Stone Cradle (22 page)

I am usually good at forgetting.
Mi Deari Duvvel
forbid it should be otherwise. It was because I forgot-to-forget that Mehitable fell from the cart, that day, in the lane in the rain. I learned my lesson, after that. I reckon we all did. As soon as she was well again, I vowed I wasn’t going to be tempting the
mullas,
the ghosts, no more, with the Travelling and the remembering and the wanting
to live like I once had. We all of us get born into a stone cradle but some of us have the sense to climb out of it.

Mehitable pulled through. We went to Sutton. And I never forgot-to-forget again, not once.

I
still had a few mixed feelings about going to the village, mind, for my only experience of houses had been a cottage in a graveyard and a box in a street in Cambridge which came to much the same thing, in my opinion. That was house-dwelling for you, I thought. We took the cart and bender tent and stopped at Mepal, then Elijah and Rose went on foot into Sutton to scout around for somewhere. I was left behind to keep an eye on the children – so we all said to each other – but in actual fact it was because I looked a bit too much like what I was. Rose and Lijah could pass for
gorjers
easy enough.

They came back with the news of having found not one but two little places, right on the outskirts of Sutton. Lijah had taken some dyke digging work for a month and even got a note from the old mush so’s the landlord would let us off the down payment. The places were empty and needed a bit of work, but if we didn’t mind that we could move in right away.

That’s how easy it was to become a family of house-dwellers again.

My place was tiny. It had a little parlour with a kitchen alcove and a bedroom upstairs. After going up and down the stairs a few times, I worked out that if I used the settee for sleeping then I didn’t need to go upstairs at all, which was a thing I’d never liked. I would be right next to the door. None of that sweating and trappedness like I had felt in my box room in Paradise Street. Suddenly, it seemed like not-such-a-bad little place. I would be close to the others but still able to come and go as I pleased and keep it as clean as I liked.

After Lijah and Rose had settled me in, they went next door with the children to sort out their place and I sat on the step – my step – with the door open. I looked up at the sky and felt as chuffed as a puppy with its first own bone. My little place – close enough to the others to keep an eye, like, but with my own door handles and cooking pots and feather duster. My own. I wasn’t going to be odd-one-out no more – you need other people around you to make you that. From now on, it was going to be just me.

And there was something else which amazed me, ’til I got used to it. For the first time in my life, I had the lektiv.
Helectricity
was the proper word for it, Lijah told me. They’d had it Cambridge before we left there, but it had not come to Paradise Street, nor anywhere near. They put it in the theatres and people would go and see plays not to watch the actors on the stage but to sit and stare at the lights. As a consequence, I had always thought of it as a rich person’s thing and could not believe I was going to have it in my own little home.

Lijah stood me in my sitting room and flicked the switch up and down, to show me how to use it. The light came through the wires, he said. After he’d gone, I did the same thing myself, on and off, for a good long while, until the old man over the road came across and said, was I trying to signal that I needed help?

Lijah got himself some steady work, just like he promised. He did the dyke work for a while, and then he went back to being a
pack-man. Being on the edge of a village was good for that. He had a shed to keep his stuff in, and a few shops to buy extras, but was near to the paths across the Fens and the outlying farms. The walking everywhere was good for him, I reckon – and he was good at chatting to the farmers’ wives what were lonely and didn’t get to speak to many people. I think him being a bit older helped, like, as he was a charming old-ish man now which is quite a different prospect to a charming young man. People weren’t so wary of him.

After a year or so, he got the wherewithal to go back to dealing with the horses. We got ourselves another Kit. I’m not sure which Kit it would’ve been by then. Kit the Fourth, probably. He wasn’t as nice as the First Kit, what had been my favourite, but he was sweeter than the Third. Lijah would go out with Kit of an evening, pulling the cart, and go and buy a horse off a fella. The deal would take ten minutes, then they would shake hands on it and go and spend the next three hours in the pub. After they had finished celebrating the deal, Lijah would take the horse he had just bought – some old nag, ripe for doing up – and tie it to the back of the cart. Then he would climb up into the cart, pull a blanket over himself and say to Kit, ‘Come on, Kit, take us home.’

Kit would plod home in the dark with Lijah sound asleep in back of the cart. When Kit got to our cottages, he would stamp about a bit. As I always slept with the door open and slept lightly, I could easy hear Kit a-stamping and the jangle of the harness what was hanging loose. So I would get up, release Kit from the shafts and take him and the new horse to the little stables Lijah had at the side of his place.

When the horses were settled, I would take a look under the blanket to make sure that Lijah was actually in the cart, then leave him to sleep it off and go back to bed.

Sometimes, as I turned, I would glance up at their cottage. Rose never came down, either to check he was all right or to upbraid
him for being drunk. I think she had found a way of letting it not matter no more. They were paying their rent, and the children was fed.

They still had their ups and downs, did Rose and Lijah, but I suppose they must have been getting on a bit better as, to my stirprise, I got two more grandchildren out of it. Fenella was born one springtime. Scarlet, the last of my grandchildren, popped out during an April storm which brought down the Elder tree in my back yard but led to an early hot spell.

Oh, we all loved those girls – especially Fenella. She was a fashion-plate, that child. Even when she was little. She could wear a hand-knitted cardy like it was a velvet gown. ‘Mami…’ she would say, sidling up to me when I was stitching a stocking or mending a tear in something. ‘Mami, do you have any pearl buttons in your box?’

‘You know right well I do, my acorn,’ I would say, ‘for you’ve been into it looking, haven’t you?’ She wouldn’t’ve got away with that with her mother. Her mother would have gone crazed if Fenella had been in
her
sewing box, and well she knew it.

Funnily enough, I wouldn’t have been too chuffed if any of the other girls had been into mine, but Fenella had a habit of charming things out of people. Curly hair she had – soft brown curls. The men were going to go doo-lally over her when she was older, everybody said. And they were right.

‘It’s just, I’ve lost a button …’ she would say, looking down at her cardi, a cable-knit I’d done myself, with wooden buttons.

I would see the tail of thread hanging off and think,
lost
… Really?

I liked to tease that Little One a bit. ‘Well,
biti
mouse,
I suppose I could spare just one of my pearl buttons if you was good.’

Her face would be a picture of horror. ‘But Mami, then they won’t match!’

She was the only child in her village school with pearl buttons on a cable-knit cardi, I’m quite sure of that.

There was a special thing that Fenella and Scarlet both loved in the village, and that was Mayladyin’. We all had our own time of year, I suppose. In January, the boys had Plough Monday with the plough they carried round all decorated, and their lanterns. They got ale and cakes for their trouble. Even the old ladies like me had Goodnin’ Day, for widows only, when we got given packets of tea or sugar. I wouldn’t go round with the other widows as I thought it was undignified, but someone always left tea and sugar on my doorstep anyway. I wasn’t too proud to take it in and drink it, I might say. Shortest day of the year, Goodnin’ Day. One year, I thought about getting one of the children to write a note on a bit of paper, for me to stick on my door. ‘It’s nearly Christmas so blow the tea and sugar, how about a bit of brandy and some ’baccy for my pipe?’ I never did it as I wasn’t sure I could rely upon the villagers to see the humorous side.

The girls had Mayladyin’, when they was allowed to dress up dolls and take them door to door, and get pennies for them.

Well, my Fenella, she was determined to have the prettiest doll in the village – dordy, yes, the preparations took weeks. A lace bonnet, she had to have, and little boots made of real leather cut from an old piece her dad had. Nearly ruined my fingers stitching them tiny boots. The evenings she spent round at my place, sorting it out. Scarlet was only just big enough to join in and luckily she was easily pleased with something that was a lot less effort. As long as it was pink, she didn’t care.

One Saturday, I was at home. It was the first of May in a couple of days. There came the sound of clogs on my path and I thought, here comes Fenella, after something else for her May Lady. But very quickly I realised it wasn’t Fenella’s step. Fenella tripped along – skipped everywhere, that child – this step had a drag to it. It was Billy, as we called her. My Mehitable.

Billy was almost a young lady, then. She had stayed short and thin but had straightened out nicely, although she still wore a calliper and had something of a limp. She never had much to say for herself, but would often come round and sit with me, for no reason. She and her mother did not get on, and it seemed to be getting worse rather than better as she came into an age when she might be grow’d.

How bad things were between Rose and her daughter got more obvious when the other two girls came along, for the other two were so much more what daughters are meant to be.

‘Mami,’ she said, as she stepped through my open door, ‘how are you today?’

‘I’m all well and good, Billy,’ I said, ‘I’m just dandy. What brings you here? Aren’t you supposed to be cooking food for that donkey?’

Lijah had bought a donkey the week before. It was a mangy old thing with holes in its pelt and half its teeth fall’d out. When I saw it, I asked Lijah if someone had paid him to take it. He said almost. He was going to fix it up and sell it but in the meantime it needed all its food cooking for it, as it couldn’t eat a raw carrot or a turnip if its life depended on it.

Rose had gone berserk. ‘Don’t you think I’ve got enough to do?’ she said.

So Billy got the job of cooking the donkey its food. She got all the jobs that no one else wanted, on account of how there were a lot of jobs she couldn’t do with that leg of hers.

Billy’s face darkened a little. ‘I’ve got a pig’s head and some sour bread boiling out back.’

‘I was wondering what that stink was,’ I said, as we moved toward the kitchen alcove bit and seated ourselves at the little table.

‘Everyone else has gone out and left me to it. It’ll need boiling more than an hour.’

‘Don’t you let it dry out or your mother will go something mental.’

‘Don’t I know it …’

‘
Mehitable
…’ She knew the warning tone in my voice. It doesn’t do to let children speak ill of their parents, even when they’re absolutely right.

She looked down at the tablecloth and plucked at it with one hand. There was something to be got-to-the-bottom-of here, I saw.

‘If you’re after getting away from the stink, then you’ve not gone very far, have you?’

‘I’ve something to ask you, Mami.’

‘Go on,’ I said. I rose from my seat and took a step to the cupboard. I had some oaty biscuits in a tin and no grandchild of mine ever visited my house and went away without a little something in their stomach.

I put the tin on the table. ‘Do you want some milk to go with?’

‘No thanks, Mami.’

‘Have you had your milk today?’ Billy hated milk. You had to squeeze it down her.

‘Mum made me, at breakfast.’

‘Well quite right, too. Have you washed your hands lately?’

‘Just before I came over.’

‘So what is it you’re after,
chai
?’ I took an oaty biscuit myself. They have to be cooked in ovens, them biscuits, so I’d never had them as a child. I had a fierce liking for them, as a result and cooked them several times a week. I was mad about them.

Billy reached into her pocket and brought out a doll. It was a small thing but nicely turned out with a little skirt and bodice made of blue cotton. I recognised an old blouse of Rose’s. Billy had snipped up some brown wool for hair and put it into long bunches and tied it with thread.

‘I don’t know what to do for shoes,’ she said. ‘Fenella’s doing
boots, so I can’t do those. I’d like shiny black shoes but she’s too small for anything stiff. Have you got a piece of anything that will do it?’

I took the doll and looked at it. A feeling of sadness came over me, like a cool wind blowing. I said quietly, ‘Does your mother know about this?’

Her face darkened again. She took the doll back and held it in her lap. ‘Well, Mami, what do
you
think …’ she mumbled.

‘
Mehitable
…’

She looked up sharply. ‘She’ll let me go if you say so. Oh please, Mami. Tell her it would be a good idea. I could keep an eye on Scarlet.’

I stared at her. I had a hollow feeling inside, a caving in, for all at once it had come to me how hard her life still was. Rose had never let Billy go Mayladyin’, ever. She said it wasn’t right for a child with a calliper to go dragging it around the village – it looked too much like begging. I’d agreed with her at the time and never thought more of it. And then Fenella comes along and she’s such a pretty, sunny girl. And when she’s big enough she rushes home from school one day all excited because she’s going a Mayladyin’ for the first time with her friends … and it never occurs to any of us to say no to Fenella. For Fenella is a proud, cheerful child, and Mayladyin’ doesn’t look like begging when she does it – no, it looks like a game that gets her a few pennies, that’s all.

So off Fenella and Scarlet go, each year, and it never occurs to nobody that Billy might be sitting there and dying to go herself. Why did she never speak up before?

‘Billy,’ I said gently. ‘Don’t you think you’re a bit old for all that? Mayladyin’s for little girls. You’re a young lady, you know. Why, I can’t believe how fast you’ve grow’d.’

She looked at me, crestfallen. I hated to be the one to disappoint her but I knew if I didn’t, then her mother would be a lot more blunt about it.