I for Isobel (3 page)

She felt sure they would be ashamed not to mention her birthday at all. There was going to be a little fun in this, if it worked.

Margaret had not stirred. Isobel took her book and crept out. With unusual forethought she washed her face and hands and even combed her hair, so there wouldn't be any trouble about that. Then she went to her hideyhole, the big old chair on the back verandah. The chair wasn't meant for sitting on; it faced the wall, there was stuffing coming out of it that prickled against her legs and it was lopsided because one leg was broken, but she could manage to curl up in it and be out of sight.

She read until the breakfast bell sounded, then waited a little longer before she sneaked through the kitchen. That was forbidden ground, but Mrs Terry and Irene, the waitress, were too busy to notice her.

The Mansells, father and mother and Caroline and Joanne, were there already, and Miss Halwood and old Mrs Halwood were coming in, so she was sitting calmly eating her Weetbix under powerful protection when her parents arrived.

‘Well, there you are!' said her mother in a gentle, reasonable tone. ‘Wherever have you been?'

‘Just outside.'

Old Mr Welch coming in said, ‘With her head in a book, I suppose. It's quite a bookworm you have there, Mrs Callaghan.'

Dangerous ground.

‘What are you reading now, Isobel?' asked Miss Halwood, who was a teacher in real life.

Oh dear, the quicksand itself.

‘
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
.'

‘Goodness me,' said Mrs Halwood, ‘that's a difficult book for a little girl.'

With thin saintliness, Mrs Callaghan said, ‘You know you are not to take grown-up books without permission.'

‘Oh, Mrs Callaghan,' said Miss Halwood, ‘there is really nothing wrong with Sherlock Holmes.'

‘A lot more moral than Biggles,' said Mr Welch.

‘Besides,' went on Miss Halwood, ‘it would be a shame to check her when she is so advanced. I only wish some of my pupils read so well.'

‘Your poor sister is outside looking for you, Isobel,' her mother said. ‘You had better go and find her.'

Isobel got up to go, but Margaret, coming through the door, said easily, ‘I thought you must be in here,' and took her place.

‘Do you understand all the words, Isobel?' Miss Halwood asked.

‘I guess some of them.' Drunk on approval, she spoke with too much pride.

‘That isn't a bad way of learning, but it's a good idea to look up one or two in the dictionary. Don't look up so many that you get bored with reading. That would be a pity.'

‘I couldn't ever get bored with reading.'

‘You're a lucky girl, then. I'm lucky too in the same way. The only reason I'd like to be your age again is to have all the wonderful books to read for the first time.'

‘How old is she?' Mrs Halwood asked Mrs Callaghan.

Oh, oh. How do you like that, Mrs Callaghan? Isobel saw the red rising in her mother's face and dropped her eyes demurely. Margaret was staring with a puzzled look at her mother; her father was eating, paying no attention. Mrs Callaghan said quietly, ‘She is nine.'

‘Remarkably advanced for her age,' said Miss Halwood.

Isobel was living in two worlds. Miss Halwood's, where she belonged and things were solid and predictable, and the other one, where she was exulting at making her mother uncomfortable. That was a great pleasure but it was like gobbling sweets—she expected some sickness from it. Meanwhile there was the world of Sherlock Holmes, which was better than both of them. She said, ‘May I be excused, please?' and hurried back to her chair. She fished out the book from under the seat and went back to Baker Street.

She read until she had finished the book, then she went to the lounge to change it for
Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, which she had seen on the shelf beside it. On the way back, she met her mother.

‘I was looking for you, Isobel. I want you to go down to the shop and buy me a small writing pad.' She handed her a two-shilling piece, then added, smiling kindly, ‘You may keep the change because it's your birthday.'

Well, her mother had wriggled her way out of that one, but not for nothing. Isobel took the coin and set off for the shop. She knew it was no fortune, yet there might be enough of it left to buy something that could be called a birthday present.

In the shop she asked for the smallest writing pad and put the coin on the counter.

‘That will be one and elevenpence ha'penny,' said the shopkeeper. To her fallen face, he said, ‘It's all right, girlie. You've got enough. You even get change, see.'

He handed her the kack-coloured insult. She took it and the writing pad and plunged out.

You couldn't make yourself safe, no matter how you tried. They could always surprise you. She wanted to hurl the coin into the water but she knew she mustn't express any feeling at all. ‘Blessed Mary, Virgin Mother, make me not cry. I don't want to cry, Blessed Mary, Mother of God, baby Jesus, I don't want to cry. Help me, Blessed Mary, Virgin Mother, and baby Jesus…' If once she started to cry, she wouldn't be able to stop. ‘I won't cry, I won't. Help me, Blessed Mary.'

At last, the prayer made a patch of candle-lit calm in her mind. She slowed and steadied, the need to cry having passed.

When she got back, the bedroom was empty. Perhaps Blessed Mary had seen to it that she didn't have to meet her mother straight away; Isobel found the special attention comforting. She murmured, ‘Thank you, Blessed Mary,' left the writing pad and took her book. As for the repulsive halfpenny, she wanted to do something wicked and outrageous with it, but she lacked knowledge of the suitable curse.

She dropped it into one of the drawers. If they asked her what she had done with it, she would say she had put it in the poor-box on the shop counter.

She went to the small room to leave her book on her bed. Margaret wasn't there—the lunch bell must have gone while she was out. She hurried to the dining room and sure enough, everyone else was at the table. Only her place was empty.

Except for a little parcel wrapped in pink tissue paper and tied with gold string. Keeping her eyes on it, she sat down warily.

Mr Mansell said at length, ‘Aren't you going to open your parcel, Isobel?'

A harsh loud voice came out of her mouth, saying, ‘Is that thing mine?'

She heard her mother draw in a long breath of rage and wondered why, but she did not look away from the little parcel.

‘Yes,' said Mr Mansell, in a funny, slow, clear voice, like a teacher giving dictation, ‘it is a present for you, for your birthday.'

With jumping fingers she untied, unwrapped, opened a little box. Pinned to a card which read on top
Elegance
and underneath
Fashion Jewellery
there was a gold brooch shaped like a basket, an old-fashioned one with a wide brim and a curly handle; there were coloured flowers in it, three little white bells with green tips, two daffodils, a pink rose and a blue flower with petals edged like a saw. It was beautiful.
It was a present for a real girl.

How strange it was. Birthday after birthday she had hoped, and at last, after she had given up hope, the present had come, better than anything she could have imagined. She lifted it out of the box, set it on the lid and read it like a book while she ate her lunch.

Mrs Callaghan had recovered her company voice. ‘How kind of you!'

‘It's only a small thing,' said Mr Mansell.

‘Oh, but you shouldn't have!' Chancing on a useful phrase in a foreign language, she said graciously, ‘She's spoilt enough already!'

There was a disturbance—a kind of gust of breathing—at grown-up-face level round the table. Isobel looked up and saw that all the grown-ups were turning on her mother the same glare of indignation, except Mr Mansell, who was looking at Isobel herself with a bright, soft look that puzzled her, and her pale father, who was going steadily on with his task of cutting, chewing and swallowing. Her mother, for once, was even paler than he, so white-faced that traces of an earlier colouring showed russet in her hair and green in her eyes. She was staring at her plate, plying her knife and her fork slowly and carefully like crutches. Isobel felt an ache of sympathy, knowing how it felt to be the last to be chosen, or even left out of the game. Besides, what was wrong with what her mother had said? It sounded just like the stuff grown-ups usually talked.

She forgot sympathy in looking at her brooch. When she had finished eating, she put it back in its box, wrapped it, clutched it, gabbled, ‘May I be excused, please?' and ran away to her room, where she sat on her bed, reading and looking from time to time at the brooch, unwrapping and wrapping it carefully each time.

The sound of her mother's quick, foreboding tread made her push the box in a panic under her pillow. Now, she remembered: she had been told not to tell, and she had told. She had told Caroline, who had told Mr Mansell, and retribution was coming, as her mother advanced with set face and luminous glare and began to slap her, muttering, ‘Don't you dare to cry. Ungrateful little bitch. Don't you-dare-to-cry. You little swine, thankless little swine, you couldn't say thank you, couldn't even say thank you.' Slap, slap. ‘Don't open your mouth, don't you dare to cry.'

There was not much to cry about, for her mother's intentions were far more violent than her blows. Her hands flapped weakly as if she was fighting against a cage of air. She straightened up and drew breath. ‘Mr Mansell rowed right across the lake to get you that brooch and you couldn't take the trouble to say thank you. It's no use going anywhere with you; you bring disgrace on us wherever we go. Ah, it's no use. Words are wasted on you, gawping there like an idiot.' She put her hands to her head and walked out in despair.

Isobel took the box from under the pillow, took out the brooch and looked at it while she rubbed her stinging legs. Why hadn't her mother taken the brooch? It would have been so easy. Isobel could even supply the words she had dreaded to hear: ‘Give me that, you don't deserve to have it. Come on, give it to me.' Why hadn't she said them? Could it be that there were things her mother couldn't do?

That idea was too large to be coped with. She put it away from her, but she took the brooch and pinned it carefully to the neck of her dress. It was hers now, all right. She went and looked at it in the glass and stood admiring it. In one way or another, she would be wearing it all her life.

2 • FALSE IDOLS AND A FIREBALL

Isobel could honestly swear that she did see a fireball once. It was long ago, when she was quite small. Coming from school she was caught in a thrashing rainstorm and when she reached the house she found it locked and empty, so she was standing in the yard ankle-deep in water when the sky cracked and this pink ball came streaking past and then the water she was standing in turned rosy red. She could swear to that, although fireball became another word for lie and the rosy water was dammed up forever behind a wall of derisive laughter. In the days before she conquered enthusiasm she would sometimes come running in crying, ‘Guess what I saw!' and her mother would say, ‘A fireball?', sliding a glance of sophisticated amusement towards any other occupant of the room, for it was a well-known joke.

In another mood, Mrs Callaghan would say shortly, ‘Thought you saw,' and sometimes she would hear Isobel out, then begin to question her: ‘Where did this happen? When? What happened then? Now I thought you said…', ending always, ‘You don't know, do you? You don't know whether you're telling the truth or not,' with a sigh of resignation.

It was well established that Isobel was a liar. When asked, ‘Did you spend your mission money on chocolate, Isobel?' she would say no, though she had, and Mrs Callaghan would send a contemptuous knowing glance towards her elder daughter Margaret, who had brought home the information, while Margaret would look back with her mouth sagging and her eyes full of misery, then turn on Isobel the same look, a real blackout curtain of sorrow. Isobel did not expect to be believed, but she felt that a lie was the only contribution she could make to the respectability of the occasion. She lived well enough herself with her cowardice, her dishonesty and her greed, but others had to be protected from the shock of them.

Meanwhile, fireballs existed and were seen even by liars, and Isobel did not begin to worry seriously about truth and falsehood until the day she forgot her composition book and Sister Ignatius said she was not surprised. Looking at Isobel and yet looking beyond her, her face pale and her eyes dull, she said, frowning, ‘You forget a lot of things, Isobel Callaghan. Forget your school money, too, every second week.' Isobel hadn't taken account of the number of times she forgot her school money but the accusation did not surprise her, for at home they had a wild beast of poverty which broke loose now and then and filled the air with screaming.

That afternoon she told her mother what Sister Ignatius had said. Mrs Callaghan stared, then made her say it again; after that, she turned her head away and uttered a dry, forced whimper, like a small child determined to cry—a terrible sound that carried conviction in spite of its obvious affectation. She stopped that almost at once and began to ask questions: ‘Where were you? Who else was there? What was her voice like, was it loud?'

Until then Isobel had been sincerely pleased with the effect she was making, but she remembered suddenly the usual end of such interrogations and she realised that to tell the truth was not easy. Concentrating on the task of recalling the nun's voice to her mind, she took great care to describe it exactly.

‘It was soft and tired and angry. It wasn't loud but I think everybody could hear it.'

Her mother sighed harshly. ‘What's the use of asking you? Half the time you don't know what you're talking about.'