Opal Plumstead (3 page)

We stood up and ran helter-skelter out of the graveyard, all the way to our respective homes.

I LIVED IN
a house called Primrose Villa. It was a pretty name, but our home was small and stark, one of ninety-eight built in bright red brick in an ugly terrace. We didn’t have any primroses in our garden – just a dusty privet hedge, a square of grass, and some puny rose bushes at the front. We had no garden at all at the back, just a bleak yard with a washing line and an outdoor WC. The word ‘villa’ implies a large, spacious house, but ours was the opposite. It had a meagre front parlour, a living room and kitchen downstairs, and two bedrooms and a box room upstairs.

Mother and Father had the bedroom at the front, Cassie had the room at the back, and I had the box room. It wasn’t much bigger than a cupboard, but I didn’t mind. It was
my
room, where I kept all my books and could nail my own choice of pictures on the walls. Mother favoured sentimental reproductions of children with fat cheeks and soulful expressions cuddling bug-eyed rabbits. I had reproductions of proper art in my room – soulful Madonnas in glorious cobalt blue cradling pale little Infants.

When I was nine or ten, I went through a fervently religious phase and decided I wanted to be a nun. I used to unhook the dark curtain from the parlour and parade around in my ‘nun’s habit’, chanting psalms and doing my best to look holy. I had grown out of that phase now and tended to think religion a myth – though I still prayed when I felt despairing.

I longed for a proper desk in my room but it was too cramped. My bed and washstand and wardrobe nudged each other uncomfortably as it was. When I painted or did my homework, I had to sit bolt upright on my bed and balance a tray on my lap to make a flat surface. Once absorbed in my work I often relaxed, with disastrous consequences. The tray tilted and my water jar or inkpot spilled. Mother was furious. She couldn’t get the ink stains out, no matter how many times she laundered the sheets.

‘Well, you’ll just have to sleep in black sheets, you careless little missy. We can’t afford to get you any new ones,’ she hissed at me.

I didn’t care. I’d have liked a black coverlet too, and maybe black wallpaper and a black painted ceiling. I liked the décor of deep mourning. Now that I was in my teens I’d developed a taste for Gothic literature and devoured
Dracula
and
Frankenstein
.

I sat down now, balancing the tray across my knees as best I could. I concentrated hard for an hour, doing two pages of algebra and an English comprehension. Then, for a second hour, I painted. I used sepia tones for extra effect, painting the graveyard. I drew the stone angels flying away from their plinths while skinny corpses crept out of their graves and gambolled in the grass.

I heard Mother calling for me intermittently but ignored her as long as possible.

‘
Opal!
’ she cried, bursting into my room. ‘What’s the
matter
with you?’

‘Sorry, Mother, were you calling?’ I said, trying to look innocent.

‘You heard me, young lady!’

‘I was engrossed in my painting.’

‘What are you doing
painting
? What about your homework?’

‘I’ve done it all – see,’ I said, gesturing at my notebooks.

‘Then you can come downstairs and help me make supper.’

‘I don’t think I want any supper today,’ I said, truthfully enough, because the surfeit of toffee chews had made me feel a little queasy.

‘Oh, that’s so typical of you, only thinking of yourself. What about the rest of us? What sort of a daughter are you?’

‘Can’t Cassie peel the potatoes for once?’

‘Poor Cassie’s fingers are sore from stitching.
She’s
done an honest day’s work at Madame Alouette’s.’

Cassie was an ‘improver’ at an expensive hat shop in town. It said it specialized in
the Finest Parisian Millinery
in curly writing on the shop sign – but none of the staff had ever set foot in Paris. Mother always pronounced Madame Alouette’s name with proud emphasis, her tongue waggling, but Cassie told me that Madame only bothered to speak with a French accent in front of clients. Behind the scenes she was plain Alice Higgins from Walthamstow, though she was still as sharp as her own scissors if any of the staff gave her any cheek.

She was rarely sharp with Cassie, who was her favourite apprentice. She sometimes let her model new hats to show them off to clients.

When I stamped reluctantly downstairs to the kitchen, Cassie was wearing silk flowers in her hair. They were deep purple with embroidered crimson centres and dark green leaves. They looked quite wonderful twined through her long red-gold hair.

‘What do you think you are – a bridesmaid?’ I said, pushing past her to the sink.

‘Our Cassie will be a bride, not a bridesmaid,’ said Mother. ‘You look a picture, dear. Did Madame Alouette give you them?’

‘They were left-over trimmings from some old dame’s titfer,’ said Cassie carelessly. ‘Do you think they suit me, Opal?’

I rolled my eyes at her.

‘I’ll give you a couple if you like,’ she said, smiling.

We both knew perfectly well that the flowers would look ridiculous stuck in my limp mousy locks.

‘Oh yes, I’ll twine them all round my specs. Then I’ll look a picture too,’ I said grimly, starting to peel the potatoes.

‘Now now, no need to take that tone. Your sister’s only trying to be kind,’ said Mother. ‘And watch those potatoes – you’re peeling half the goodness away. Don’t they teach you anything useful at that fancy school of yours? They fill your head with all sorts of silly ideas – they’d be far better training you up to be a decent little housewife.’

‘I’m not going to
be
a housewife,’ I said through gritted teeth.

‘Well, you’re certainly going to find it hard to catch a man with that sour look on your face,’ said Mother. ‘Don’t you go filling your mind with daft daydreams, Opal. You don’t want to end up like your father, do you?’

As if on cue, we heard Father’s key in the lock of the front door. We listened to him shuffle into the hall, pause to hang his hat and coat on the hook, and then trail his way into the kitchen.

‘Hello, my girls,’ he said softly.

He looked exhausted, with dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, his face sickly pale. His economy paper collar had somehow come unbuttoned at the back and stuck out at a rakish angle. His old business suit was a size too big for him now, and drooped unbecomingly. He stood unfastening his boots, blinking in the gaslight.

‘Hello, Father,’ I said.

‘Hey, Pa,’ said Cassie.

Mother didn’t greet him at all. She just tapped the large fat envelope on the corner of the kitchen dresser.

‘Your post, Ernest,’ she said, sniffing. ‘Your chick’s come home to roost again.’

I hated the way she said it. And I hated the way Father picked up the heavy envelope, held it to his chest for a moment, and then walked slowly out of the kitchen. We heard him trudge upstairs to the bedroom.

‘Don’t stay up there half the night brooding,’ Mother called. ‘Your supper will be on the table in half an hour.’

Mother and Cassie shook their heads at each other.

I glared at them. ‘Why do you have to be so hateful to him?’ I said fiercely.

‘Now then, don’t take that tone with me,’ said Mother. ‘Can’t you show a little respect?’

‘That’s precisely my point. You’re failing to show Father any respect whatsoever,’ I said.

‘I’ll thank you to mind your own business,’ said Mother. ‘You think you know it all, Miss Clever-clogs, don’t you?’

I felt I
did
know it all. I knew Father was a very clever man, much cleverer than me. He’d won a scholarship when he was a boy, taken his Higher Oxford exams and gone to the university. That was when he met Mother. Her parents owned a little stationer’s supplying all the young gentleman scholars. She was only sixteen and I suppose she looked very fetching. It’s difficult to imagine this, because now Mother is frankly stout, so tightly corseted she creaks when she moves, and her bright hair has faded to pepper and salt, scragged back into a tight bun that exposes the lines on her forehead. Even so, I can see that when she was a girl she might have had her fair share of Cassie’s charm.

There was a courtship and then a hasty marriage, disapproved of by both sets of parents. Cassie and I had never met any of our grandparents. Father didn’t get to finish his degree. He had to go and teach in an elementary school, which he hated. He had been a silent, scholarly child. He couldn’t understand these rough rowdy pupils. He couldn’t control them at all. It made him so ill that he had to stop work altogether for a while.

He started writing when he was lying in bed at home – first tortured confessional pieces, and then fiction, though this was frequently autobiographical. He also wrote children’s stories for Cassie and me. They were melancholy moral tales about little children who misbehave once and consequently suffer terrible disasters and death. Cassie didn’t like these tales and put her hands over her ears and chanted la-la-la so she couldn’t hear. I couldn’t get enough of them, and begged Father to tell me the tale of the boy who ran into the road and got trampled to death by horses, or the story of the little girl who went paddling in a stream and fell into deep water and drowned.

‘Stop telling the children such morbid nonsense!’ Mother said, whenever she overheard.

Perhaps she’d thought the world of Father once, when he was a varsity man and seemed to have prospects. She was full of resentment now. It seemed so unfair, because he was always the sweetest man with the mildest manner, even when she shouted at him. He tried very hard to sell his stories, but without any success so far.

He took a position as a clerk in a shipping office in London. He bent over his desk nine hours a day, entering information in a big ledger, to try to clear our debts. He wrote his stories in the evening after supper. He had a large callous on the middle finger of his right hand from all his penmanship, and developed a permanent headache, so that he often held a cold wet cloth to his temples.

I hated to see him so afflicted. At times I couldn’t help wishing that he was an ordinary father, a bouncy red-cheeked shop man like Olivia’s, who always had a chirpy quip and walked with such a spring in his step that his boots tapped out a tune on the pavement. Then I felt guilty and tried even harder to be a sympathetic daughter, though at times I wanted to seize him by the shoulders and give him a serious shaking.

When supper was ready (sweetbreads and onions and mashed potatoes, an unattractive meal that made me shudder), I said I’d fetch Father.

‘That’s right, ginger him up, Opal. And take that look off your face. I dare say you’d prefer a prime cut of steak, but beggars can’t be choosers.’

‘But why do we have to have
sweetbreads
, Ma?’ said Cassie, for once winking in sympathy with me. ‘They’re cow’s innards, all slimy and disgusting! You chew and chew, and you still can’t swallow them.’

‘You girls should be grateful I stand sweet-talking the butcher so he’ll save me the cheaper cuts,’ said Mother indignantly. ‘He’s promised me a sheep’s head for the weekend.’

Cassie and I made simultaneous vomiting noises and I ran upstairs to Father.

He was sitting on the side of his bed, his rejected manuscript on his knee. He had a dazed expression on his face.

‘Please don’t take on so, Father. All the publishers are fools. I think you’re a brilliant writer,’ I said earnestly.

He wasn’t listening to me. He was reading a letter.

‘Is that from the publishers?’ I asked. Father didn’t usually even get a letter, just a rejection slip.

He nodded. He started to speak, but his voice came out as a croak, and he had to begin again. ‘From Major and Smithfield,’ he whispered. He held the letter close, as if checking it. ‘They
like
it, Opal! They truly like it!’

‘But . . . but they’ve still returned it?’

‘Only for a few trifling corrections. They suggest a different twist to the plot, and a more dynamic opening chapter. Yes, I understand – I can do that easily.’

‘And then they say they’ll
publish
it?’

‘If I re-submit my manuscript, then they say they will reconsider it. It’s very cautiously put, but that’s what they mean! Oh, Opal, they truly like my novel.’

‘I’m so happy for you, Father!’ I threw my arms around his neck and hugged him tightly.

‘If you only knew how much this means to me,’ he murmured into my hair.

‘I
do
know, Father. I’m so proud of you.’

‘Wait till your mother hears!’ said Father. He stood up, clasping my hand. ‘Let’s go and tell her.’

We clattered down the stairs, both of us wanting to be first in the kitchen, jokily pushing and shoving each other as if we were little children.

‘Mother, Mother, guess what!’ I shouted from the hall.

But Father gently elbowed me out of the way and reached the kitchen before me. ‘It’s astonishing news, Louisa!’ he said. He hardly ever called Mother by her full name – she was always ‘Lou’, or ‘my dear’.

‘What?’ said Mother, pausing in her serving of the sweetbreads.