LOVEJOY pelted down towards the river, then turned and dodged up Garden Row, past the iron gates of the canal dock and the blocks of the council flats with their lawns and concrete paths, down another side road until she found herself in just such another street as Catford Street, wide and shabby with drab, porticoed houses; she was out of breath but safe.
Older and more wary than Sparkey, she went into one of the porticoes, where no boy or girl could come up behind her, tweak her hair or jerk her elbow, and snatch as she had snatched. She had no idea what she had taken; she was simply a little marauder.
It would have surprised Lovejoy’s mother, Mrs. Mason, to be told that Lovejoy never had any pocket money; Mrs. Mason was always going to give her some but, somehow, it was always spent. “I meant you to have an ice cream,” she would say to Lovejoy in the teashop or café, “but look, I’ve only got sixpence for a coffee. Never mind. You can have the biscuit.” Mrs. Mason paid Mrs. Combie now, to provide Lovejoy with the necessities of life, but she did not pay enough to provide anything else.
Now and again Lovejoy had a penny for washing up or running errands, but a penny did not go far. “I can’t go without everything, forever,” said Lovejoy.
“I don’t know how she managed,” Olivia was to say when she and Angela were told everything.
“Managed by stealing,” said Angela.
Lovejoy did not steal big things, nor money; she knew that to take money was wicked; nobody had told her that ice creams and comics were money, and she was adept at taking a parcel out of a perambulator while she pretended to rock it, at making a small child look the other way and whipping a cornet out of its hand, at walking along by a shop counter, gazing innocently all the time at the assistant, and coming out with some sweets or a bundle of ribbon or a pencil-sharpener in her hand.
Now she looked at the packet, and her look changed to disgust. “Flowers. Seeds,” she said and she almost threw the packet down the area. Then she saw there was printing on it and she began to read.
Lovejoy, to her continual disgrace, could hardly read. “She has changed schools too often and missed too much,” the inspector had told Mrs. Combie severely. That was true. When Lovejoy and her mother first began to come to Catford Street between their bookings, Lovejoy had appeared and disappeared so often in school that the teacher asked her, “Are you a canal child?” Canal children sometimes came to school if their fathers’ barge had to go into the dock for repairs. Lovejoy had said nothing but she had been mortally offended. “Do I look like a canal child?” she might have said.
“You think too much about how people look and much too much about clothes,” said Mrs. Combie. Lovejoy did more than think about them; she had been trained in them as in a religion. “One must look smart”—that was her mother’s creed, and Lovejoy was her mother’s disciple. She had been the best dressed child in Catford Street—“On top,” Mrs. Combie said. “Her vests and pants were in tatters from the beginning”—but vests and pants did not show, and Lovejoy never wasted a thought on them. She had a grey flannel suit with a pleated skirt for school, white blouses, and a red beret; for best she had a black velvet dress, a black and white dog-toothed checked coat, and a black velvet tam-o’-shanter with a long black tassel. Lovejoy’s clothes were her stock in trade, her tools, and she took great care of them. When she came in from school or a walk or shopping, she would slip into her old pinafore dress and a plaid coat that she had worn so long that it was like her skin, and carefully put her good clothes away, hanging them up on her small-size hangers, sponging off marks with a bit of rag, and pressing the pleats and lapels with Mrs. Combie’s iron; she washed her own blouses and white socks and gloves, and hung them in the window to dry; a clothes-hanger fitted with pegs was her most cherished possession, and she carefully hoarded the packet of soap flakes, the cleaning rags, and the pot of shoe cream for her red shoes that Mrs. Combie gave her. “She’s not a child, she’s an old woman,” said Mrs. Combie’s sister, Cassie. Cassie was a slattern, and Lovejoy’s fastidiousness enraged her. “I suppose you think you’re pretty?” she said.
“No,” said Lovejoy certainly. She knew perfectly well she was not pretty; she had studied herself too often in the mirror to have any doubts about that; she had a certain fineness and lightness, dear little bones, thought Lovejoy, but her slant eyes and flat nose were not pretty; all the same, she did not like Cassie any the better for saying it and she adopted a way of looking Cassie up and down, taking in the trodden-down heels of Cassie’s shoes, the ladders in her stockings, the place where the hem of her cheap tomato-coloured dress had come undone; her eyes went over Cassie’s hair, golden but unwashed and bundled in a net, and the spots on her chin. Cassie ate too many sweets and smoked too much. She had stains on her fingers and teeth. Lovejoy saw the stains.
“What are you looking at?” Cassie would demand.
“Nothing,” Lovejoy would say and would hum a little tune.
Lately clothes had been very difficult. “Too tight for you under the arms, isn’t it?” asked Cassie spitefully, looking at the little grey suit.
“It isn’t,” said Lovejoy, but it was; and the scarlet shoes were too small now, as were her school shoes; they hurt and raised blisters; Lovejoy had five even blisters on the toes of each foot, and the blisters were turning into corns. She had had to tell Mrs. Combie about the school shoes, and Mrs. Combie bought her a pair of plimsolls. “Plimsolls,” said Lovejoy in shame, and she set her teeth and bore the red shoes if ever she went out of the Street. “When my mother comes she’ll buy me some new ones,” she said, but it did not sound very certain.
“Where is your mum?” Tip was to ask.
Like all the children, Lovejoy was often subjected to the inquisition of the Street, pecking questions from sharp little beaks.
“Where d’ya live?”
“Two hundred and three Catford Street.”
“That’s the rest’raunt. No one lives there.”
“Mrs. Combie does,” said Lovejoy.
“Is Mrs. Combie your mum?”
“No, she’s not,” said Lovejoy indignantly.
“Where is your mum?”
“She’s away.”
And then one of the children would cry, “Don’t believe you’ve got a mum.”
“I have”—but Lovejoy said it too fiercely, and they would know and cry, “There’s something fishy about her mum.”
“What is this Mrs. Mason, if I may ask?” said Cassie.
“She’s a coloratura,” said Mrs. Combie in the elegant, even voice which showed she did not know in the least what she meant. “A coloratura,” said Mrs. Combie firmly. “Her stage name is Bertha Serita.”
Cassie made a noise in her nose; it was between a hiss and a snort.
“Is there anything wrong in being a singer?” asked Mrs. Combie.
“If she is a singer,” said Cassie.
“She’s in the Blue Moons,” said Mrs. Combie. “They’re quite well known. You often see their picture in the paper. Look.” And she went to the dresser and took out a cutting from a Bournemouth paper.
“Pierrots!” said Cassie, looking. “Pierrots on the beach!”
“The Blue Moons are on the pier too,” said Mrs. Combie, “or in the Winter Garden. They’re a concert party really, high class. They wear midnight-blue dresses, real silk net with silver ruffs. It looks lovely with her chestnut hair,” said Mrs. Combie.
“Her hair’s dyed,” said Cassie.
“I know, but she’s a beautiful woman,” said Mrs. Combie, “though she is getting plump.”
“Fat,” said Cassie.
“Plump,” said Mrs. Combie, “and she has a beautiful skin and colouring.”
“Out of a box,” said Cassie spitefully.
“Maybe, but it looks nice,” said Mrs. Combie and she gave a little sigh as she remembered how her fingers had rasped on the blue skirts when she had gently touched them. “They have hats like tiny satin flowerpots with crescent moons. Saucy!” said Mrs. Combie, and a flush came on her sallow cheeks.
“But why doesn’t your mother take you?” Tip was to ask Lovejoy. “She used to take you, didn’t she?”
“That was when I was sweet,” said Lovejoy. She told that to Vincent too. “I used to dance on the stage,” she said. When they found out, at school, how Lovejoy danced, they had wanted to give her a part in the school pantomime, but like the children from the Home, who could not have parts either, there was no one who had time to see to her clothes. “I don’t care,” said Lovejoy, who cared bitterly. “I’m not like a norphan. You don’t care,” she told the other girls, “if you’ve danced on the stage.
“I used to do a kitten dance,” she told Tip and Vincent. “I had a swansdown dress and little swansdown gloves; and I used to do a song with my mother. In it she was dead but she came back at night to see her child. I was the child,” said Lovejoy. “I used to wear a white nightgown and say my prayers to her.”
“Ugh!” said Vincent.
“It wasn’t ugh,” said Lovejoy. “People used to cry.”
“But why did you stop?” asked Tip. “Why didn’t you go on dancing?”
“My little teeth fell out,” said Lovejoy.
To Tip, to all the children in Catford Street, the coming out of a first tooth was something to be proud of. “I got sixpence,” said Tip, “and threepence for each one after.” For most it was proud, but for Lovejoy it had been a tragedy.
“Did you say she could leave that child here?” Cassie asked Mrs. Combie in her loud aggressive voice.
“She has to be left somewhere,” said Mrs. Combie helplessly.
Lovejoy had come willy-nilly to accept that. It could have been much worse; Mrs. Combie was kind, Vincent was very kind, but for Mrs. Combie there was really only Vincent and for Vincent there was only the restaurant. Lovejoy was a little extra tacked on.
She had never heard of a vortex but she knew there was a big hole, a pit, into which a child could be swept down, a darkness that sucked her down so that she ceased to be Lovejoy, or anyone at all, and was a speck in thousands of specks—“Millions,” said Lovejoy, and then there was something called “no one.”
She knew how easily that could happen because once she had been lost. I was only six then, thought Lovejoy; she was nearly eleven now but she had not forgotten it. She was lost and she was a speck and there was no one. It had been when her mother was out of work and they were moving restlessly about. At the police station they had asked Lovejoy questions.
“Where do you live?”
“We don’t live anywhere.”
“Where did you spend last night?”
“In London,” said Lovejoy promptly.
“What place in London?”
“London,” said Lovejoy.
“This is London,” said the woman police constable gently.
“No, this isn’t London,” said Lovejoy certainly. “London was last night.”
The constable tried again. “You don’t know where you stayed?”
“We don’t stay,” said Lovejoy gravely. “We can’t, because of the bill. They want us to pay it so we go somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else?”
“Yes. That’s where we were going,” said Lovejoy.
Nowadays she was left behind; all she had of her mother, most of the time, was a pack of postcards she carried in the pocket of her coat. When her mother did come home—Catford Street had become home now—Lovejoy was kept away from school, though Mrs. Combie had told Mrs. Mason about the inspector. “What does she care? She isn’t here when he comes,” said Cassie.
Lovejoy was too useful to be spared; she washed and ironed her mother’s clothes and brushed her mother’s hair; she played the gramophone, ran out for a paper of chips, fetched in beer. Though Lovejoy’s legs were strong they ached by the end of the day. “How do you expect to get on?” her teacher, Miss Cobb, would say when Lovejoy appeared in school again. Lovejoy, sadly, did not expect to.
She took a long time, now, to spell out the words on the packet. Cornflower (Cyanus minor)—she could not make anything of that—double blue. Double blue what? Hardy annual, two and a half feet. What’s an annual? Very showy for borders. In bloom from June to September. Sow in March or April—That’s now, thought Lovejoy—in any good garden soil, raked fine. Cover the seeds lightly. When the seedlings come up, thin well.
When she had managed to read through that, Lovejoy slit the packet open; she was careful not to break into the blue painted flowers—cornflowers, as she knew now. Inside was a small, very small, white envelope. Blooming cheats, thought Lovejoy, to put a little one into such a big one. She took out the small envelope and felt it; it was filled with something that felt like grains, but such tiny ones that, pinched together, they felt soft, like a tiny pillow, and yet they were grainy. She broke a corner of the envelope and shook it out into her hand; each seed looked like an insect with a white-looking body that had a white overskin, covering something dark, and, at one end, a minute fuzz of a head, golden colour.
Lovejoy tried to crack one with her teeth, but it was unexpectedly hard. She looked at it again. The seed is the dark part, she thought. She leaned against the pillar of the portico; a patch of sun had made it almost warm, and she felt warm too and, now that she was not out of breath from running, comfortable and interested. She looked at the dark part of the seed again; it was like knowing a person was there under a disguise, she thought. “Pooh, it isn’t as big as a pin,” she said—she meant the head of a pin. How could it grow into a flower, a double blue flower, two and a half feet high? “I don’t believe it,” said Lovejoy.
She nearly threw the packet away; but after a moment she put the seeds back into the envelope, put it in the packet, and tucked that into the pocket of her old plaid coat. Then, because she, like all the children, found it easier to jump and skip and hop than to walk, she began to skip home.