It wasn’t only being alone; it was the way the house smelt dead.
She sat under a big sweet-chestnut tree, in the heart of the woodland, watching Mr. Thompson with grave brown eyes. Mr. Thompson was frying mushrooms over a hazel fire in an old half-circular billy-can. The peculiar aroma of hazel smoke and the tang of mushrooms was so strong on the October evening air that every now and then she licked her lips like someone in a hungry dream.
‘Never had wild mushrooms before,’ she said. ‘Never knew you could get them wild.’
‘No?’ Mr. Thompson said. He kept turning the mushrooms over with the point of an old bone-handled shut knife. ‘And how old did you say you was?’
‘Twelve.’
‘Don’t they tell you nothing at school?’
‘Not about mushrooms.’
‘The sort you git in shops eat like leather,’ Mr. Thompson said. He dropped another lump of butter into the mushrooms. The butter sizzled and he lifted the billy-can a few inches off the fire. ‘Don’t taste of nothing at all.’
‘I only ever had them out of tins.’
‘Tins, eh?’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘They git ’em up in tins now, do they?’
Mr. Thompson took the billy-can completely off the fire and peered down at the mushrooms. The girl sat holding an egg in each hand. Something about the neutral blankness of the eggs seemed to be reflected in her eyes and she hardly stirred as Mr. Thompson took the eggs away from her and broke them one by one into a battered coffee tin.
Mr. Thompson beat the eggs with his knife. His face was rough and greyish from a two-day growth of beard. The battered brown hat that was pushed to the back of his head made his eyes appear to be protuberant, like a pair of big blue marbles, but at the same time docile, harmless and contented.
‘It’s quiet in the wood tonight,’ she said. ‘You don’t even hear the birds.’
‘No, the birds are settling down. I heard an old pheasant a little while back though.’
‘Pheasant? Are they wild too?’
‘Sort of,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Half an’ half, this time o’ year. Half-wild, half-tame. Till they git shot at a bit.’
‘Tame? You mean you could keep one in a cage? Like a budgie?’
‘No,’ Mr. Thompson said. He laughed. ‘They ain’t them sort o’ birds.’
She sat quiet, her eyes roving to and fro suddenly, half-wild, half-tame themselves. The birds, like the mushrooms, were another part of her many revelations. Their songs woke her in the early mornings, before the mists cleared, when she sometimes lay alone for a long time under Mr. Thompson’s raincoat, staring up at the great roof of branches, wondering if Mr. Thompson had gone away and left her. This was the time of day when she remembered most clearly the way the house smelt: that dead smell, the smell of night before day washed it away.
But before very long Mr. Thompson was always back, bringing mushrooms, blackberries, wood-nuts, perhaps a bit of watercress, clean water for her to wash in and fresh branches for the fire. Once he brought a handful of wheat-ears and the sound of them being rubbed between the leathery palms of his hands was the sound that woke her.
‘Mum works at the food factory,’ she said. ‘I told you that though, didn’t I? She brings stuff home. I think she wins it—you know. That’s how I know about the mushrooms that one time.’
‘Wins it?’
‘Bones it. You know.’
‘Works too, does she? All day?’
‘All day. She’d work all night too if they’d let her. Wants to get the fridge paid off. The telly took two years. She wants a spin dryer next. She’s gone before eight in the morning and gets back about ten at night. Does a washing-up job at a hotel on the way back. That’s what makes her bad tempered.’
That too was why the house smelt dead. You didn’t really live in it and it just smelt dead. It was a hole you crawled back to after work was over. Her father was away at half-past six in the morning and sometimes in the winter she didn’t see him at all. With overtime he was knocking up big money. They were both knocking it up. Really big. All the time.
Mr. Thompson, giving the beaten eggs a screw of salt, poured them into the billy-can with the mushrooms and started to scramble them with his knife, holding the can at the very edge of the fire.
‘Hand us that spoon, will you?’ he said. ‘And you cut some bread with my knife. We’ll be ready in a minute now.’
She started to cut slices of bread from a loaf. The aroma of eggs scrambled in with mushrooms rose more richly than ever through the woodland air. Everything Mr. Thompson cooked was good. Everything that had happened with Mr. Thompson was good. Everything since she had first met him on her way home from school five days ago had been good. It was all a revelation.
‘You can have the spoon back now. I’ll eat mine with me knife.’
The only utensils Mr. Thompson seemed to possess were the spoon, the knife, the billy-can, the coffee tin, a cup, an old blue plate and a kettle. Now he put half the scrambled eggs and mushrooms on the plate and the kettle on the fire.
‘Eat up,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘It gits cold quick out here.’
She started shovelling eggs and mushrooms into her mouth with the spoon, cramming slices of bread in after them like wads of stuffing. Her own eyes were protuberant now: big with unconscious, happy greed. Small points of reflected firelight gave them excitement too, so that she might have been sitting there watching some complex sort of drama being played out on a screen.
While she was cramming in the food Mr. Thompson paused in his eating to wash out the old coffee tin with boiling water. Then he dropped a handful of tea and sugar and half a tin of condensed milk into the kettle and stirred it round several times with a hazel stick, finally letting it all boil up.
Even the smell of tea excited her. Like everything else it was good too. It was good and living. Lost and rapturous, she sat there eating madly, waiting for her cup to come.
‘Been holding your cup out a good minute,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Don’t you want it? Been thinking of something?’
She didn’t say anything; she didn’t tell Mr. Thompson how, for quite five minutes, she had been thinking again of the dead smell of home and how it seemed to strangle her: the living-room with the telly, the fridge, the radio, the cooker and the washing machine all crammed in together, the table with uncleared breakfast remains still on it when she got back from school, the grey eye of the television set holding her a mute captive there in the dead half-darkness while she waited for someone to come home.
She merely said instead: ‘I was thinking how you’re always so friendly.’
‘Got nothing to be unfriendly about. Got nobody to quarrel with.’
She gulped fast at her cup of tea, staring at him with big grave eyes over the top of it. She was right about Mr. Thompson: he was always so quiet and friendly—like the day she first ran into him, carrying his bundle of utensils, his raincoat and two loaves of bread. It was because he accidentally dropped one of the loaves and she picked it up for him that they got talking and finally walked on together. That was the first time she was struck by the large, friendly eyes.
She had never really been aware of how far they walked that first afternoon; perhaps it wasn’t all that far. But because Mr. Thompson walked slowly, unprepossessed by time or distance, it seemed a long way. In an hour they were in the woods and Mr. Thompson was saying:
‘You’d better git back now, hadn’t you?’
She remembered that moment very well. She knew for an awful certainty that she wasn’t going back. She remembered a shadow of sickness falling on her as her thoughts went back to the living-room and in a moment the stranglehold of it was round her neck.
She begged Mr. Thompson to let her stay a little longer and he said:
‘Well, I’m going to boil myself a drop o’ tea. You better have a cup before you go.’
After that, as she did now, she sat watching him over the top of the tea cup. The shadows of late afternoon fell on his face, breaking it up into a benign and trembling pattern, and she knew for the first time that she would never be afraid of Mr. Thompson. There was something about that face that gave you the same warm feeling of comfort and security as when you put a glove on your hand.
Her father’s face was never remotely like that. He worked a lathe in a machine shop and when he got home at night it was as if you could feel the lathe still whirling madly in the living-room. You could feel a wild compressor still driving through his blood: the telly’s got to be paid for, the fridge has got to be paid for, it’s all got to be paid for—God, let me get out and have a drink somewhere.
‘You’ve only just got home,’ she said to him once. ‘You don’t have to go out again yet, do you?’
‘Stop jawing. I’ll mark you if you don’t stop jawing. You got the telly to sit with, ain’t you? Sit and watch the telly. I slave enough to get the telly, don’t I?’
‘Go and get yourself an ice-cream,’ her mother said. ‘Put that in your mouth. I’m tired.’
After that first cup of tea with Mr. Thompson she was aware of feeling tired too: not exhaustively tired but rather as if she had been sitting for a long time in a too-warm room. The strong fresh air in the woods seemed to drug her and presently her eyes started to drift drowsily to and fro. When she woke she was lying under Mr. Thompson’s raincoat and Mr. Thompson was sitting gazing at the fire.
He was gazing at the fire now, rubbing his two-day old beard with thumb and forefinger. He reckoned it was time to git himself a shave, she heard him say.
This pleased her; the grave brown eyes started lighting up. She would be able to hold up the mirror for Mr. Thompson. It was only a cracked pocket mirror with some of the quick-silver worn off the back, but it pleased her to hold it for Mr. Thompson.
‘Had enough tea?’ he said. ‘I’ll have to take the kettle down to the brook and fill it if I’m going to git a shave.’
‘I could drink another cup.’
He poured the rest of the tea out for her and she said:
‘There was something I was going to ask you.’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t you ever go back home nowhere?’
‘Puzzle me to,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘I —’
‘You mean you haven’t got a house?’
‘Had one once,’ he said. ‘A doodle-bug fell on it. My mother was in it. There was just a big pile of rubble when I got home.’
‘What did you do after that?’
‘Started walking.’
‘Walking where?’
‘Up and down the country.’
‘Nowhere particular.’
Sipping her tea, she asked him then if he never worked and Mr. Thompson said no, he never did. His mother had had a bit of money tucked away in the bank. It was his now and it did him for most things.
‘Fancy never working,’ she said. The images of her parents danced frantically on the stage of her mind, like grotesque and desperate puppets on a treadmill.
‘As long as nobody don’t make me,’ Mr. Thompson said, ‘I don’t see no reason to.’
He laughed. He didn’t often laugh and when he did so it was with a dry sort of cough, partly a chuckle. No, he didn’t work and, funny thing, he didn’t read no newspapers either. So that was another thing that never bothered him much: all that business about what was going on.
‘I don’t bother people either,’ he said, ‘and most of the time people don’t bother me.’
‘Was that why you let me come along with you?’
‘People quite often come along with me,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Walk a mile or two with me and then go back. Company, I suppose.’
‘You like company? You ever get lonely?’
‘I like company sometimes.’
‘I don’t think I’d ever be lonely with you. I like it with you.’
‘Perhaps you would, after a time. You can very often be lonelier with people than without them, I say.’
Throughout this conversation she was again aware of feeling a growing sense of security and comfort about her, like the drawing on of a glove, and she was almost disappointed when Mr. Thompson at last got to his feet, picked up the kettle again and said he was off to the brook to fetch water.
‘I’ll pack things up a bit,’ she said. ‘I’ll wash up when you get back. Will you bring some watercress?’
‘Might do,’ Mr. Thompson said, ‘if I see any.’
Mr. Thompson struck off through the undergrowth of hazels. In a few open spaces thick bracken, turning fox brown already, grew higher than a man. A jay, like blue fire, flew suddenly over one of these spaces with a throaty screech, filling the wood with echoes that seemed to go zithering away far into the deep mass of branches.
Something about these noises disturbed Mr. Thompson; he stopped and stared about him. The presence of the girl had never really worried him very much; he had never laid a finger on her; she was just another companion on the way. She’d turn back all right when she wanted to—she’d get homesick or bored, or something else would make her go.
He waited, listening, but within half a minute the wood was deadly quiet again. The girl was right: there was hardly a bird to make a sound. She’d been quick, he thought, to sense the absence of the birds. There was a funny feeling about a wood when the birds weren’t there.
The big wood ended in a line of yews and white-beam, at the bottom of a slope. A brook, six or eight feet wide, ran round its boundaries in a deep curve. There were a few deep pools in it and the night before last Mr. Thompson had had four fair-sized perch out of it and he and the girl had had them fried for supper. She had never tasted anything in all her life like that, she said. He remembered how she had sat sucking the perch bones as if every single one was a precious needle of sugar. That was the best fish she ever tasted, she said. You didn’t get fish like that out of a fried fish shop. Up to then that was the only kind she’d ever had.
Stooping to fill the kettle from the brook Mr. Thompson was aware of a sudden uneasiness again. Thin white saucers of mist were forming and floating across the meadows beyond the wood and out of them Mr. Thompson could suddenly have sworn he heard another cry, followed by another, from a jay.
He was walking back up the slope before it came to him that what he had heard was the whining of a dog. He went back a few yards and stared across the meadows, listening. The sound of whining, this time of more than one dog, reached him again. It was quite a long way off yet and it had that eerie sound that hounds make when they’re hungry.
Uneasy for the first time, he walked back through the wood to the girl. He found she had been busy collecting bracken and laying a pile of it out for herself as part of a fresh bed. She had made up the fire too and it was ready for the kettle.
He put the kettle on to boil. She was pleased to see him back, she said. She could wash up now and help him when he shaved.
Mr. Thompson rubbed his beard with the ball of his thumb and didn’t say anything.
‘You know what you said you might get down at the brook,’ she said. ‘Remember? Watercress.’
Yes, Mr. Thompson remembered the watercress. Didn’t see any, though, he said.
‘Perhaps we’ll get some tomorrow.’
It was half in Mr. Thompson’s mind to say that there wouldn’t be any tomorrow, but he said nothing and merely pushed the kettle farther into the fire. He didn’t like the water too hot for shaving and a few moments later he washed out the coffee tin, filled it with warm water and then started to lather his face.
‘Give me the mirror and I’ll hold it for you,’ she said. ‘I like doing that.’
He seemed, she thought, to take an extra long time to lather his face. While she waited for him she took off her shoes and sat gravely watching him. He seemed preoccupied and thoughtful and now and then he lifted his head sharply, listening. While he was slowly lathering himself she washed up the cup, billy-can, knife and plate. The lingering taste of mushrooms still clung to her mouth and now and then she licked her lips slowly with her tongue.
It was about six o’clock when Mr. Thompson began to shave. She squatted in front of him, brown eyes grave again, and held the mirror so that he could see. It would be dark in less than an hour from now and when it was dark Mr. Thompson would make up the fire. It was the moment of the day she longed most deeply for. She didn’t dread the darkness—not like she did at home. It was all so silent and shut away. That dead smell of the house wasn’t there and the big circle of outer darkness framed the central core of crimson firelight, across which Mr. Thompson would presently gaze at her and say ‘You’d better git your sleep now.’ The birds, except perhaps for the last croak of a roosting pheasant, would all be silent by that time and presently she would lie down on one side of the fire to go to sleep, with Mr. Thompson dozing on the other.
In the morning the autumn singing of the birds would wake her and she would experience once again the extraordinary sense of not belonging to anyone or anywhere, as Mr. Thompson did, and of being free.
Suddenly Mr. Thompson gave a sharp impatient exclamation. She saw that he had nicked the upper part of one cheek with his safety-razor, drawing blood. In a sharp turn of his head, as if attracted again by a sudden far-off sound, he had forgotten to take the razor away. The half-shaven face, white here and there with lather, stained for an inch or two with blood, looked grotesquely ill-at-ease. She hadn’t seen it look like that before.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hold the mirror straight, did I?’
‘Wasn’t that,’ Mr. Thompson said.
Mr. Thompson, drawing the razor hastily across his face, was sure beyond doubt that he could hear the cry of dogs again.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said.
‘Hold the glass straight,’ he said and in his voice she detected the first and only sign of sharpness. ‘I don’t want to cut myself again.’
The cry of dogs was nearer now; Mr. Thompson judged them to be somewhere out in the meadow. He suddenly jumped to his feet and rapidly wiped the remaining lather from his face with a rag of towelling.
‘You got to go,’ he said.
Too astonished to speak for a moment, she saw him abruptly pour the rest of the kettle of water on the fire. The explosive impact of it tore out of her, painfully, a single amazed word:
‘Go?’
‘You got to go home,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Now. Quick. You got to do what I say.’
‘I’m never going back there —’
‘You got to go now,’ he said. ‘Why’d you take your shoes off? Put ’em on. Quick.’
He raised his hand. It was as if her father were threatening yet again to mark her and she was quick to duck. But Mr. Thompson’s hand was raised simply to perform an extraordinary act—that of pushing his battered hat firmly down, for the first time, on the front of his head. It was exactly as if he wanted to hide underneath it and the shadow of the brim seemed almost to suffocate his face.
‘Got your shoes on?’
She was struggling with the laces of her shoes. When they were tied she looked up at Mr. Thompson with bruised and frightened eyes.
‘What are you sending me away for, Mr. Thompson? I never want to go back there —’
‘You got to go,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘Git hold of my hand. I’ll take you to the end of the wood and then you git home. Quick.’
‘I won’t go there.’
‘Listen to that,’ Mr. Thompson said. He was beginning to be half-frightened himself now; he could distinctly hear the dogs hungrily whining somewhere down by the stream. ‘You know what that is? Dogs—they’re looking for you.’
He started to run with her towards the upper edge of wood. It took them ten minutes to break clear to the boundary and already it was half dark beyond the trees.
‘You go down here until you git to the railway bridge—’
‘I’m not going. I’ll never find my way—’
‘Under the railway bridge,’ Mr. Thompson said, ‘and then after about a mile there’s a brick works. After that you turn right and you go straight for the town.’
She stood absolutely still, looking up at his face. She had nothing at all to say. The grave brown eyes were darkened completely, all light beaten out of them.
‘You git back where you belong,’ Mr. Thompson said. ‘You be a good girl now. They’ll be waiting for you.’
Soon she was running. She was running under the shadow of the railway arch, past the chimney spire of the brick works and into the town. She was running past the lights of grinning windows, into the night, back where she belonged, to where the house was dead.