Five Boys (3 page)

Bobby finally grasped that it was
he
who was being beckoned and slowly made his way over. The windowpanes were thick and flawed and the closer Bobby got the more the fellow behind them looked like some swimmer trapped under the ice. He was an old chap, in a threadbare jerkin, and when Bobby was near enough to make him out the fellow stopped flapping his arms and pressed a coin up against the glass. He opened his mouth but the words which came out of him were so deadened and distant that they made no sense at all.

A bout of indigestion was brewing up in Bobby to rival the one brought on by Miss Peebles’ cheese-and-onion sandwich and didn’t improve when the old man put his thin lips right up to the glass and proceeded to move them in a slow and deliberate manner, like a lunatic at the bars of his cell. Plenty of pointing and face pulling followed but
Bobby managed to stay put long enough to realize that the old man was actually directing him around the side of the house.

There was an old wooden porch in which Bobby stood, like a sentry, and after a while the door opened far enough for a head to pop out and look him up and down.

“Got your wits about you?” said the head. “Eyes and ears, eh?”

Bobby was disheartened to find that even when the words were perfectly audible they were just as meaningless as the ones which came through the glass, but there was such expectation in the old man’s eyes it was clear that all he was after was confirmation, which Bobby duly offered, then a hand crept out toward him, turned and opened, to reveal a couple of coppers in its palm.

“Get some cakes from old Marjory,” said the old man, “and see what’s stretching.”

The old man smiled, which cheered Bobby—he was pleased that the old man’s thin lips were capable of such a thing—although he was no closer to understanding what was being asked of him.

His mystification must have been apparent, for the old man suddenly became exasperated.

“The
shop
, boy,” he said. Then, “The
post
office,” and nodded down the lane.

Bobby felt that he was now at least in comprehension’s neighborhood, even if he didn’t have the exact address, and took the coins.

“Whatever you fancy,” said the old man. “But no scones. And no Eccles cakes,” as if he had just recognized in Bobby the tendency to dabble in such things.

The hand retreated into the shadows, the head followed and Bobby was about to set off in search of Marjory and her cakes when the head sprang back out.

“Remember,” the old man said and narrowed his eyes. “You’re a mole.”

He looked left and right, then settled on Bobby.

“There’ll be questions,” he said, then disappeared.

Within five minutes Bobby was back with his bag of cakes, knocking at the door and bracing himself for the old man’s head to pop out at him like a jack-in-the-box. But from deep inside the cottage a voice called out, “It’s open,” so Bobby held down the latch, heaved against the door and eventually landed in a large, low-ceilinged room, dimly lit, with the old man in an armchair by the window, hunched over a cluttered tray.

“Nearly there,” said the old man without looking up.

All the walls were lined with bottled butterflies. The old man was nipping and tweaking at something with a pair of tweezers and had a quilted sleeping bag pulled right up to his armpits, which made him look as if he was emerging from his own rather tattered cocoon. As he waited, Bobby had a closer look at one of the bottles. A tiny ship sat in a ruffled pool of turquoise plaster. Its sails billowed stiffly and its rigging of threads was as taut as an egg slice. A handwritten label beneath read, “The
Bentinck,
passing Aden, 1844.” And as Bobby watched, all the other butterflies transformed themselves into miniature ships.

“So,” said the old man, setting his tray down on a table, “what have we got for our elevenses?”

He nodded at a footstool by the window and as Bobby went over and settled himself on it his host picked the cakes out of their paper bag and explained how sultanas and
raisins tended to get under his dentures and not want to come back out.

“An inconvenience I hope you’ll be spared,” he said and took the iced bun, leaving the Bakewell tart for Bobby. Then the old man sat back in his armchair and slipped his free hand down into the sleeping bag where, Bobby imagined, it would be nice and warm.

“So what was Marjory up to?” said the old man.

Bobby thought for a moment. “Nothing,” he said. “Just getting the cakes.”

The old man winced, as if he had woefully overestimated Bobby’s abilities. The iced bun hung in the air and he stared down at the rug, as if setting an example in the kind of concentration he had thought Bobby capable of.

“Anything else?” he said.

Bobby was gravely aware that he had somehow forfeited one precious chance and might not be granted many more, so he paused and thought hard about the big fat lady in her tiny little shop.

“I think,” he ventured, “she might have been sucking on a sweet.”

The old man’s face lit up. He nodded. “That wouldn’t surprise me,” he said, then chuckled, and his hand shifted in his sleeping bag. “She’s always at them jars of sweets.”

Bobby wondered briefly whether the old man’s interest in the lady at the post office wasn’t simply the appreciation of one person with a fondness for jars and bottles for another.

“And what do you reckon she was sucking on?” the old man asked. “Did you happen to catch a whiff?”

“I’m not sure,” said Bobby and saw all the hard-won warmth drain from the old man’s face. So he thought back
to the woman tucking the sweet into a cheek as she leaned over the counter and asked Bobby if the old goat up the road had got him running his errands for him. “But it might have been cinder toffee,” he said.

The old man gazed out of the window and nodded.

“Could be,” he said. “She likes her cinder, does Marjory.”

The old man’s thoughtful little interlude gave Bobby the opportunity to take a bite of his cake. He had never had a Bakewell tart before and was surprised (but not entirely disappointed) to find that it tasted quite like the treacle toffee he had had for his supper the night before.

“What did you make of her?” the old man said.

Bobby continued to chew with great deliberation, as if giving the question some thought.

“… generally speaking,” the old man said.

By the time Bobby finally got around to swallowing he still had no idea what reaction his answer was going to get.

“I thought she was quite large,” he said and looked meaningfully out of the window, just as the old man had done a minute before.

The shipbuilder beamed, recognizing a fellow after his own heart. He let out a deep sigh, accompanied by further activity in his sleeping bag.

He nodded. “She’s a fair size, is she not?” he said.

Bobby was again struck by how differently things were done down here: the days were shorter, the meals were sweeter, and speaking frankly about people’s size was quite acceptable. A year or two earlier he had made some quite innocent comment about a fat lady in the queue at the butcher’s and got a terrible telling-off from his mother on the way home—a recollection which stirred such strong
emotions in him and brought such a significant lump to his throat that his mouthful of Bakewell tart couldn’t find a way past it and he began choking, which broke in on the old man’s reverie and had him worrying he might have to turn the boy upside down.

Thankfully, this proved not to be necessary and when at last the food was heading in the right direction Bobby wiped the tears from his face.

“Went down the wrong lung, that bit, didn’t it?” said the old man, but the boy kept staring at the floor.

“Yes,” the old man said to himself. “She’s a fair old size, is Marjory Pye,” then looked over at his tray of tiny tools and slivers of wood and balls of thread and for a while talked abstractly about the perils of drilling a jib boom when you’ve got icing all over your fingertips.

Bobby had just about recovered himself when the old man suddenly turned to him.

“I don’t believe you’ve been introduced to the Captain, have you?” he said.

Bobby wasn’t sure he was up to anymore introductions. He wanted to be back home, tucked up in his bed. And it was only when the old man got to his feet and held out the hand not holding up his sleeping bag that Bobby realized how the Captain and the old man with whom he was having his elevenses might be one and the same.

Miss Minter was finding that, contrary to popular wisdom, Bobby’s being out of sight in no way constituted his being out of mind and the moment he disappeared down the lane she began to worry what she was going to do with him when he returned.

Considering how long it took her to come up with the
idea of giving him breakfast and getting him out of the house, the idea of bathing him came to her with comparable ease. Certainly, it came a good deal easier than the effort necessary to generate enough hot water to fill her old tin bath. The fire in the range needed stoking, then constant attention, and there were countless trips between the boiler and the pump out in the yard, as well as dragging the bath in from the outhouse in order to bring it up to room temperature and avoid it instantly chilling any hot water introduced to it.

She began heating the water soon after lunchtime, convinced that Bobby would come skipping up the path at any moment, covered from head to toe in mud. Meanwhile, Bobby, mindful of her instructions regarding his return was, in all his mindfulness, having difficulty recalling whether it was meant to precede, coincide with or follow the onset of darkness. So, having had his elevenses at the Captain’s and investigated the last few corners of the village soon afterward, he climbed through a hedge halfway down the leafy lane and spent most of the afternoon throwing stones into a field.

He must have lain down and closed his eyes at some point for he dreamed of old Mr. Evans (which was odd as he hadn’t seen Mr. Evans in years). Then he climbed a tree, kept an eye on the sun until it began to sink between the hills and went down the lane after it.

Bobby had no trouble finding the old woman’s cottage. He just followed the thick column of smoke pouring from its chimney, but it wasn’t until he entered the house that he appreciated what was producing it. As soon as he opened the parlor door the heat hit him with all the force of a
cricket bat and a great cloud of steam billowed out into the hall. The windows dripped with condensation. The sills were dappled with small, mercurial pools. There was so much steam that all the linen on the clothes rack, which had been bone-dry that morning, looked as if it had just been dragged out of the wash. Bobby could just make out Miss Minter, bent over the range like a fireman on the foot plate of a locomotive. She looked over her shoulder, but her spectacles were so fogged up she had to tip her head forward and peer over them.

“Here he
is,”
she said, without a hint of reproach. “I’ve been keeping the water hot.”

She dragged a damp tangle of hair back from her forehead and hooked it behind an ear. Stepped forward and took Bobby’s hands in hers.

“Good God,” she said. “You’re freezing.”

On the contrary, Bobby thought the old lady was roasting. Miss Minter, meanwhile, was noticing how little mud Bobby had on him, but taking solace from the fact that the bath would at least heat him up.

She picked up the poker and struck the tap on the boiler. A plume of steam flew out with the jet of boiling water and Miss Minter had to wave a hand through it to make sure the water was landing in the bath. Then she stood aside as the range gushed and spluttered, like some geyser running its course, added a dash of salts from a green glass beaker and several jugs of cold water and invited Bobby to climb in.

When he was undressed and in the bath, Lillian Minter pulled up a stool and they sat silently beside one another, as if Bobby was in the sidecar of her motorbike and they were enjoying a country run. Miss Minter was tempted to ask
what he had been up to, but knew that whatever he said would only give her more to worry about. Besides, the parlor was calm for the first time in hours.

“Is that nice?” she said.

Bobby nodded. The way the water cradled him, the smell of the soap, the roaring fire—all were recognizably nice. As he pulled his shoulders down under the milky water the strange Captain and his homemade ships came back to him and Bobby wondered if the old man was ever tempted to try them out before bottling them.

“Does your mummy soap your back for you?” Miss Minter asked him.

At first she thought he must not have heard her. He was so still she thought he must have drifted off. But when she looked again she saw a tear creep down his cheek—watched it drop into the bathwater and send a series of ripples sweeping back and forth across its surface.

She couldn’t believe her lack of sensitivity—was sickened by it—and had to leave the room under the pretext of fetching a towel from upstairs. She opened the cupboard and buried her head in the linen. Cursed herself over and over for making the poor boy cry. But when she went back downstairs she offered no apology and made no reference to Bobby’s tears, thinking that it would only embarrass him on top of everything else.

She let him soak for another few minutes, then wrapped a towel around him and dabbed him dry. Got him into his pajamas and dressing gown and led him around the back of the settee where she spread an old newspaper out on the floor. Then she left the room and returned with a large jar of dried soup mix.

She gave the jar a shake. “Now,” she said, “all these peas
and beans have managed to get themselves mixed up.” She made an effort to look highly vexed. “Do you think you might sort them out for me while I have the bath?”

She unscrewed the lid and poured the jar’s contents out onto the newspaper. Bobby looked at the mountain of dried beans and pulses—saw a whole evening’s work ahead of him—but he knelt down beside it and told Miss Minter that he would see what he could do.

C
ONSIDERING ALL
the trouble he took over their tiny reproduction the Captain seemed to get no end of pleasure from telling Bobby how the real ships came to be wrecked. During those first few days of his evacuation Bobby thought he must have heard about every cutter, smack, ketch and man-of-war which had had the misfortune of coming up against Devon’s unforgiving coast, and when the Captain wasn’t quizzing him on what sort of shape Marjory Pye was in or what sort of sweets she was eating, the old man seemed to like nothing better than to wriggle right down in his sleeping bag and talk romantically about all the wrecks littering the seabed, fathoms deep.