitchen which was so tidy that, like Mrs. Beeding, it was a bit frightening. But (also like Mrs. Beeding) it was comforting.
The Beedings only used the kitchen for meals, never to sit in, for it became intolerably hot when baking was going on and as some of the stifling warmth lingered there after the bakehouse furnaces were cold, the kitchen was infested with black beetles. The range, an extravagant and temperamental set-piece, was never used except as a saucepan stand and as a Rowton House for the beetles, who occupied it in spite of the ceaseless war of aggression waged on them by Mrs. Beeding. There was not a speck of dirt for them to enjoy, but there was the delicious fuggy warmth and grains of flour (all the Beedings except Mrs. Beeding agreed that the beetles must live off the flour; what else was there for them to live off? But Mrs. Beeding said they lived off their own nastiness) and so far no campaign had interrupted the perpetual ball-and-supper which the beetles enjoyed on the kitchen floor at nights.
To-night everybody hurried to get supper finished and rush upstairs before the first slow, brown, misshapen form was sighted afar in some dim corner near the bakehouse passage.
It is a pity about the beetles; the kitchen’s so nice, thought Amy, drinking her hot sweet tea and gazing slowly round the room over the cup. She felt soothed and sleepy and peaceful, and looked at the others sitting round the table as though they were people in a pleasant dream.
There was Dora, sitting with her elbows on the table and her usually sharp grey eyes gazing thoughtfully over the top of the cup she was nursing between her hands. She was thin and elegant, with the closest shingle and the shortest skirts in Highbury. To-night she wore a green jumper suit, the waist well defined by a red belt over the hips, and a red choker necklace to match, high up on her throat. Under the table Amy knew that her legs stretched for what seemed to the little girl an immensely long way, covered in thinnest pink silk and ending in shoes of fawn leather. Two ends of yellow hair, thinned to a point, swept out on her cheeks. Her nose was too long and her lips too thin, but she had enormous dash and style, and was sharp as a needle. Boys were rather afraid of her, but she had a “steady” whom she bullied and intended to marry, some day. She was ambitious and took her typisting seriously; she was learning Spanish because much of her firm’s business was with Spain and Dora thought you never knew when a spot of Spanish might not come in handy.
Amy liked her, in spite of wishing that Dora would not sometimes try to boss her about and teach her to knit (the only occupation Amy really hated with all her heart). Dora was impatiently kind; more than once she had bestowed a lightning shilling on Amy and Mona and shooed them off to the pictures, and she had, in spite of her needle sharpness and bossy ways, the same comfortingly solid feeling about her that her mother had. It was not the comfort that Amy’s own mother had given people, like a pretty picture or a cheerful tune; it was only the comfort of common-sense and decency, but to a child living Amy’s life, any kind of comfort was worth having.
Then there was Mona … but Amy’s sleepy gaze moved indifferently past Mona, whose face she did not enjoy looking at, and on to young Artie, pop-eyed with sleep, nodding his ginger head over the last of his doorstep. He was a pale little boy of five, spattered with gold freckles, who often had to be hauled out of a fight by his elder brother Maurice. Artie would fight about anything, even to defend the fair fame of Mona when some little boy or girl called her a bad name. He was all over scars of old battles and always rolling down his clothes to show them to shocked females and approving males. Amy thought Artie very brave, but found it difficult to be loving to him, as her mother had told her to be to little children, for love seemed to kind-of roll off him. So she compromised by being extra polite to him. He, unused to such formality and furiously embarrassed by it, never saw her without scowling and silently drawing back his fist as though preparing to punch her in the stomach, but his honour was apparently satisfied by the gesture, for it never developed beyond a gesture, and they got on amiably enough.
While they were finishing off with plum jam thickly spread on slabs of bread, Mr. Beeding came in silently from the bakehouse, shutting the door of the passage behind him. His round face was pale as tallow and black hollows were scooped under his eyes, which were dull and moved slowly as though he were drugged.
He was a Welshman, and once could sing true and sweet as the deep notes of an organ, but that had been as a young man, before his trade had begun to kill him. He now had two men working under him and was making a good living; but he could not enjoy the money he earned, because the only night when fresh bread was not demanded by the residents of the crowded Highbury district was Saturday, and if he went out with Mrs. Beeding and the younger ones to the pictures on Saturday evening he usually fell asleep in the peaceful dark, and disturbed people all round him with exhausted heavy snores. Usually he worked eleven hours a night, sometimes longer, in the stifling brick bakehouse with its inner lining of steel, stripped to the waist and wearing only a thin singlet, enduring the ravening thirst which he and his men must not quench with water because this might cause the dreaded “baker’s disease.” A man suffering from those sores on the skin, brought on by the action of water on chemicals used in the flour, is unemployable as a leper. And Mr. Beeding was very fond of a drink; when he was not flung out asleep, motionless as a corpse on the snowy double bed in his wife’s room, he was over in The Chickens having one with his neighbour Mr. Flower or with some others of the boys. He had a nasty little cough, which the drink helped to soothe, and it also helped him to put up with his hernia. Mr. Beeding endured the hernia, the cough, the thirst and the stifling hours spent in the bakehouse in order that the housewives of Highbury might have nice fresh bread in the morning. His wife never said a word about his work or his cough or what he spent at The Chickens, and none of the children mentioned it either. That was their life, and their father’s; and all bakers had the same sort of life, anyway.
Mr. Beeding smiled faintly but kindly at Amy and sat down at the head of the table.
“Tea, Dad?” asked Dora.
He nodded, and she gave him a cup which he drank thirstily.
“Yer won’t forget the jug o’ tea fer the men, will yer, Dora?”
“No, Dad. It’s done,” jerking her head at a big blue enamel can in a corner.
He nodded. “That’s a good girl. Thank yer. Yer mother was just going ter see ter it when she came over bad.”
They ate in silence for a little while, only interrupted by a shriek from Mona who fancied she sighted a beetle under the range. There was the usual slight depression caused by the presence of Mr. Beeding, looking like a corpse with his yellow-white face and drugged silence, and no one found much to say. Amy began to feel that she would be happier upstairs with The Wolf of Leningrad.
At last Mr. Beeding got up, and stood for a moment swaying and muttering, “For what we have received may God make us truly thankful for Jesus Christ’s sake Amen,” over the untidy remains of supper. Then he picked up the jug of cold tea (the only liquid the men were allowed to touch while at work) and went back to the bakehouse.
When they were all filing upstairs to the Lounge, having stacked the washing-up, Amy slipped past Dora as the latter slowly mounted with Artie in her arms, muttering, “Good night, Dora. Thanks ever so for having me to supper,” and ran up the dark stairs to her own kingdom.
“Aime!” came a faint anguished howl from below. “Aren’t you coming to play Fox and Geese? Aime!”
“Oh, let the kid alone, can’t you? You know what she is,” came Dora’s voice sharply; then she heard the Lounge door shut.
All night there were unusual sounds in the house, such as might be caused by people making themselves tea because they had convinced themselves they were unable to sleep for gnawing anxiety and also wanted something to tell their schoolfellows about the next day; once Amy awoke when the front door slammed heavily in the small hours.
And the next morning, while she was cooking the bacon for breakfast and Tim was shaving and swearing over the scullery sink, Mona rushed up to announce hysterically that Mrs. Beeding had produced a girl weighing seven pounds eight ounces, a perfect little angel with red hair. Born at half-past three that morning.
“Dolores,” said Mona confidently. “That’s what I’ve got a feeling Mum’ll call that baby. After Dolores Costello. You see.”
The child, however, was christened Marie Noreen and never called anything by all the Beedings but “Baby”.