Kindergarten (3 page)

As she walked away from the house and through the forest, she met the magician’s friends on their way to the wedding-feast. They asked her:

Further along in the forest she met the magician, who was coming slowly back from her parents’ house. He asked her the same questions as the others:

The magician looked up, and saw the disguised skull in the window. He thought it was his bride, and called up to her. Then he and all his friends went into the house for the wedding-feast.

At this moment, the brothers and all the relatives of the bride arrived, sent to save her by her sisters. They locked all the doors of the house, and closed all the shutters, so that no one could escape, and set fire to it.

The magician, and all his friends, perished in the flames.

L
ILLI
D
ANIELSOHN’s
illustration for “Fitcher’s Bird” was a water-colour, a double-page spread of a quiet interior flooded with warm light, a meticulous representation of a middle-class German bedroom in the late 1920s. On the extreme right of the picture, a beautiful dark-haired girl, the second sister, was beginning to open a door set into the bedroom wall. The curtains over the window were about to billow outwards into the room as the door opened. Plants on the window-ledge, a carved table, an oil-lamp, the individual threads in a woven bed-cover.

Beyond the bedroom door, unseen and unrecorded, was the mutilated body of her murdered sister. No blood seeped beneath the door into the image of domestic peace. In her left hand the girl held the fragile egg, which, when stain with blood, would mean that her life was over. Her face, in intense close-up, the eyes very large, did not look towards the forbidden room, but gazed out of the picture, towards the onlooker. She was very young.

A
FTER
C
ORRIE
had poured the boiling water into the teapot, he sat down to wait for a while before pouring out the tea.

The Kate Greenaway playing-cards Mum had fixed on the fridge door were still there. The six of diamonds had a picture of three little boys at the entrance to a churchyard. We’re
all jolly boys, and we’re coming with a noise
. Mum.

He stared at the painted enamel eggs in the egg-cups on the pine dresser as he poured milk, and then tea, into Lilli’s teacup, and poured out some orange-juice for Matthias. The nearest one to him was of two boys in sailor suits carrying a model yacht.

He too the cup and the orange-juice through into the sun lounge. The sun lounge ran the full length of the back of their house and Lilli’s, and their kitchen and living-room both opened into it. He liked to hear the rain rattling against the glass roof. His parents had always referred to it as the sun lounge—ludicrous though that term was on a day like this one—perhaps thinking that the word “conservatory” had grandiose overtones, appropriate though it might be in an Edwardian house. Jo, his eleven-year-old younger brother, was more accurate when he called it the grot-hole. The floor was littered with Matthias’s toys.

He pushed his way through carefully, bricks and model cars rattling across the tiles. He noticed a model soldier stuck in the soil of a plant pot near Baskerville’s basket and wondered how it had got there. They had never been allowed toy guns, or any toys connected with war or war-games.

He peered through the glass, masking his eyes against the reflected light. He saw a torch approaching through the gravestones in the burial-ground, ad the pointed hood of Jo’s anorak as he skipped exaggeratedly along the path.

The connecting door between the two houses was in the sun lounge, and he walked through into Lilli’s house. The floor of her sun lounge was equally cluttered.

Matthias, his three-year-old youngest brother, was there, kneeling on a chair up against the table near Lilli’s hand-loom, leaning over a painting with immense concentration. His nose was dull green with dried paint. He was three years old, three feet high, and weighed three stone, a pleasing symmetry which Jo regarded as a strong argument against metrication.

The smell of cooking came through the open door from the kitchen.

“How’s Horrible Horace?” Corrie asked, handing him the orange-juice. It was in a covered tumbler, with a little raised rim to drink from. He liked the special little things made for small children.

Matthias fell back into his chair, and surveyed the overall effect of his painting, like an artist checking his perspective, and then, very seriously, as though he were a French general bestowing an honour, he kissed Corrie on the cheek to thank him for the orange-juice. He was very lavish with his kisses with people he knew well.

“I’m not Horrible Horace!” he said.

“Murderous Matty? What have you done with my grandmother?”

“Making a German Christmas! I’m going to stay up late tonight!”

Matthias’s voice always became very high and shrill when he was excited or amused.

“I bet you’ve eaten her. I can see a bit of her shoe in your teeth.”

“What big teeth you’ve got!” Matthias shouted, adding, a moment later, “I’m not hungry.”

Corrie walked round to look at Matthias’s painting. There was a preponderance of green, applied in thick vertical strokes, and a large red blob at one side.

“What is it a picture of?” he asked.

“A havverglumpus,” Matthias replied, with withering contempt. At least Corrie had looked at the picture the right way up this time.

He glanced around for somewhere safe to put Lilli’s cup of tea, away from Matthias’s paintbrushes. He noticed that her easel was out, at the edge of the sun lounge along from the loom, and wondered why Matthias wasn’t using that. He eventually placed the cup on the bench in front of the loom.

This was the day when, in term-time, he and Jo came after school to have tea with Lilli. It was a tradition that had started some months ago, on a day free of orchestra practice and other school commitments, and they had carried it through into the holidays. Lilli would set out the table in the dining-room with flowers, a hand-woven cloth, and her best china, and they would spend an hour or so talking about the week at school, playing some of the new pieces they had learned on their instruments. He had grown to need those times with Lilli. Today they had suspended the custom, as Lilli was preparing the dining-room for her Christmas, but he had promised to bring her some tea.

He went further along the sun lounge, and then through the door into the living-room. Lilli’s house still had two separate rooms downstairs, the dining-room at the front, facing out on to Dunwich Green, and the living-room at the back. In their house the two rooms had been knocked into one, and they had one long room running the full depth of the house, with an arch in the middle where there had once been a wall. Lilli’s living-room was still waiting to be redecorated, bare and echoing, like a room in an empty house, the floor-boards uncarpeted, and the furniture under dust-covers.

He went through into the hall, passed the dining-room door, and picked up the evening paper from the floor beneath the letter-box. “C
AROLS AT
S
IEGE
S
CHOOL
.” The subheadings in the report stood out: “P
OLITICS”
“T
ERRORISTS
”; “H
OSTAGES
”; “D
EMANDS
.” It seemed as good a summary as he had ever read of modern life in Western Europe.

He knocked on the dining-room door.

“Tea is served, modom.”

“Thank you, my good man,” Lilli said as she came out, using the phrase that Jo normally used when Corrie did something for him.

He offered her his arm, and they went through the kitchen into the sun lounge. Matthias sat sucking at the orange-juice as though he were plugged into the tumbler. He was always entirely self-absorbed when he was dealing with food or drink.

The sound of the rain on the sun-lounge roof was louder than it had been all afternoon. There was to be a carol service round the tree on Dunwich Green at eight-thirty. Jo was going to sing a solo.

“We need snow for tonight, not rain,” he said to Lilli. “The more it snows—”

“Tiddely-pom!” Matthias said. He had finished his orange-juice.

“We can’t have an Outdoor Hum for Snowy Weather when it’s raining.”

“And when we’re indoors,” Lilli added.

“I expect we’ll get all the snow at Easter.”

There had been snow on the ground when Mum had been buried.

He looked across at Lilli. She was sitting on the bench in front of the loom, holding her cup and saucer in one hand. There was a great quality of stillness about her. He had talked to her about most things, sometimes when Jo was not there, but he could not talk to her about what he had found in the school music rooms.

He leaned across Matthias, holding his little brother’s painting up towards Lilli.

“What’s this a picture of?”

“A havverglumpus, of course,” she said, as if amazed that he hadn’t known.

“Of
course
!” Matthias repeated, looking at Corrie with great scorn.

He climbed down from his chair, and went across to Lilli, then stood, legs apart and arms raised away from his sides, looking into the distance. Corrie stared at him, puzzled.

“Have you wet yourself?” he asked eventually, after Matthias had held the pose for some time.

“No! I’m being Rupert the Bear.”

He was still standing like Rupert the Bear, and shrieking “Splishity-splash!” when Corrie went back into Tennyson’s, their house, closing the connecting door between them. Tennyson’s and Lilli’s house were part of a terrace of Edwardian houses, each with a different white head above its arched doorway, gazing out across the Green.

Corrie’s other little brother was in the kitchen, pouring out two mugs of tea. He was wearing his shiny green anorak with the hood up, dripping slightly, and green wellingtons. Wet footprints led through from the sun lounge, in which Baskerville, their elderly golden Labrador, was a wet panting heap.

Jo pushed a mug of tea across to him.

“How now, boy!” Corrie said.

“I am like you, they say.”

“Why, there’s some comfort.”

Corrie and Jo regularly addressed each other through quotations, belabouring each other with their erudition. Jo was quite capable of keeping up with his older brother. Corrie had written the music for the school production of
The Winter’s Tale
, performed a fortnight before the end of term, and they were still quoting that to each other. Jo had played the little boy Mamillius, and in the final scene of the play—off-stage, unseen, dead sixteen years—he had sung a song written by Corrie, “’Tis time, descend, be stone no more,” the music heard as Hermione, Mamillius’s mother, stepped back into life to be reunited with her husband, Leontes. He had a beautiful singing voice.

“How’s Lilli?” he asked.

“All prepared. Six o’clock.”

He looked at the pointed hood, and Jo’s sharp-featured face.

“You look just like a garden gnome dressed like that,” he said.

“That’s right,” Jo answered, swinging his legs round. “I’m the National Elf.”

He kicked his wellingtons off, hung his anorak on one of the hooks beside the door in the sun lounge, and began to unwind his long scarf round and round his head.

“The Ideal Gnome!”

He reached up for a biscuit from the tin with the reproduction Victorian design for Colman’s mustard, and then began to
entrechat
about the kitchen, jumping up and down and trying to stand on tip-toe, making extravagant sweeping arm movements, pirouetting through into the living-room. The paintings from school pinned on the family notice-board in the kitchen flapped as he went past.

“Curse this truss,” he said eventually, and sat down, switching on the television.

He picked up the atlas that Corrie had been resting his music notebook on, and took out the pieces of the cut-up “Fitcher’s Bird” illustration, sliding them into place. In an early lesson with Lilli, months ago, he had slit the reproduction from one of his copies of the paperback, and cut it up into thirty pieces to make a simple jigsaw for her to put back together again.

“The heart of a dark pathless forest,’” he quoted as Corrie sat down beside him, carrying his mug of tea. They were both dressed in their best clothes, ready for the German Christmas, wanting to do the right thing for Lilli.

As the television picture appeared, a photograph of a blood-stained body filled the screen. The school siege was the main news again. The German terrorists had killed a woman who had tried to move up towards the school—the mother of one of the children. It was five-fifteen, and the special news bulletin for children was just beginning.

Jo leaned forward, and then jumped up to walk back through into the sun lounge. Corrie heard the clicking of Baskerville’s nails as he slid around the tiles, and the occasional clatter as he ploughed through the heaped toys.

“We will execute all those who try to approach too near us,” the Red Phoenix terrorists had announced. “We will make no concessions whatsoever.”

He looked down at his tea. It was in a Peter Rabbit mug. Peter’s mother was speaking to her children. He wondered whether Jo’s dislike of Mr. McGregor in school was based upon a memory from early childhood.

Jo was obviously thinking about Mum again. He did his daft things, and made his quick comments as much as he ever did, but he did them automatically, his voice quite separate from the rest of him. And recently he had started having the nightmares again, the way he did for two months after Mum’s death, when Dr. Disken had put him on some tablets to help him sleep. Last night Corrie had woken up at three o’clock and gone to the lavatory, and the light was on in Jo’s room. He had gone into his room, but Jo was asleep, and he had left again after switching off