No Peace for Amelia (6 page)

‘Oh, Mama, you’ll be late for work,’ Amelia suddenly exclaimed, looking up at the wag-on-the-wall clock, which wagged away solemnly out of her mother’s
vision
. ‘It’s after half-past eight.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ Amelia’s mother jumped to her feet and ran from the room, all thought of women’s suffrage, the nationalist movement and Amelia’s misdemeanour swept aside in her panic.

Amelia smiled in spite of herself. Mama was always late for work anyway. One more morning wouldn’t make much difference. She stacked the breakfast dishes and took them to the kitchen, hoping Mary Ann could give her a fresh, hot cup of coffee before she had to leave for school. 

S
ome days after Frederick had left for the Front, there came a sharp ringing at the Pims’ door, followed
almost
immediately by an impatient rat-tat-tatting on the knocker and then a thumping sound, as if someone thought the noise of bell and knocker insufficient to call the household to the doorstep and was using some heavy blunt instrument to reinforce his summons. Mary Ann was busy in the kitchen, her hands bloody from some shank beef she was chopping into small pieces for a long, slow stew.

‘Open up, in the name of the king!’ The voice came through the letterbox and rang in the empty hall. The eruption of noise at the hall door made Mary Ann drop her kitchen knife with a clatter, spattering blood on her snowy apron, on the hem of her skirt and on her shoes. She hurried to the sink to clean up, so it was a few
moments
before she got to the hall.

Amelia’s grandmother had already opened the door, and the hall was full of hobnail boots and gruff voices. There seemed to be about a dozen of them, all angry and noisy, but there were really only three. The senior one among them shouted something at his subordinates, and they stopped thumping about and stood sulkily still, their bayonets lowered and their eyebrows thunderous.

‘Are you the young Maloney one?’ the officer asked Mary Ann.

‘Yes,’ said Mary Ann, in a shaking voice. ‘My name is Mary Ann Maloney.’

‘And who are you?’ he asked, turning with a slightly more polite tone to the old lady. ‘Are you the woman of the house?’

Grandmama said nothing at all, merely looked sadly at the men and then at Mary Ann.

‘Leave the old lady alone!’ cried Mary Ann. ‘It has nothing to do with her. She is a Quaker lady.’

‘What has nothing to do with her?’ asked the officer with a sneer. ‘You seem to know something about why we are here.’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Mary Ann stalwartly, wishing she hadn’t dropped the kitchen knife. Not that she would have used it, but she would have felt better with a weapon in her hand.

‘Well, then,’ said the officer, ‘so how do you know who it has to do with?’

‘Because you asked for me by name. Leave her out of
it. And the boy.’ Edmund had crept out of the drawing room and was lurking, terror-stricken, behind his grandmother.

‘Go back in the front room, Ma’am,’ said the soldier. ‘And take the young lad. We’ll deal with this tramp
ourselves
.’

Amelia’s grandmother did not reply. Nor did she
retreat
into the drawing room. She took Edmund’s hand in hers and stood her ground.

The soldier shrugged. ‘Right-oh then. As you wish.’ Then he announced formally, to the ceiling: ‘We are here to search this house in the name of the king.’ He turned then to the two other soldiers and said: ‘Up the stairs. We’ll search the young one’s room first. That’s the most likely place. You show them the way, Maloney.’

Mary Ann stepped forward and placed a
blood-streaked
shoe on the bottom step of the stairs. A strange procession set off up the staircase, led by Mary Ann. The three soldiers followed, their eyes darting everywhere, their weapons at the ready. And Grandmama and
Edmund
took up the rear. The old lady wasn’t going to leave Mary Ann alone with these horrible men, and
Edmund
certainly wasn’t going to stay downstairs by himself.

On the landing, Mary Ann pointed to the narrow steps that led up to her attic bedroom.

‘Oh no,’ said the officer. ‘You keep in our sight. Lead on.’

So Mary Ann led on again, her legs weak with terror and perspiration dampening her armpits, her temples and even the palms of her hands.

The raucous men seemed to fill the tiny bedroom. They scattered pillows and slashed through Mary Ann’s chintz cushion. They poked down the sides of the
armchair
and yanked open the locker and the wardrobe. To her great embarrassment they pulled all Mary Ann’s clothing out of her tallboy, waving her interlock knickers and her flannel petticoats on the ends of their bayonets and ripping her expensive lisle stockings.

Then one of them stood on the loose floorboard. He rocked back and forth on it and shouted: ‘Hey, lads, this is it!’ He pressed down on the floorboard with the heel of his boot and the other end of the board shot up under the pressure.

With a whoop, the two younger soldiers crowded around the rectangular opening and poked into it. A dark smell of creosote came up into the room from the joists beneath, and warm, musty air from under the floor came with it.

Amelia’s grandmother looked at Mary Ann in
consternation
, but Mary Ann didn’t catch her eye. With a moan, she fainted, her knees folding like the hasp of a penknife and her apron billowing as she went down in a graceless heap on the floor. Because the room was so full of
people
, there wasn’t space for her to stretch out and she lay huddled together like a collapsed marionette. Amelia’s
grandmother had to step over her before she could turn to minister to her.

Mary Ann’s lips were blue and her face was
greyish-white
and bloodless. The grandmother shook her
shoulders
and spoke her name. When Mary Ann didn’t
respond
, she smacked her briskly in the face. Mary Ann’s hand went up to her smitten cheek and she opened her eyes. ‘Ma?’ she whispered. ‘Ma?’

‘Mary Ann!’ said the old lady. ‘Mary Ann. It is I,
Hannah
Pim. Can you hear me?’

Mary Ann’s eyes opened wider in surprise, and she put a hand to her head. Then she started to struggle to her feet.

The soldiers had forced up more floorboards and were still groping among the joists. Edmund sat on the top step of the ladder-stairway – for there was no room for him inside – and wept quietly to himself.

Mary Ann stood up, helped by the old woman, and she faced the men who had violated her private world of memories and grief – for her precious letters lay strewn around the room, some of them torn from their
envelopes
, and one at least torn in two, where an impatient hand had ripped it against the knotted bootlace – and said: ‘I hope yous are satisfied now. You’ve wrecked my room, you’ve upset the child and God knows what damage you’ve done. Will you go now, please, since you haven’t found – what you – came – for.’ It was a long speech for someone who’d just come out of a
swoon, and Mary Ann’s voice petered away as she came to the end of it, but her stance was firm if her voice was weak.

‘By God and we will not,’ retorted the officer. ‘We’ll find it all right. Come on, lads!’ And he led the clumping heavy-footed band down the stairs again. They upturned a few pieces of small furniture in the other bedrooms, and swung the curtains half-heartedly, but they didn’t really expect to find anything there. They went on downstairs again, and had a good rummage in the kitchen and the scullery. They rumbled the coal about in the bunker in the yard, and they pitched paint tins and garden tools around the potting shed. One of them poked pointlessly among the branches of the apple
sapling
in the back garden and sliced a twig off with his weapon. Then they marched back through the house again, carrying coal dust from the mess they had made at the coalbunker and leaving coaly footprints in the kitchen, dwindling to black smudges as they reached the hall.

They shook out the coats under the stairs and
upturned
people’s innocent high boots where they stood waiting for wet weather or a trip to the country and they even opened out an umbrella, twirling it pointlessly and bending a spoke or two. They gave a cursory look in the dining room and rattled the crockery in the sideboard, and then they turned their attention to the drawing room. A brass log box stood by the fire, and they heaved
all the logs out of it. They opened the ottoman and yanked out all the blankets and old curtains it contained. They opened the lid of the piano, which stood
inoffensively
against the wall, and ran their gross fingers along the pins and boards, creating a muffled cacophony which made them laugh. They swished the curtains and finally they wrenched the cushions from the chairs and pulled at the innards of the upholstery.

All this time, Grandmama, with her hand under Mary Ann’s elbow to steady her, and a silently weeping
Edmund
followed them wretchedly from room to room, Edmund keeping his eyes averted all the time, and hanging onto his grandmother’s skirt, Grandmama saying nothing, and Mary Ann making occasional squawking protests.

‘Aha!’ called one of the soldiers with a rude laugh, his thick red spade of a hand down the side of a fireside chair. ‘And what is this?’ He wrenched a small handgun out of the upholstery and swung it over his head. Then with a swooping movement he flung it across the room. ‘And how do you account for this?’ he cried with a leer.

Grandmama paled. Mary Ann looked ready to faint again. Sensing the tension, Edmund at last looked up, and with a cry he raced across the room and flung
himself
at the soldier.

‘Don’t you touch that, don’t you touch that, don’t you touch it!’ he yelled hysterically, clawing at the man and stamping both feet in a most unEdmundlike rage,
jumping up and down in anger and distress. Then he sat down on the floor with a bump, flung himself back, wriggled around onto his stomach, and worked his way like a snake across the floor to where the gun lay. He reached out a trembling hand for it, but as he did so, a big ugly boot clamped down on it, and Edmund had to withdraw his hand at lightning speed to avoid having his fingers crushed. ‘Don’t, don’t,’ he cried, sobbing and shaking. He rolled onto his back again and shut his eyes tightly, but still the tears squeezed out and rolled down the side of his face and plopped onto the rug.

The soldier stooped and picked up the gun. He weighed it in his hand, and then he burst out laughing.

‘It’s only a toy. Sure it’s as light as a feather. It’s only made of tin!’

And the other two soldiers laughed again. The soldier nearest Edmund prodded his ribs gently with his boot,
until
Edmund opened his eyes and squinted up at him. The soldier sank onto his hunkers and pressed the gun into
Edmund
’s hand, closing the boy’s fingers over it. ‘Sorry,
laddie
,’ he said in a surprisingly quiet voice. ‘Sorry.’ Edmund sniffed and gripped the gun and said nothing.

With that, the three soldiers brushed themselves down and got ready to leave. The senior man held his cap over his breast in a fine gesture and said to the grandmother: ‘Sorry to disturb you, Ma’am. You can tell the man of the house that there will be compensation for any damage. Good day.’

And the three of them marched out of the room
without
another word, threw the front door open, and slung it shut again, and stomped off down the short path to the gate.

A
melia was the first to get home, swinging her satchel in the spring sunshine. She knocked on the door and as she waited she admired the irises that were lined up prettily under the drawing-room window, so
intensely
blue that they were almost purple, and with a searing gash of deepest yellow drawn through the heart of every one. She admired them with special tenderness, because Frederick had remarked on these very flowers, only a few days previously, on the last occasion when she had spoken to him, on this very doorstep. She bent down on an impulse and broke a flower-head off, and stuck it in her buttonhole.

Why did nobody come? She rat-tat-tatted cheerfully on the knocker again and then playfully slung her satchel at the door with a thudding sound and shouted ‘Open up' through the letter box, little realising that she was echoing the horrible happenings of barely an hour
ago. She was just starting to rap out another tattoo, when Mary Ann flung the door open and said in an angry voice: ‘Stoppit! Will you stoppit!' Then she swung on her heel and disappeared up the stairs, before Amelia could apologise or ask what the trouble was.

The hall looked like something a baby hurricane in a hurry had whirled through. There was a tangle of boots and umbrellas and scarves outside the kitchen door, and if Amelia wasn't mistaken, it looked as if the coalmen had lumbered through the house instead of going around through the little latch-door at the side.

Tentatively, she squeaked open the drawing-room door. The curtains were half-drawn and the cushions lay drunkenly around. An old pink corner of blanket poked untidily out of the ottoman. Automatically, Amelia went and tucked it neatly in. Then she noticed that the lid of the log box was open, and the logs were sticking out of the top, as if someone had hurled them in hurriedly,
instead
of stacking them properly, and there was a
miniature
forest floor of wood chippings and tattered leaves and strips of bark and little brittle bits of fern frond strewn around near the box. There was no sign of Grandmama or Edmund, who could usually be found reading at this time of day, huddled over the fire if the
afternoon
was cool, or on warmer days just huddled over where the fire would have been.

Amelia found them in the kitchen, tidying up. At least, Grandmama was tidying, and Edmund was following
her every step, which was a great hindrance to the old lady in the narrow confines of the kitchen, but she didn't complain. Edmund turned two enormous eyes,
brimming
with unshed tears, on Amelia when she came into the room, and immediately put his hands behind him and stepped back defensively.

‘Whatever's been going on?' asked Amelia, looking from the cowering child to a stray heap of flour in an
unexpected
corner and noticing more coaly streaks on the floor.

‘Well,' began Amelia's grandmother, but she didn't get any further, for Edmund's previously unshed tears
suddenly
trickled over his eyelashes down his cheeks, and he cried out: ‘It isn't real, it's only a toy,' and stepped
further
back from Amelia again.

Mystified, Amelia hunkered down to the boy's level. She took out her handkerchief and wiped the wettest parts of his face, but when she tried to put her arm around his shoulders, Edmund backed off, keeping his hands
awkwardly
behind him. Amelia relented, stood up and raised a querying eyebrow at Grandmama. Her grandmother shook her head, as if to say that it was best not to enquire further, not with Edmund in the state he was in.

‘I think maybe you should go to Mary Ann,' said Grandmama quietly. ‘She's up in her room.'

‘She just bit my nose off in the hall,' retorted Amelia.

Edmund looked anxiously at Amelia's nose, which made Amelia smile.

‘Not literally, silly. I mean she just snapped my head off.'

Edmund's eyes grew rounder and wetter still.

‘I'd better go,' said Amelia.

Amelia found Mary Ann packing. The place was in a shocking mess. There were feathers and little hunks of kapok everywhere, as if Mary Ann had been having the wildest pillow fight with herself, and scraps of paper lay about, like large and colourless confetti. There was a hole in the floor, which Amelia had to step over to reach her friend.

‘What's going on, Mary Ann?' asked Amelia, looking around at the devastation, anger beginning to well up
inside
her.

‘I'm leaving, Miss,' said Mary Ann, folding her things and not looking up.

‘Miss!' exclaimed Amelia. It was always a bad sign when Mary Ann reverted to calling her this. ‘Oh, Mary Ann, what's wrong, what's wrong? Why is everyone so miserable, and why is the house in such a mess? Did you have a fight with Edmund?'

‘Fight with Edmund?' This extraordinary notion made Mary Ann look up. ‘Lawny!' she said, her mouth almost cracking into a smile at the thought of such a thing.

Clearly, this wasn't what had happened. Somebody else, some outsider had wreaked this havoc. How dare they!

Amelia tried another tack: ‘Why is there this hole in
your floor?' and she peered down into the rectangle of dark.

‘That's my hidey-hole,' said Mary Ann, matter-
of-factly
.

‘Hidey-hole? What have you got to hide, Mary Ann?' Amelia's nose crinkled in distaste at the tarry smell from the hole.

‘Oh, things, things.' Mary Ann stuffed some stockings very fiercely down the side of her bag. ‘But not guns, Amelia.'

‘Guns?' Amelia sat down with a thump on the floor and peered into the hidey-hole.

‘
Not
guns, I said. I might be tempted to do it. In fact, for one moment I
was
tempted to do it.'

Amelia looked up at Mary Ann, her mouth open.

‘But then,' Mary Ann went on, in a dreamy voice,
almost
as if she was talking to herself, ‘then I thought about how good and kind your family had been to me, and I knew I could never endanger them – or you, Amelia.'

At this point Mary Ann looked at Amelia, but Amelia still got the impression that she was talking to herself rather than to her.

‘So I refused,' Mary Ann concluded grandly.

‘Gosh!' whispered Amelia.

‘Will you tell your ma that from me, please, Amelia?' Mary Ann was really talking to her now. ‘Even though Patrick begged me. Tell her I refused.'

Amelia was beginning to piece together what had
happened. Someone had come here, looking for guns. And they had thought there would be guns because of Mary Ann, and particularly because of Mary Ann's brother, Patrick. How dare they come into this house of peace! How dare they bring their violence and their war-making and their threats in here! And how dare they drive Mary Ann away like this!

‘No!' said Amelia, her refusal ringing out like a shot. She had almost lost Mary Ann once before, and she didn't want it to happen again. ‘I will not tell my mother anything of the sort, because you're not going
anywhere
, Mary Ann, whatever you did or didn't do for your precious brother. Now, will you take those clothes out of that carpet bag and put them back in the drawer.'

‘No, Amelia, I can't stay now. They suspect me, and any house I'm in will only be suspected too. I can't bring suspicion like that down on this family. I'll have to go.' And Mary Ann went on doggedly folding her clothes and casting aside things too badly damaged by the soldiers to be worth packing.

‘Oh, Mary Ann, I never thought you were a coward!' said Amelia slyly.

‘Coward!' Mary Ann was stung. ‘I'm no coward,
Amelia
Pim.'

‘Well, then, if you're not a coward, you will stay and speak to my mother before you go, and you will tell her yourself that you refused to hide the guns for Patrick.'

Amelia knew that if she could manage to keep Mary
Ann until her mother came home, she had a much better chance of keeping her altogether.

Mary Ann stopped folding, but still she didn't meet Amelia's eyes.

‘If you want to be believed, Mary Ann,' went on Amelia, ‘you'll have to tell her yourself. If you leave now, without talking to her, she might think you left out of guilt.'

‘But I'm not guilty! I didn't do it!' Mary Ann cried out, running her fingers distractedly through her hair,
forgetting
that she had her cap on, and knocking it to one side.

Amelia said nothing. She just slotted the loose
floor-board
into place, closing up the dark hole.

‘Very well,' said Mary Ann at last, and she threw the bodice she was holding onto the bed and finally looked Amelia straight in the eye. ‘I will talk to your mother
myself
. But then I'm going, Amelia. I can't have it said that I brought disgrace on this house.'

Amelia smiled a big, warm, triumphant smile. ‘Come on, so,' she said, and went ahead of Mary Ann to the top of the narrow staircase.

As it turned out, Mary Ann wouldn't have been able to slip away even if she had wanted to, for Amelia's parents were both home already. The girls found them all crowded into the kitchen when they got down. Mama and Grandmama sat at the table, and Edmund crouched on his mother's lap, which he was really far too big for, his face turned away from the company, and only the gleam of his hair showing, gold against her navy-blue
shoulder. Papa was pacing up and down, shaking his head from time to time.

As soon as Mary Ann came into the room, she spoke quickly and firmly:

‘I'm very sorry for all the trouble I've brought on this house, but yous needn't worry about any such a thing happening again, because I'm going to leave. I'm sorry I can't give you the proper notice, but I know yous won't want me to stay another night in yer house, so I'll just leave quietly now.'

For a moment, there was silence in the kitchen,
broken
only by Edmund's soft sighing.

Then Papa spoke: ‘Don't be absurd, girl. We haven't a notion of letting you go.'

Mary Ann looked disconcerted.

‘Certainly I can work a week's notice, Sir, if you
prefer
,' she said proudly.

‘No!' The volume of Papa's assertion seemed to
surprise
even himself. He continued more gently: ‘Mary Ann, we don't want notice.'

‘That's fine, so,' said Mary Ann. ‘I'll just finish my packing and go in that case.'

‘Mary Ann, Mary Ann,' said Papa in exasperation. ‘What I am trying to say is that we want you to stay. We are very angry about what happened here today, but it is not you we are angry with. We know you wouldn't even dream of doing the sort of things these people had in mind. We all know it wasn't your fault.'

Mary Ann slid her eyes around to meet Amelia's, in shamefaced acknowledgement that she had certainly, at the very least, dreamt of betraying the trust of the Pim family, but Amelia just gave her a friendly little smile in return.

Suddenly there came a muffled wail from Edmund, his face still buried in Mama's shoulder: ‘It's my fault!'

Everyone turned to look at him, but all they could see was the crown of his head.

Mama caught hold of a fistful of his fringe and gently prised his head back, so that she could look into his eyes, but he kept them tightly shut.

‘It's me they're angry with!' he wailed again. ‘It's all my fault, not Mary Ann's.'

And he suddenly opened his eyes, jumped off his mother's knee and ran to Mary Ann.

‘I'm sorry, Mary Ann,' he said, looking up at her. ‘I swapped my best engine for it. I thought I wanted it. This big boy had it at school, and everyone thought it was great, and I thought I wanted it. But I don't want it any more.' He shoved his toy gun at Mary Ann. ‘You can give it to your brother if you like. I think he likes guns.'

This was the first Papa had seen of the gun. He looked in consternation at his son.

‘Edmund!' he said sternly. ‘That is not the sort of toy you are allowed to have.'

‘No, Papa,' said Edmund. ‘I'm giving it to Mary Ann's Patrick now. He's allowed. I shouldn't have had it. That's
why the bad men came. I don't know how they knew, though.' And his tear-stained face scrunched up in
puzzlement
. ‘I always kept it hidden.'

‘Why did you hide the gun, Edmund?' asked Mama.

‘Because I shouldn't have had it.' Edmund was
looking
at his boots. Mary Ann looked at hers too, in silent sympathy. It might have been she who had been caught out like this – and it wouldn't have been with a toy.
Amelia
looked uncomfortable too, and tried to suppress an image of Frederick in uniform.

‘And why not, Edmund?'

‘Because we are a Quaker family, and we don't like guns.'

‘And why not? Why do Quakers not allow guns in their houses, even toy ones?'

‘I don't know, Mama.' Edmund continued to regard his boots, as if they were the most interesting footwear ever made.

‘Well, Edmund, it's because we are opposed to war.'

‘Yes, Mama.'

‘And we are so opposed to war, that we don't think that children should even play at war. Do you
understand
, Edmund?'

‘Yes, Mama.' Edmund suddenly looked up at his mother and added: ‘Mama, I wasn't playing at war. I was only playing at cowboys.'

At this, the whole family – all except poor Edmund, that is – burst out laughing, the tension of the dreadful
afternoon broken at last.

Even Papa laughed. He fluffed Edmund's hair and reached out for the gun.

‘Here, give it to me,' he said. ‘I don't think we'll give it to Mary Ann's brother. I don't think he should play with guns either, even if he is grown up. And now I am going to write to my MP to protest at this disgraceful invasion of privacy.'