Trick or Treat (8 page)

‘Not my problem.'

‘We'll have to find it a new home,' says Petra wearily. ‘And in the mean time, I don't think you should call it anything.'

‘All right then,' Buffy retorts, ‘I won't call her Anything. I'll call her Nothing.'

‘You'll feel bloody stupid standing on the doorstep at night calling, “Nothing,”' grumbles Bobby.

‘Come on, Nothing,' Buffy carries the kitten away upstairs, murmuring to her as she goes.

‘I'm going to get on with the guy,' Bobby says, and follows her.

‘Sorry,' Petra says to Tom. Wolfe frowns at her. He can't see what she's got to be sorry about.

‘You all right?' Tom asks her.

‘Just tired.'

‘I'll tell you what, mate,' Tom says to Wolfe. ‘Why don't you come into town with me tomorrow? I'm going to do a picture.'

‘On the pavement!'

Tom is a street artist, and he's never taken Wolfe with him before. It hasn't been fair because he's taken the others, but never Wolfe. He usually gets left with Petra.

‘That would be great! Can I Mum?'

‘Course you can.'

‘What about a lie-down now,' Tom asks. ‘I could do with a kip myself.'

Petra smiles down at her tea, and nods.

‘All right, me old mate?' Tom says. ‘Can you keep yourself amused for an hour? Watch the box, or something.'

Wolfe nods. Petra and Tom go upstairs together. Wolfe gets the box of fireworks and takes them all out and arranges them on the table. ‘Golden Rain. Traffic Lights. Snakes of Fire,' he whispers. ‘Vesuvius. Red Arrow. Shattering Star.'

Nell goes up the stairs for her afternoon rest. She takes the hat up with her, and puts it on Jim's pillow, beside her.

‘See Jim,' she says. ‘See what I found.'

‘It's hers,' Jim replies. ‘What do you mean “found”?'

‘I did really, on the street. She must have dropped it.'

‘Nell, we don't want that performance all over again. You must give it back.'

‘Hush,' says Nell. ‘I must get some shut-eye. Didn't sleep a wink last night.'

She folds back her eiderdown and settles herself down. She lies on her back, stockinged feet neatly together, toes pointing to the ceiling, eyes closed. There is so much to worry her nowadays, it's a wonder she sleeps at all. There's Rodney. What should she do about Rodney? A good mother would welcome him back, glad to be able to keep an eye on him, and Nell is nothing if not a good mother.

As she drowses, she remembers bombs, the whine and hiss of bombs, brilliant flowering explosions in a frosty night sky, brighter than the full moon and the stars. There is the rattle of machine-gun fire, like hail upon glass, and there are flames that make the city spread out below glow red and almost glamorous. She is a young mother and her baby son clings to her, terrified. Jim is away watching bombs fall from a foreign sky, same moon, same stars; and his baby, baby Rodney, clings to her. She carries him down the stairs and in a daze, a strange state in which she appreciates the beauty of the bombs and the blazing city, she carries him out into the loud and smoky air and into the Anderson shelter where it is cold and mushroomy-dark and almost quiet, and she rocks him to sleep. She is a good mother and her child loosens his clutch on her coat as his breathing deepens and he grows heavy in her arms. Little Rodney is asleep. She puts him down in the packing-case cot Jim made for him, and covers him snugly in blankets. She listens to his breathing, heavy, even, healthy. And then sits huddled and cold, listening to the muffled war outside and sucking a fluffy peppermint she found in her coat pocket. Quite a way away, she thinks comfortingly. They wouldn't bomb here, not ordinary people like me, not mothers with babies, not ordinary houses with ordinary people. But, of course, they would, and they do. There is a high-pitched squeal. Near. Almost in her ear, like a mosquito, close enough to swat. And then there is a pause, silence but for the peaceful rhythm of Rodney's breathing. And then there is a whooshing thud and the shelter rocks and Nell has to stifle a scream. There is a close thumping in the earth, a movement, as if it is gathering itself up to spring, and then it subsides. Nell's heart is racing. There is the awful trickle of sweat inside her clothes although she is so cold. Rodney has not even stirred. He sleeps the sleep of the innocent, the trusting. Nell waits she doesn't know how long, a long time, long enough for the sounds of war to recede, like a storm passing over.

And then she has to look. She has to get out and look to see whether it is her house that has been hit, her carpets and curtains and furniture destroyed. She leaves Rodney where he is safe and goes out into the garden. She has to push hard on the door for there is something in the way: slates, slates blown like autumn leaves against the door. She cannot see at first the few feet to the house for the air is thick and sour with smoke and dust. But her house is still there, intact but for a broken window-pane or two and the glass blown out of the back door. She almost weeps with relief – but there is trouble two doors down, at Olive and Arthur's.

The house is standing but there are flames, there is destruction. There is nothing Nell can do to help, not with a baby asleep in the shelter. She goes back inside and closes the door and only hours later, after all-clear, does she step outside again. Her limbs are stiff with the cold and the cramped position she has been sitting in. Outside everywhere, from everywhere, people are calling and shouting, quite jolly some of the voices as if it is some sort of game – and yes, Olive's voice is among them. The fire is out but there is a smoking hole in the back of the house, and the roof is damaged. Nell crunches on glass and broken slates as she carries Rodney into her own safe house. She tucks him into his wooden cot and then she sets to work, sweeping up the broken glass and scrubbing the floor and the window-sills, brushing the carpet to get rid of the dust and the smoky grime. When it is as clean as she can make it, she goes back outside into the raw light of dawn – for she is attracted to destruction.

Olive's things are everywhere, strewn everywhere with the broken bits of her house. In her own garden, Nell finds some odds and ends worth picking up. As she stands out there looking at the dawn-lit ruins of the city, there is a sudden high-pitched ringing and she jumps, her heart spurting painful blood, thoughts of sinister weapons, delayed-action bombs, racing: and then she laughs. It is an alarm clock. Olive and Arthur's alarm clock most likely, flung right across the gardens. It rings insistently despite its shattered glass, and Nell picks it up from among the sharp fragments that litter the ground and switches it off. She slings it over the fence and carries her more important booty back into the house.

Nell smiles and opens her eyes. She is refreshed though she hasn't been to sleep, not properly. She liked the war. She
was
attracted to the destruction and yet it never touched her, not close enough to hurt, close enough only to thrill. She liked the to-do. She liked to make do. She was ingenious, Jim always said afterwards, while food was still rationed. She made meals that would have been a feast in the best of circumstances; she cut down Jim's old shirts and her own frocks and coats and made little clothes for Rodney that wouldn't have looked out of place in Buckingham Palace. She was a brave woman, a smart woman, and she never let Hitler interfere with
her
routine. Never a day without lipstick, not like some who let themselves look like frights as if war was some sort of excuse for sloppiness. She was excused war work because of baby Rodney but still she was an example of what made Britain great, doing her bit to keep it all going, civilian life, in her own small way. That was what Jim said and he knew what was what, being a fighting man himself. She misses the war. She misses the sense of purpose.

She opens her eyes and looks at Jim. ‘You're right,' she says and smiles at him fondly. ‘I'll have our Rodney back home where he belongs. He
is
our son when all's said and done. He can have his old room back with all his old things.'

Jim smiles at her, pleased, and when he smiles like that it is almost as if sunshine spills out of his frame and into the room. ‘That's my Nell,' he says. ‘And why not get that hat back to Olive? You'll feel the better for it.'

Nell sits up and puts her feet on the floor. She pauses while her body adjusts to the vertical position. She picks up the hat and then drops it. ‘It's got some of her disgusting hair stuck to it. Caught in the straw. Wretched filthy thing. Wants burning. What would I want with it anyway?'

‘That's my lass,' says Jim.

Arthur peers out of the window. ‘Rain's stopped,' he remarks. ‘I'll get off out and look for hat.'

‘You'll find it, won't you Artie?' Olive says.

‘If it's there, Ollie, I'll find it.'

‘And then everything will be all right again.'

‘Mmm.' Olive looks sharply at Arthur. He sounds doubtful. He stoops a little, standing there by the window. He never used to stoop. He used to stand straight, look at the world straight, defiant even. Now, what with his stoop, he looks apologetic.

‘Of course it'll be there,' Olive says. ‘And what will I do?' ‘There's television. There's books. You used to love to read, Ollie. I haven't seen you read for donkey's years.'

‘We used to read, didn't we, Artie? The books we read! When we went away, remember Artie? It never mattered where we were you used to say, we might have been on the moon for all the notice we took. Always with our noses stuck in our books!'

‘I'll fetch you down some books, Ollie, to look at while you wait.'

‘We used to think and talk. We'd read anything. We knew such words! Now when I read, Artie, nothing follows. The whatsits, the joining bits have gone so that nothing follows.'

Arthur smiles at her. ‘Wait on,' he says. She listens to him going upstairs, his footsteps jerky and quick. He will go in the back bedroom, a room she hasn't been in for years. No cause to. The floor of that room is all books and boxes, and the boxes themselves mostly full of books. Two complete sets of Dickens; Tolstoy; Shakespeare; Morris; Tennyson; Wordsworth; Yeats – so many millions of printed words all piled there. They liked it like that. It had been very unlike Artie, but she had persuaded him, and he had come round. If the books had been on shelves, as Arthur had wished, they would hardly have looked at them. You get used to books on a shelf, like wallpaper. Piled on the floor there was movement. They'd sit in there and lean upon the books, rest their wine glasses upon the books, make love among the books sometimes when the mood caught them. They'd move them round, flick through the tops of piles, rebuild. She would untidy and Arthur would neaten. They would turn things up they might otherwise have forgotten. She rubs her eyes.

Arthur returns with a little stack of books. ‘Are you comfortable?' He puts the books beside her, and helps settle her against a cushion. He turns down the gas fire for the room is warm. He switches on the lamp: ‘All right?' He picks some toffee papers up from the floor. ‘I'll have to run Ewbank round in here,' he says.

Olive watches him patiently. She does not want to read. There is something the matter with her eyes nowadays and she cannot read for long before the words jump and jumble, and her temples throb. She probably needs glasses but she doesn't want them. She looks awful enough and the world looks awful enough without them both springing into focus. What with the words jumping and the way one idea won't connect with the next, reading is a miserable business, and she gave it up long ago – as Artie well knows.

‘Won't be long.' Arthur squeezes her shoulder and leaves her be. She hears him going out of the passage, talking away to Potkins. She listens to the quietness. The gas fire hisses and pings, a car drives past, a child shouts. She looks at the books beside her. What has he chosen? Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley – and Arthur's book, the one by Kropotkin that was practically his bible. She opens it and in the lamplight sees that the edges of its pages are furred with dust. Arthur is slipping up. He used to mind about dust; funny that he was so finicky, so particular. And he used to know the book by heart. She has a memory of him standing on the allotment, just a young man, red in the face from digging, a sharp exciting smell of sweat coming from him, making her want him right there. His cupped hands were full of earth. ‘Kropotkin talks about the making of earth by gardener,' he said. ‘The earth became his, through his work. Do you know that in renting contracts of French allotments, gardener can carry away soil he's made?' Olive remembers shaking her head and squeezing her thighs together as she watched the brown earth trickle between his fingers. Sometimes she'd cycle to the allotment just to make love to him in the shed, quick, hot, grubby love that left earthy fingerprints on the skin under her dress, and then she'd cycle home, pressing her soft wetness against the hard of her saddle, an enigmatic smile upon her face.

She chuckles and shakes her head. They were happy, and they were in love. They were not approved of but nobody could say that they were not happy.

She puts Arthur's book down and picks up
Under the Greenwood Tree
. There is her name in the front: ‘Olive Owens, September 1943', in her own handwriting. The book was a birthday gift from Arthur. He had sent it to her from Norfolk. She remembers unwrapping the brown-paper parcel, and opening the book to begin reading immediately and finding that Arthur had underlined the first paragraph.

To dwellers in the wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the notes of such trees as they shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality
.