It was after breakfast, and I went into the dining-room to clear away the remains of Father’s kippers. The sun came slanting in through the window and touched the mantelpiece, where the monkey’s skull used to lie. I placed a damp log on the recently lighted fire. A soft hissing sound came and a frantic woodlouse rushed about the smoking bark. I rescued it with a teaspoon, although I had no fondness for woodlice. It was a pity to let it burn – and there it was, squirming on the damp teaspoon, grey and rather horrible. With one hand I pushed up the window and with the other placed it on the sill, where it crawled about leaving a small wet trail of tea among the winged sycamore-seeds that had lodged there. The air was sharp and wintry, and the street very still. The only people to be seen were a few pale women with black string bags. Under the gate a dried leaf rustled very gently. I thought, ‘It’s minutes like this that seem to last so long.’
The door-handle rattled and Father came into the room behind me. I hurried to the table and started collecting the breakfast remains. He stood over me, glowering. ‘If you want the window open, why the hell don’t you let the fire out?’ I ran to close the window, and, while my back was turned, he almost shouted, ‘You’re leaving here – going to stay with Peebles’s mother. It was arranged last night. He may come round and talk to you about it some time today.’
I’d turned round and was staring at him in bewilderment. ‘I’m off!’ he bellowed at me, and slammed the door. A few minutes later I saw him leave the house with his case in his hand and his bowler hat pushed far back on his head. The iron gate clanked and he’d gone; but, even if he’d remained, I wouldn’t have dared to ask why I was being sent away like this.
The morning went on and Henry Peebles didn’t come. I began to think that perhaps it wasn’t true, that I wasn’t going away at all. At first I’d been afraid of leaving home and going to a strange woman’s house, but now I began to realise that nothing could be worse than home. If Mrs Peebles was like her son, at least she would be kind. I wondered where Mrs Peebles lived, and then I remembered the address Blinkers had given me: it was Hampshire and an island. It would have been wonderful if it had been Wales and I could have seen the farm where my mother used to live. In my mind I had a picture of my mother’s part of Wales. It was always the spring and very, very green, with the sun sparkling on waterfalls and wet slate roofs; there were impossibly high mountains, and wild goats, with enormous horns, were dotted about. I tried to imagine Mrs Peebles’s island; but I could only think of desert islands with palm trees, and Blinkers didn’t look as if he came from anywhere like that.
In the afternoon I made a currant cake, but my mind was on other things, and the currants all went to the bottom and the cake stuck in the tin and broke as I was getting it out. As I stood looking down at this wreck of a cake, Henry Peebles arrived. I let him in and he said, ‘What a heavenly smell – just like Christmas cake!’ and went straight to the kitchen. Even while I’d been to the front door, worse things had happened to the wretched cake, and now it had fallen in half.
‘What on earth can I do with a cake like that?’ I asked, bitterly.
Blinkers replied, ‘There is only one thing to do with it: eat it while it’s hot.’
So I made some tea and we ate broken cake with it. All the time I was waiting for him to say something about this visit to his mother’s, but he didn’t for ages, not until we’d almost eaten the whole cake and I’d begun to wish I hadn’t. Then he said I was to be a companion to his mother. She had some people living on the ground floor of her house, but, although they did the work, they were no company for her. She was a little strange in her ways, it seemed, very remote and sometimes depressed; but I was to be an interest for her, and we were to look after each other, and it was going to be a great success. Blinkers beamed on me with his kind, blinking eyes, and I said I hoped his mother would like me. ‘Of course she will,’ he exclaimed. ‘She’ll love you.’ And he gently stroked my bare arm and I knew he still wanted me to be Alice Peebles.
Then Father came home and there was nothing for his tea except the remains of broken cake, cold and heavy now.
It was all arranged and I was to leave home in less than a week. Father became almost pleasant to me now I was going: it was such a relief to his mind. I think that I must have reminded him of Mother, and also that he couldn’t bear feeling that he was responsible for one he disliked and despised. Often I’d thought I must be despicable and low or he wouldn’t feel like this about me. At other times some of his fierceness seemed to rise in me and I’d long to shout at him, ‘It’s you that are despicable! I’d be all right if I were away from here. Blast and damn you!’ But, of course, I never dared. I should think it’s a dreadful sin to swear at your father, though no worse than for a father to swear at his daughter. Anyway, now he didn’t swear at me, or turn away when he had to speak to me. He was abrupt and impatient, but quite thoughtful and reasonable, and he sometimes spoke to me at mealtimes. Once, when we were eating liver, he suddenly said, ‘You’ll find it cold in the country and there will be warm clothes to be bought – a coat… a dress… I don’t know, but get Mrs Churchill to go through your things and make a list. No black, mind. I won’t pay for mourning clothes.’
Mrs Churchill was delighted I was going. In a way it rather annoyed me – everyone glad I was going – but I knew Mrs Churchill thought it was for my own good. She kept saying, ‘It’s all that nice Mr Peebles’s doing. I could kiss him, that I could. He’s really nice, considering he’s a man.’ The thought of Blinkers’s surprise if suddenly embraced by Mrs Churchill made me laugh and wish she would carry out her threat. Every time he came to the front door, she beamed on him and kept giving him little pats as he walked down the hall. Even Father seemed to like him. I did, too: but sometimes he made me feel suffocated, perhaps because I wasn’t used to kindness. There would be his gentle eyes looking at me in a swamping way, and I’d keep thinking, ‘I must be grateful’; there we would be sitting on the stiff dining-room chairs, Blinkers being kind and me grateful.
He told me he was buying a partnership with a vet the other side of the river, in a place called Earl’s Court. There weren’t any earls there, but there were many old ladies with small dogs and large cats that needed constant attention. He said he was going to grow very rich and retire to the country, and in the meantime, he would take off his hat to every Pekinese he met.
Father gave money to Mrs Churchill to buy me new clothes, but she refused to ‘cross the water’ and we had to shop in Brixton. All the same, I did manage to get a wonderful coat, dark green with braid, and cut on rather military lines. It had a sort of pill-box hat to match, and cost so much we had only enough money left for a green skirt and two flannel morning blouses and a real silk one for afternoons. There was no money for underclothes at all, so I’d just have to manage with the old things I already possessed. ‘We mustn’t let old Moustaches know you’re going all ragged underneath or he’ll make us return that fine coat. Silly old fool! A nice coat’s more important to a girl than woollen knickers, any day.’
Mrs Peebles didn’t write to me. I would have liked a welcoming letter, but her son said she was expecting me and the room he had had as a boy had been prepared for me – ‘although I’d have liked it better if she’d given you one looking over the creek,’ he added. I wasn’t sure what a creek was, so I didn’t particularly care if I saw one from my window or not. I cared much more that Mrs Peebles should like me.
My last day at home the vivisectionist’s man came, with his pointed, yellow shoes, and it rained from heavy, grey, mushroomy clouds. On a bench in the hall damp people with damp animals sat waiting to see Father. The parrot shivered on his perch. He had never been the same since he had lived in the lavatory, and now he had started pulling out his own feathers and bald patches had come, revealing pale and scaly skin.
My clothes were packed in a black trunk that had belonged to my mother. Each time I went into my bedroom, there it was, with labels tied on the handles, and I’d sit on my bed looking at it, wondering what kind of a home we’d be in tomorrow, my trunk and I. Downstairs Mrs Churchill mopped muddy footmarks from the hall for the third time, and her bulldog face looked closed and cross under her cloth cap; then she put on her macintosh, which was greasy round the neck, and departed.
It was little Hank’s turn to leave next. He came clumping out of the animals’ room, his heavy face white and tired. I suddenly felt sorry for the exhausted child, so poor and underfed, and called him into the kitchen. He came in slowly, dragging his feet, half expecting to be scolded for some work left undone, and I cut a large slice of fruit cake and handed it to him, expecting him to grab it. He took it very slowly and looked at it intently. Surprised, I asked him why he didn’t eat it, and he mumbled, ‘’Cos I want to remember what it looked like when it’d gone.’ Then he stood by the kitchen door eating his cake with very small bites. When it was finished, he picked up a few fallen currants from the floor and ate them one by one, then crept from the room without saying a word and left the house.
When I went to clear away Father’s tea, he was sitting with his square hands on the table, either side of his plate, all smeared now with congealed food. I put the dirty china on a tray. I hardly liked to touch the plate between his dreadful hands; even his fingers had black hairs on them. To my relief, he abruptly left the table and sat in the leather chair. I could feel he was looking at me and my hands shook as I tried to clear away. He suddenly shouted, ‘Hurry up, girl; for Christ’s sake, stop dithering! I want to speak to you.’ Somehow I managed to take the things into the kitchen, but when I returned, in my nervousness I knocked the door and started the dogs across the hall barking. I went into the room, and there was Father still looking at me. I stood by the door holding the handle so that I could escape quickly if necessary. He took a cachou from the silver box on his watch-chain and, as he crunched it, he still went on looking at me, and the sweet smell, which I connected with my father, made me even more afraid, although to other people it must seem quite harmless. Suddenly he began to talk, and it was as if he’d rehearsed it.
‘There are things that should be said between us and I’m saying them now. The main thing is that you’re leaving this house tomorrow. I hope I shall never see you again. This young man Peebles seems to have taken to you – and, by God! he can keep you. You’ve never been a child of mine. Did you know you couldn’t walk until you were two? It used to make me sick to see you clapping about on your bottom instead of walking like a decent child. Look at you now, sickly and pale, like a washed-out clout, and no flesh on you at all. But, although you’re a miserable thing and no child of mine, have I ever stinted you? Tell me that!’
‘No, Father,’ I whispered.
He gave me a withering glance, and went on, ‘Did you know I married your mother for a miserable hundred pounds? If I’d waited a year, even less than a year, I’d have had ten times that amount of money, but your mother trapped me with her miserable hundred. I might have forgiven her if she had produced a son, but she wasn’t even capable of that. Her brothers used to call her “the singing mouse”, among other silly pet-names; but I soon made her sing out of the wrong side of her mouth, and she deserved it. But I never stinted her.’
His voice fell and his eyes weren’t looking at me any more. He was talking to someone else. ‘I never stinted you, although you were less to me than a housekeeper. I could have turned you out for your deceit and sickly ways, but I let you stay here as Mrs Rowlands, although I loathed the sight of you and your finicky daughter. Now you are dead, and it’s better for us both. You were rotting away with a filthy disease; you are better dead, I tell you. I never stinted you; it was you that stinted yourself. I gave you a fine coffin. What more do you want? Is it your paper-white daughter…’
My father did not notice when I left the room.