Opposite the Cross Keys (19 page)

Mr Fenner had an indelible crayon which he kept specially for writing on war memorials. Whenever he came upon one with a blank space at the end of the list of the fallen, he would add the names of horses known to him personally who had sacrificed their lives for their country. Once – in Bawdeswell, I think he said – the vicar had caught him in the act, and threatened to call the police. Luckily for Mr Fenner, there had been a lady in the church doing the flowers. She came over to find out what the fuss was about, and when Mr Fenner explained what he had been doing and why, she was so taken with the idea that she had a plaque put up:
In grateful memory of the horses of the British armed forces who gave their lives for their country in the Great War 1914–1918.
Underneath was engraved:
They graze the pastures of Heaven
.

Mr Fenner did not seem to have a lot of luck with the clergy. Maybe because he was Chapel himself, he always seemed to be getting on their wrong side. One Plough Sunday he, along with the other ploughmen of the parish, brought his employer's team to the church to receive the traditional blessing. Being Chapel, he brought the horses strictly on master's orders and against the promptings of his own conscience.

Describing what happened, Mr Fenner said he had no doubt that this theological unease communicated itself to his charges, Charley and Perce, two perfectly matched Shires who, in his own words, were ‘sweet as honey, but nobody's fools'. If they had been offered the choice between Church and Chapel he was positive they would have said Chapel without a second thought. Decked out with brasses, manes braided with ribbons, their white feathering brushed from hock to heel until it shone like silk, they looked a picture as they lined up in the churchyard with the rest of the horses, waiting for the rector to come out and do his stuff.

The rector, who inclined to High Church, was making rather a meal of the proceedings. ‘Got up like the bloody Pope,' was how Mr Fenner phrased it, ‘with a kid in front of him swinging one o' them smoking things what let out a fart every five paces.'

Charley and Perce behaved beautifully while the rector blessed them. It was simply unfortunate that they had been placed at the end of the front line of horses. As the rector, preceded by his censer-swinging acolyte, rounded their flanks to get to the second row, Charley, as is the way with animals, feeling a sudden call of nature, answered it.

‘Had to go back to the rectory an' change his fancy dress,' Mr Fenner recalled with satisfaction. ‘Came back in a plain suit, not even a dog collar. Blew me up, though, afterwards, something sinful. What he expec' me to do, the silly ole fool? Put a cork in it?'

Mr Fenner selected a young turnip, a charming little vegetable, its creamy coat flushed at the base with a delicate rose. He got rid of the clinging earth by rubbing it along his trouser seam, from waist to thigh, and back again: took a bite out of the sweet flesh and settled back comfortably.

‘Talkin' of horses,' he remarked, ‘you ought to get your pa to get you lessons. Lots o' posh little girls ride.'

‘I'm
not
posh!'

The word cut me to the core. After all my delusions of having settled into Opposite the Cross Keys as to the hovel born, it appalled me to hear myself so labelled. Beside, it was untrue. I wasn't: my family wasn't. I knew quite well, as Mr Fenner evidently did not, that I had not been born with a Pony Club rosette in my mouth. Dancing lessons, yes; piano, even elocution. But not riding. The likes of my father's child did not go swanking off to gymkhanas got up in velvet caps and jackets, breeches and boots that must have cost the earth.

Actually, except for an occasional wistful yearning after those fetching accoutrements, I was grateful for my lowly status because I had no desire – indeed, quite the contrary – to get on terms with that other essential item of gear, the one with four legs at the corners, an uncertain disposition and large teeth.

‘Know what?' said Mr Fenner. ‘You ought to get that gypsy gal to learn you. They got a rare way wi' horses, gyppoes. Born to it, d'yer see? They got a raft of 'em out in that field back o' them caravans. Why don't you arst her learn you how, while you're here?'

This mention of Nellie Smith, about whom, even since Wednesday, I had been unthinking with all my energies, unmanned me. Weeping, I confided to Mr Fenner all about the spring water (all, that is, except for revealing my promise to Tom and my betrayal of his trust: I even made out that the spring in question lay in quite another direction, towards Hautbois) and how Nellie Smith had got a beating from her father because of it.

Haltingly, for I lacked the mental sophistication to arrange my thoughts in manageable order, let alone express them clearly in words, I tried to convey what an unbridgeable gap the man's violence had opened up – not just between Nellie Smith and me, which would have been bad enough, but between me and Salham St Awdry where I had been so happy. If Mr Fenner wanted to know the truth of it, the real reason I had chosen not to go with Mrs Fenner to Norwich that morning was that I was afraid I might have decided not to come back.

‘Them gyppoes ain't St Awdry's.' Mr Fenner finished his turnip, threw away the stump. ‘Never were, an' never will be.' Taking his time, he reached into his pocket for his pipe. Not until he had got the horrible shag smoking away nicely – at least, out of doors, it had the virtue of keeping gnats and midges at a disgusted distance – did he make any further observation upon what I had said. Then he asked, in a casual way, ‘Beat her up bad, did he?'

‘I – I don't know. I saw him undoing his belt. I didn't wait to see.'

‘Oh ah.' A long puff on the pipe. Then: ‘This was when – Wednesday?' I nodded. ‘You bin to ask how she is?'

I hung my head as I admitted that I had not. I did not know how to explain my craven need to distance myself from that flashing length of leather which had invaded my dreams, that silver buckle catching the light of the setting sun as it found its target again and again.

‘Well …' said Mr Fenner, taking his pipe out of his mouth. In that one word he made me aware that things were going to get better from then on. ‘Bugger me if I know what the fuss is about. Don't your pa never give you a belting?'

‘Of course not! He'd never do anything like that!'

‘Oh ah?' Mr Fenner considered, then offered, ‘Maybe it's on account of he's a gent. Can't be because you're a little angel, ' cause we know better, don't we? Or maybe it's on account o' being eddicated, he don't need to. He's got the language. We country bors, not being what you would call civilized, we have to make do with our hands. It's all we got.'

‘But it's so cruel!'

‘Is it now?' Mr Fenner's blue eyes twinkled. ‘You ever asked Maud how many times her cruel ole pa clouted her over the lughole when she was a kid getting above herself, which was seven days outer seven, on the average? You ask her – hear what she says.'

I felt confused. Nobody needed to tell me that Maud loved her father with a love devoid of reservations. I believe that even then, young as I was, I sensed that at least part of the reason why her pathetic little attempts at love affairs came to their premature, unconsummated conclusions was that the love object of the moment never came within miles of coming up to her pa.

I felt even more confused when the iron gate to the allotments creaked open and Nellie Smith came in, looking terrible, with one eye shut and empurpled, a bump on her left temple, and the spaces between the chickenpox scabs, which seemed to have held to their places with undisturbed equanimity, filled in with claw marks which looked as if they had been made by a wild beast or the spike of a large buckle – or possibly both. At the sight of that small, damaged face I felt a powerful urge to run to Nellie Smith, my friend; put my arms round her, speak words of comfort. At the same time I wanted to run a mile.

In the event, I was spared a decision between those incompatible alternatives. The girl approached the shed with quick, purposeful steps, bent over the basin at our feet, and helped herself to a carrot.

As she stood biting into it, showing a gap in her upper jaw where one of her middle teeth was missing, Mr Fenner said in a friendly way, ‘Glad to hear you say please,' whereupon Nellie Smith tossed the carrot back into the basin with, ‘Keep yer mouldy carrot!'

Mr Fenner observed, ‘I begin to see why yer pa give you a belting. Waited longer than he should've.'

‘My dad thinks the world of me!'

‘Oh ah? Funny way he's got o' showing it.'

‘The world of me!' the other repeated. ‘An' I think the world of my dad!'

What I had failed to notice among all the evidences of her hurt was that Nellie Smith was bursting with self-satisfaction. She barely noticed me, save as an audience. Any other audience would have done as well.

‘A king o' men!' she insisted, whirling round so that her skirt flared out in a circle. ‘What you think? That snotty-nose PC Utting come into the camp an' wanted to fetch him down to the nick. Sauce! I told him I fell out of a tree, not that he believed a word of it, but what could he say? He said people half a mile down the road heard me screeching.' The girl giggled. ‘“I got a loud voice,” I said, “an' it were a high tree.”'

She was wearing yet another dress: spotted muslin, full in the skirt but nearer her size this time, which made me realize for the first time how thin she was, a matchstick girl, no thickness to her at all, almost. The dress had short puffed sleeves, the skinny arms they revealed nearly as clawed as her face. She waved them about as if she wanted to draw them to our attention.

‘“In that case,” the copper says, “I'll get an ambulance out here, take you into casualty, make sure there's no bones broken.” I told him what he could do with his sodding ambulance! Did we laugh, when he'd gone off with his tail between his legs! Reckon he could have heard
that
half a mile down the road and all!'

With a sudden movement, like a dancer in a cancan, she flung the back of the muslin skirt up and over her shoulders. To my shocked surprise she was wearing absolutely nothing underneath, unless the still-angry weals which criss-crossed her back and buttocks could be considered something.

She let the dress fall.

‘Couldn't 'a gone to the hospital an' let 'em seen that, could I?' she asked cheerfully, not making it clear whether it was the weals or the absence of underwear to which she referred. ‘Anyways, the old un plunked some stuff on, took the sting out afore you could say knife.'

‘Oh, Nellie!' I got out at last, and burst into tears.

‘What the hell's got into her?' demanded Nellie Smith.

We sat on the bank in the cowslip meadow dabbling our feet in the Sal. In the field behind us buffcoloured cows lay about in the sun, whisking their tails every now and again. You could never have guessed what apricot-scented treasure the field harboured in its proper season. I wondered if Nellie Smith would be there next spring to pick cowslips with me.

I must have mentioned something of the sort, because she said, ‘I dunno,' with no special feeling and as if anywhere was the same as any other where.

Feeling sorry for my rootless friend, I asked, didn't she miss having a home, a real home stuck fast to the ground so it couldn't be moved.

The answer was a laugh that sounded more of a jeer.

‘Rather be a bloody tree, you mean, stuck where you grow, 'stead of having legs to go wherever you want to?' Without waiting for a reply, she went on, ‘You heard of a place called Ancient Greece an' Rome?'

Taken aback by this sudden turn of the conversation, I nevertheless admitted that I had heard of it.

‘Well, then! That were full of houses, weren't it? Big uns – palaces. They had a book in school wi' pictures. Pictures of what's left: bit o' wall here, a couple of pillars there, or a statue of a man wi' no clothes on. Not all of him neither. Tha's what happens to places stuck in the ground. Sooner or later they fall down or get broke up, an' all what's left in the end is a pile of rubbish for the gypsies to pick over.' Nellie Smith regarded me with more disdain than pity. ‘You'll see. Except I shouldn't think as you'll be there to see it. It takes time, ruins does. But sooner or later there won't be no St Awdry's any more, nor Norwich, nor nowhere folk live in houses. But us gypsies'll just get ourselves into our caravans an' drive off whistling!'

I was silent, mulling over what she had just said – or not really mulling, it was too hot: letting the prospect of the down-fall of civilization swish over me like the swallows which kept swishing past, up and down the air, hawking for flies. Since the episode of the spring the relationship between Nellie Smith and me had at once deepened and become more fragile. I had enjoyed the delights, now I understood the dangers, of calling someone friend.

Together, children though we were, we had accomplished something powerful: we had actually influenced, not to say decided, the course of events in that adult world, which, closely as it impinged on our own, was normally outside our ordering.
They
pointed us along the way we had to go, like it or not. For once,
we
had pointed
them
.

The old un had been dead right about the efficacy of virgin spring water. The beautiful Miss Lee had not reappeared in St Awdry's since her drenching. Her cheerful little sports car was no longer seen in the gypsy encampment. Nellie Smith's father, once he had finished beating up his daughter, had taken off for Norwich, and returned tipsy and morose. Since then, according to Nellie, he had not been anywhere; spent his days sitting on his caravan steps drinking beer and looking so defeated that, if you didn't know the truth of it, and if it hadn't been for Nellie's weals and bruises, slow to heal, you might have thought it was she who had belted him instead of the other way round.