The Pandervils (30 page)

Well, not quite ready, for first he must be undressed. ‘Shall I be a rabbit, Dad, and you skin me?'

Egg thought this a good plan. He whipped out an imaginary knife and skinned his rabbit expertly. He was always surprised that Nicky, who had invented
it, did not find this a rather gruesome game.

‘Oooo!' cried Nicky.

‘Does it hurt?' asked Egg.

‘It hurts something awful,' said Nicky. His father stared down into his face. Nicky gravely returned the look. ‘It only pretends to hurt, you know.'

Footsteps approached the door; went past; came back; stopped. ‘Eggie dear!' It was Carrie's voice.

‘Yes, Mother?' answered Egg.

Carrie came in. The two Pandervils faced her with questions in their eyes. ‘I'm bad again,' said Carrie. ‘Whether you like it or not, you better know. I'm going to bed.'

‘Can I do anything for you? Make you something hot? Rub you?'

‘I'm going to bed,' said Carrie. ‘Oh no, you can't do anything. I must bear the cross alone if it's God's will, though what I've done to deserve all this pain I
don't
know. I'm going back to bed, and never oughta 'ave left it. People don't know 'ow bad it takes me. But never mind.' She paused at the door, and added in raised tones: ‘And there's another thing, Father. You'll have to speak to Daniel.'

‘Speak to 'im?'

‘Yes, speak to 'im. He's not treating my girl right. Not by a long way he isn't.'

‘What's he bin doing?' asked Egg. ‘I
thought:
there was something ‘smorning.'

‘Fast and loose,' said Carrie. ‘On the drink and worse. There's a lot o' dirty sluts in this town, let me tell you. Wish I could lay me 'ands on 'em. Not that I'd
touch
'em. I should think not indeed! You gotta speak to 'im about it.'

‘Um,' said Egg.

‘Oh, you may
um!'
retorted Carrie angrily. ‘You oughta never a let my girl marry a man like that.' She went out, slamming the door behind her.

‘What's dirty sluts?' asked Nicky.

‘Stuff you get in the water after your bath,' said Egg. ‘That soapy scummy stuff as you see wriggling down into the plughole. Now, are we ready?'

Nicky made a mysterious face enjoining silence. He crept closer to his father and whispered: ‘There might be a mouse in the bath, you know. So we must go very quietly and take a peep. Shall we?'

They did.

‘There he goes,' whispered Nicky hoarsely. ‘Can you see him?'

‘Yes. Don't he swim fast!' exclaimed Egg admiringly.

‘He's not
swimming,'
said Nicky reproachfully. He's running. On top of the water, like Jesus. He does run fast, don't he? And in a minute he'll run faster and faster and faster and faster.'

‘Shouldn't wonder,' agreed Egg.

Such a possibility was worth watching for.

‘I told you he would!' said Nicky. ‘He ran as fast as a real one, didn't he!'

In due time Nicky suffered himself to be hoisted into the water and to be soaped and sponged all over. He talked a great deal throughout these processes, and Egg, who privately believed, without irony or reservation of any kind, that this was the pleasantest and cleverest child in the world, sustained his part of the conversation with an unvarying gravity of demeanour and a dancing lightness of heart. And the moment came when Nicky, fortified by his father's presence, found courage to pull the plug up by its chain. With Selina it was a different matter, for the last gurgle of the water was apt, with the help of her artful fancies, to bear a very sinister interpretation. Egg was more genial company, and, when that funny ugly noise did at last occur, Nicky was able to shout with a pleasure unalloyed by fear: ‘Go away, you dirty sluts!' And as he lifted the pink and steaming child out of the bath and planted him carefully on the cork mat, this elderly grocer chanced to recall an odd saying that his own mother had been wont to use on bath-nights, more than half a century before, in Mershire. ‘And now,' said Egg Pandervil, ‘you're fit to kiss the ladies!'

Seeing their camp-fire burn low, the two boys hastened to replenish it with sticks and fir-cones and handfuls of crisp rust-coloured leaves; and when the fire blazed again they squatted down in the long grass, which, under the onrush of darkness, was beginning to sigh and rustle and change its greenness for the colour of slate-roofs. Responding to the mood of the hour and the magic desolation of the scene about them, they were silent for a long while. From time to time one of them, without getting up, tossed another stick or two into the flames. They felt lonely, courageous, mature. A cold wind fluttered out of nowhere and blew the woodsmoke—an acrid memorable smell —into their sensitive young nostrils. The elder boy, Ralph Tooley, was thirteen years old. The younger, Nicky Pandervil, was not quite twelve. Between them they had just relieved Kimberley.

From where he sat, hugging his knees, Nicky could see the field slanting darkly and steeply
under him to the marshy bulrush beds, and thence rise again, in a more gradual ascent, to the row of conker-trees that flanked Coppett's Avenue. To the west, which was still stained with the afterglow of sunset, the chimney-pots of Albert Road presented to his vision a serrated horizon that might have been cut out of black paper, so artificial and insubstantial did it seem. At one point to the north-east, precisely at the east end of Coppett's Avenue, stood the ugly extensive building known as Coppett's Asylum for Infirm Watchmakers and Clockmakers, a place which Nicky's imagination, misled by a not unnatural confusion of ideas, peopled with aged bespectacled lunatics who spent what remained to them of life in a fantasy of witless and everlasting watchmending. In all other directions nothing was visible but field and trees and wool-gathering sky. Crouched on the summit of his green hill, at his back a belt of pines that completely hid the villas of Victoria Avenue a quarter of a mile away, he felt that at any moment, if he so chose, he could float out into space and remain indefinitely hovering in that mysterious middle distance. Coppett's Piece bred such fancies, especially when dusk came with its cold sighing breath, and elms and oaks, having quietly dreamed the afternoon long, became quick with whispering noises. Abandoned by Coppett—a benefactor of whom little beyond his name is known—and not yet seized by the ubiquitous builder, it was a region queer, romantic, desolate, and delightful: queer by virtue of its switchback contours, those two
monkey-trees, that suggestive fragment of brick wall, and that sculptured faun lying on his back naked and abandoned in the grass; and delightful because, although Nicky, the grocer's son, could reach it from his home in half an hour, it was in spirit so utterly remote from Farringay High Street. Coppett's Piece was a place where anything might happen.

At this very moment something began to happen.

‘I spy blaggs,' said Nicky, suddenly breaking the silence.

‘Where?' asked his companion sharply.

‘Over there!' Nicky jumped to his feet and pointed. ‘There's one, two …'

His computation was interrupted. ‘Get down, you goat!' said Tooley. ‘If they're really blaggs, we'll have to jolly well look out.'

Nicky, dropping into the grass, realized that his hero Tooley was afraid. This distressed him: not because he despised the weakness but because, on the contrary, he shared it. His own fear was as yet of negligible dimensions, easy to control and to conceal: it owed its tenuous existence only to the face that ‘scooting' at sight of an enemy was against the code.

‘There's four of em,' said Tooley, having crept on his belly to a point of vantage. ‘One's got a basket. Wonder what they're up to.'

‘Have they seen us, do you think?' asked Nicky. ‘Our smoke'll give us away, I expect.'

Tooley made no answer, being still absorbed
in his work of observation. Presently he said over his shoulder: ‘It's two to one, Pandy. And one of 'em's got a basket.'

It made matters the worse, to Nicky's mind, that one of them should carry a basket. The phrase had a sinister quality for him, and he wondered if Tooley shared this feeling. The enemy was no longer in his line of vision, for he still, remembering Tooley's rebuke, kept under cover. It was in his mind to ask: ‘Shall we do a bunk, or stick it?' But by long experience he knew himself incapable of voicing the suggestion. Two to one was heavy odds, in face of which you might retreat with dignity; but he looked to Tooley for a lead, that being the convention of their relationship; a chap could not seem to show funk until encouraged by his seniors to do so. Had the enemy been folks of their own kind, Nicky would not have felt like this. But these were different. The alien world, the world that existed beyond his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances, was divided for Nicky into blaggs and sops. These were enemy. He and his friends were ordinary folk. Sops, most of whom attended the Farringay Grammar School and flaunted green velvet caps with a golden badge, were objects rather of derision—perhaps of secret envy—than of definite hostility. But blaggs were quite another story, something almost subhuman. Blaggs—a term etymologists take pleasure in relating to blackguards — comprehended board-school boys, junior tramps, ill-disposed and ill-dressed strangers, and, pre-eminently, errand-boys
with baskets. They were malicious and dirty; above all, dirty. There are two kinds of dirt. There is the honest dirt acquired by climbing trees and making mud-marbles, and, in general, not being a sop; and there is a dirt more than skin-deep, a pungent terrifying foulness perceptible equally to ears and eyes and nostrils—an emanation, as it seemed to Nicky, from the very soul of this alien race. In conflict with your fellows you might get black eyes and a bloody nose, and, what was even worse, you might get torn clothes that would mean dire trouble at home. All this was natural and acceptable enough. But once get caught by blaggs, and there was no knowing what they would do to you. In was this unknown that Nicky dreaded. There were bloodcurdling stories told, and these, though he happily did not recall them now, had left a precipitate of terror in him.

‘Are they coming this way?' asked Nicky.

‘Shut your row!' whispered Tooley. ‘They'll hear you.'

Without more words it was understood between them that though honour did not demand as yet that they should provoke a battle they were none the less precluded from deserting the field of danger. They were permitted to remain under cover; they were not permitted to retire. Each in his secret heart recognized, and perhaps a little resented, this romantic prohibition.

Once again Tooley glanced sharply over his shoulder, but now, though his lips moved, he made
no sound. By this portent Nicky knew that the worst of the ordeal was yet to come and that the enemy was nearing them. Exquisite the anxiety of the next few minutes, during which time the boy, not being absorbed in the emotion of the moment, was able at times to stand aside and see the whole episode objectively. It did not lose by this process anything of its essential quality, being rather enriched till this onlooker in Nicky had to admit that it was all very much worth while. This mood, however, was gone as soon as come, leaving him comfortless, unheroic, and the adventure unbeglamoured. More for company than for any strategic reason, he crawled on his belly towards the edge of the slope, not resting until he lay side by side with Tooley.

Tooley said: ‘They've got some frogs or something down there. In the basket.'

It was too dark to discern what was in the basket, but the conjecture was so plausible, and so well supported by past experience, that Nicky shivered, feeling a little sick.

‘What for?' he said.

The question was an idle one and was answered by the silence it deserved. Nicky knew as well as Tooley, as well as anyone, that ‘a bit of fun with frogs' was one of the chief delights of blaggs. It was such things that constituted their blaggishness and made the very idea of them turn Nicky's stomach. As the silence lengthened he was aware of a sickness moving inside him. Finding suspense unbearable he moved forward several stealthy
inches and peered over the edge. The enemy, grouped at the bottom of the slope, were now clearly visible. One of their number was seated on an upturned basket, a straw in his mouth and something dark and alive in his hand. Three others stood by, watching, nudging, giggling, and encouraging him with obscene remarks. As the torture moved nearer its crisis Nicky knew that he could stay there no longer: he must go either backwards or forwards. At the same moment he heard Tooley whisper, close into his ear: ‘ Let's go and stop it. What do you say?' Nicky remembered that his right hand was clutching a large stone. Exultation filled him. The passive agony of watching was at an end.

‘You armed?' he asked excitedly. And hardly waiting for an answer he struggled to his knees, gave a loud yell, and hurled his stone. He had aimed, having no thought for consequences, at the head of the Blagg-in-Chief, the fellow on the basket, but by happy chance his stone struck either the frog, so ending that bit of fun, or the hand that held the frog—he couldn't see which. There was immediately an outburst of screaming blasphemy. Nicky jumped to his feet recklessly exposing himself, a stone in each hand. The other blaggs, at sight of him, shouted to their leader: ‘Geou on, Sid! Do 'im in, mate!' It seemed tacitly agreed that the quarrel was to be tried by single combat, but Nicky, having been companioned for many months with more experienced warriors than himself, knew better than to trust these others
to stand by and see fair play. The frog-torturer took a pace or two forward. ‘You come dahn 'ere!' he said invitingly. ‘And see what you'll blurry well git.' By way of extra inducement he promised to castrate Nicky by an exceptionally painful process. Nicky stood waiting. His heart pumped furiously. That savage anger being once and for all spent in violence, he had nothing now but his own spirit to support him.