Great Meadow (11 page)

When we put the lids on the milk cans and thanked her, she wrote down what we owed on a slate on the wall and said, ‘Take your mama some nice brown eggs, a present from me, help to build her up.' As if she was a castle or something. Still, it was very kind, and she put them in a brown paper bag with
Eat more fruit
on it, and gave it to Flora to carry, on account of we had the cans. Then we all called, ‘Happy Christmas', and shuffled about on the wet stone floor and went out into the slushy yard. All the way to the lane we could hear her singing – well, that's what she would have called it – ‘If I Had a Talking Picture of Youhoooo'. She was really a bit batty.

Our father was in the lean-to when we got back. He was looking very nice, wearing his painting smock which Mr Dick, the shepherd, had given him, and he smelled of turpentine. He had a saw in one hand and a clump of mistletoe which he'd cut from the old apple tree in the orchard. He held it over Flora's head and said we had to have a bit of mistletoe in the house so that he could kiss all the girls, and Flora made a soppy face and gave him the eggs instead.

Inside, the kitchen smelled of roasting goose and gravy, and the range was red hot and the copper boiling with steam tumbling about, and our mother, in a cotton frock, was getting the chestnuts ready for the sprouts. Everyone
was very happy, busy and cheerful. You'd never know we had forgotten the tree. Our father hung the mistletoe in the door between the kitchen and the hallway and Lally said it would be a terrible nuisance there and couldn't we have it in the dining-room, over the table, and he said well, how could he kiss them all if it was over the table unless they all got on it? Anyway, Lally won, as usual. So he nailed it to a big beam above the table in the Big Dining-Room, which we never really used except for parties or Christmas. The door to
their
sitting-room was shut, and locked, and we had to go and take off our Wellingtons and coats and things and then he called to our mother, ‘Margaret! I think it's high time for the presents, don't you?' and Lally and our mother came into the hall, and our father took off his smock and opened the sitting-room door.

And there it was.

The most beautiful tree you've ever seen. All gold and silver. Shining in the firelight. And we all cried out in surprise, and our father said the only thing was not to touch it really, because it was all made of holly branches and he'd had to paint all the leaves gold and silver by hand and it had taken him half the night. Our mother said that was his punishment for forgetting the tree in the first place, and Lally said it was a good thing she wasn't about to do any washing because her clothes' prop was now covered in holly and thick as a hedgehog with nails, and our father said there was quite a gap in the fence down at the Daukeses' cottage. Then they had sherry. Even Lally had a sip, but not too much on account of she'd be tipsy taking the goose out of the oven. All round the gold and
silver tree were the presents, including Flora's haggis – you could tell them easily because they were round and wrapped in tartan paper, and there was a huge box for me and I knew what it was by shaking it. It was the Pollock's Theatre. So they hadn't forgotten after all. And they had made the tree.

After we'd opened all the presents our parents went down to the village to telephone
The Times
. You always had to telephone
The Times
to check that everything was all right and that nothing terrible had happened in some place like the Sahara or Berlin. You never could be certain, our father said, that some ‘idiot' hadn't got himself assassinated or pushed off a cliff, and that really meant just ‘killed' in simple English. But he had to ‘check in'. So they did, on Christmas morning even, from the Star at the Market Cross because it had a telephone. Lally said
nothing
stopped for
The Times
, it was all go.

I hoped, with my fingers crossed, that nothing awful
had
happened when they telephoned, because if it had, that meant our father would rush back to London no matter what. So no Christmas dinner. I just prayed there wouldn't be another airship crash, like the R.ioi, or another Emperor crowned in Abyssinia. Things like that got in the way. But it was all right, and they came back safe and sound. When I asked them, my mother laughed, looking so pretty with sparky eyes and said no, nothing to make our father go to
The Times
, just a bit of trouble in the Punjab but then there always was, so we'd have a decent time and dinner was at three o'clock on the dot.

It was terrifically busy at Euston Station: everyone in the
world seemed to be going to Scotland. All you could see was hundreds of people, and all you could hear was clangs and rattles and doors slamming and steam hissing and the scuff-skoff and clickety-clack of feet on the platform. Everyone was in a terrible hurry. Except us, because Lally said you always had to allow time for journeys and those sorts of things.

Flora was rather pale and didn't say much, and even at the bookstall, which was pretty exciting, she only nodded when she was asked if she'd like this or that for the journey. So she ended up with a copy of
Everybody's
and
Pip, Squeak and Wilfred
. And, just as Lally was putting her change away in her purse, there was our mother, and her best friend, Aunt Freda (who wasn't kith or kin but almost), who had a pointy nose, lots of rings, and came from Ireland. She also gave you jolly decent presents at Christmas and birthdays – like money.

‘Found you at last!' said my mother. ‘What a crowd, and you are fearfully early. But perhaps that's just as well.' And then she told Flora a lot of things about love to people, and to write a card when she was safely back, and hoped she'd had a lovely time with us and that we had been kind to her. And everyone agreed. I mean, standing among all those people by the bookstall, what could you do?

Lally adjusted her hat, put her bag under her arm, and I picked up Flora's suitcase, which wasn't very heavy really, in spite of all the presents we'd given her. Our mother said that she and Aunt Freda were off to Gunter's for coffee, because they hated goodbyes, and then they'd go off to the Caledonian Market, which was their favourite thing to
do, and which they did once a month. With a lot of kisses and hugs and rearranging of veils and fur collars they went away, waving like anything, until we couldn't see them. All that was left was a smell of scent and face-powder, and that didn't last long.

At the compartment door Flora said she'd take her case, but I got in and put it on the rack. There was a quite nice lady on one side and a fat man with a pipe who looked over his glasses and rustled his paper on the other. But they looked kind. Flora had tears running down her face. I mean she wasn't crying, not making any sound, and her face not screwing up or anything, just the tears down her cheeks. Lally got out her handkerchief but Flora shook her head and wiped her face with her gloved hands.

‘Don't cry, Flora dear. All good things have to come to an end, you know? And you'll soon be back. In the summer perhaps . . . '

And Flora just said, in a sort of choky voice, ‘I haven't got one, you see?'

‘Haven't got what?' said Lally, looking worried in case she'd lost her ticket. But it wasn't that, and she said after a big sniff, and another wipe, that she hadn't got a mother. That made us feel rather awful, but Lally said well, you have got brother Alec and your father and she was sure they would be simply longing to see her again, and they'd be at Central Station, Glasgow, to meet her.

But Flora just shook her head miserably. ‘You are lucky. You are so
lucky
, you two. You have one of each and I've only got the one and he's always away fishing or sailing or shooting or something.'

No one knew what to say, but thank goodness there
was a sudden moving about and doors started slamming, and a guard came hurrying along calling out and looking at his pocket watch like the White Rabbit. Lally said it was time to get on the train, and we all did a bit of kissing, only Flora's face was still wet and a bit sticky, and she was holding
Everybody's
and the Annual. The Guard slammed the door, and took his flag in his other hand, still looking at his watch, and Flora called down and said she was sorry, that she'd had a great time, that she'd never forget us all, or the cottage and her ‘wee' room, and that we were very, very lucky.

As the train started to move slowly away, she waved and waved and it got faster and faster, and then she'd gone to Scotland, and we walked slowly through the people, and there was one woman crying, and a porter pushing a trolley and Lally said we had to mark her words.

‘You're both very lucky children. Both very lucky indeed.'

That's what she said. So.

If I turned my head to the left everything was pretty blurry, on account of all the grasses, very close to my face. And then, a bit further on, it all got speckled with blue, that was the scabious, then strips of red, and that was sorrel, and there was a quite big ant waggling up, his feelers waving about. If I turned my head and looked straight upwards it was all blue. Huge blue nothing. Not even a cloud . . . it just seemed to sparkle if you stared at it long enough. Our father said that was infinity. It's jolly far.

Then if I looked to my right, I saw my sister's head, and she was lying on her front, her fringe falling over her face so that all I could really see of her was her poky nose. But I knew she was fiddling at something, because her hair was swinging about and now and again (and this bit almost made me laugh out loud), you could see her pointy tongue flicking out. So there was her nose, her hair falling about, and her tongue flicking in and out like a grass snake. Only I didn't say so because she's petrified of snakes and when we come up here to the top of Windover she stamps through the grass because she says the vibrations will frighten away anything vile. She means snakes of course. Adders and so on. Even nice old slow-worms.

‘What are you doing?'

‘I'm saving its life.'

‘What's life?' So I rolled over on my front because it was quite interesting to know what she was saving.
Couldn't be a snake and it couldn't be a beetle: she's not very fond of beetles either. I don't know, sometimes, why she doesn't live in
Hampstead
all her life. It was a pretty fiddly job, whatever it was she was doing, I could tell. And very slow and careful. Like peeling off a transfer.

‘It's a poor little moth-thing. All wrapped up in a spider-web, and I'm going to save its life.'

‘If it's all wrapped in cobweb it'll be too late. It'll be dead anyway.'

‘No. Oh no. Sometimes the spider just wraps things up, like parcels, and keeps them in its web for later. Spider's larder. Only this poor thing isn't going to be eaten.' She cupped a sort of mummy-looking thing in her hand. It was all grey with web, but here and there you could see a bit of black and a little piece of red, so it had been a burnet moth or something. I mean ‘had been' because it was as dead as anything. You could see that easily. Only she couldn't.

‘Dead,' I said. ‘All its juices have been sucked out. That's what spiders do, you know that. They wrap up the victim and then
suck
out the juices.' I said it twice because I liked the sound it made saying it.

My sister suddenly sighed. ‘Oh look! Now see what you've done! Just because you are old Mister Know-Ail you've made me nervous and look what's happened! It's all broken.' She was holding some ashes, like off a cigar butt, in her hand. ‘It would have been all right if you hadn't worried me with all that sucking part.' She threw the dusty pieces into the grass.

I told her that it wasn't my fault at all. It was a dead old moth and had been sucked empty and that it had just been
hanging in the web in the hot sun, so what else could she expect? Dead as a door knob. And she started to brush down her cotton shorts and asked why door knobs were always dead when they were never alive in the first place. I said I didn't actually know, and sat up, resting on my elbows.

Far below, right beyond Long Barrow, you could see all the elms, still and dark in the sunlight, marking the lane down to Milton Street, and in Milton Street the squinty red roofs of the village and one, a bit bigger and in the middle, had ‘The Friar's Head' painted in big white letters across the tiles. That was where we had to go for the bread, because there was a bake-house behind the pub and Winnie Moss did a bake on Wednesdays. Today was Wednesday, and we had to get a honeycomb as well, and Bert Moss, who ran the Friar's Head, kept bees and was pretty famous for his honey, and I was just hoping that the coppers which Lally had given me to pay for the loaf (best brown I had to ask for), and the comb, hadn't fallen out of my pocket, lying about in the grass. But it was all right actually, I had wrapped them in a piece of last week's
Larks,
so they made a bulgy packet and I could feel them through the flannel of my shorts.

So that was all right. We half ran, half walked in a sort of staggery way down the front, the very front, of the Long Man. I went down his left leg and my sister went down his right one, but we never trod on his face part. There wasn't a face really, just the outline, but it felt rather rotten to do that. We did once see one of those awful hiker people sliding down his face, or the place where his face
would
have been, and my sister was so angry she actually shouted, ‘Hoy!
Don't
do that!' The man looked a bit startled and when we began reaching down for handfuls of rabbit droppings to throw at him he hurried off down with his rucksack bumping about, and a fearful woman in a pink shirt and a beret shook a stick at us but she went off with him, so that was pretty good. We had to pick up rabbit droppings because there wasn't anything else – no flints (which would have really hurt them) but perhaps they thought they
were
flints, or stones anyway, and didn't realize they were only dried-up droppings.