She goes on looking at the basket. Her curiosity outweighs her meanness. ‘I could come with you,’ she says in a more friendly voice. ‘I could help you take it.’
I’d like to respond to this, but I don’t see how I can. I shake my head miserably. She looks away, rebuffed. ‘Oh, well, do it by yourself, then. I don’t care.’
I sit there looking at the ground. I almost had my courage up before she arrived. I was almost ready to face the dogs in the Lanes, even to get close to the German.
‘Off you go!’ she taunts.
I can feel the courage ebbing out of me again with every word she speaks.
‘I’m not going to
follow
you! Is that what you’re worried about? Why should I care where you take her stupid things?’
Impasse. We’re going to be here for ever.
‘What’s inside it, anyway?’ she asks finally, her dismissive tone softened a little once again by her curiosity.
I shrug. ‘Just some things.’
‘What things?’
‘I don’t know.
Things
.’
‘Secret things? Like in your box? Rusty old carving knives?’
I’m too miserable to speak, even if I could think what to say.
She suddenly giggles. ‘Or are
you
her boyfriend?’ she says softly. ‘That would be funny, if your best friend’s Mummy was your girlfriend!’
And now I think I recognise something in her mocking smile, some small glint of sadness, that’s almost like the pleading look in Keith’s mother’s eye when she read me her lecture about the little privacies that people might wish to protect. At that hint all my anguish comes bursting out. ‘I thought’, I cry, ‘that we were going to be …’
But there I stop.
What
did I think we were going to be? I was going to say ‘friends’. Isn’t that what she said before, that I could be her next-best friend after some girl at school? And then didn’t she say that she and the girl at school weren’t best friends any more? I hesitate to mention the word ‘friends’, though, because she’s started all this talk about people’s girlfriends and boyfriends again, and I don’t mean anything silly and horrible like that.
Still, no other word presents itself. ‘Friends,’ I say wretchedly. ‘I thought we were going to be friends.’
And just as suddenly as the trouble started, it finishes. Her big mocking smile vanishes. She gives me one of her little smiles instead. She really wants to be friends just as much as I do.
She unpops her bobbly blue purse. ‘
I’ve
got something secret to show
you
,’ she says. She holds out the open purse, and we both look into it, our heads next to each other, the curled-up end of her hair brushing my cheek. Among the ha’pennies and threepenny bits is a packet, bent and flattened by the narrowness of the purse, with the words ‘10 Players Navy Cut’ along the edge.
We move our heads apart and look at each other. ‘I took it out of Deirdre’s satchel,’ she says.
Inside the packet is a single cigarette, bent and flattened like the packet itself. She pops the purse shut again. The popper opens and closes with a sweetly satisfying sound, I notice, as if it were saying ‘Lamorna’ as a single syllable. ‘That’s why I was coming to your camp,’ she says. ‘I thought we could have another smoke together.’
The air’s full of sweetness and birdsong again. I shrug offhandedly to conceal the great leap of excitement inside me. ‘All right,’ I say grudgingly.
I fetch the matches from the trunk. She puts the cigarette in her mouth, then glances slyly at me as I light it for her. I see the little spark of reflected flame in each of her pupils, and I know that now I’ll have to let her see my secret in return. She lifts her head and releases a mouthful of smoke. She hands the cigarette to me, and even as I draw upon it she leans across me and pulls the teacloth up from the basket. I make no move to stop her. Our quarrel has apparently ended in perfect agreement.
From underneath the teacloth she takes out two eggs. She holds them up for me to see, grinning. I nod. She puts them carefully aside. I hand her the cigarette and she draws on it while I reach into the basket in my turn, and take out a small packet wrapped in greaseproof paper. Inside it are two rashers of bacon.
Barbara giggles. ‘I thought it was going to be things for them to have a midnight feast with. Sweets and beer and things.’
She brings out a handful of potatoes and carrots. I bring out a tin of Spam and a piece of corned beef.
‘Funny sort of midnight feast,’ says Barbara.
I feel in the basket again and find a little white box. On the label is a familiar printed heading: ‘W. Walworth Watkins, MPS FSMC FBOA, Dispensing Chemist and Optician.’ Underneath the heading is a handwritten inscription: ‘Master K. R. G. Hayward. M & B tablets. One to be taken with water three times a day.’
‘M & B,’ says Barbara. ‘It’s what you have when you’ve got a temperature.’
I know. I’ve had them myself. These are probably left over from some illness Keith had last winter.
Barbara takes another drag on the cigarette, and feels in the basket again. This time she brings out an envelope. It’s sealed, but there’s no address on it – not even an x. She looks at me, with her little conspiratorial smile.
I take it out of her hands. We’re not going to look inside a private letter. Looking at the marks on a blotter is one thing, because they’ve been left around for anyone to see, but actually opening the envelope is quite different. Everyone knows that.
She sits watching me reflectively, letting the smoke gradually escape from her mouth. Then she leans slowly forward until her face is only a few inches from mine.
‘What?’ I ask apprehensively, starting back, though I can guess.
She leans closer still, and rests her lips against mine.
Some moments go by. She takes her lips away.
‘Was that nice?’ she asks.
Nice? I hadn’t really got round to thinking about whether it was nice or not. I was too busy thinking about the germs.
‘Deirdre said it was nice,’ she says.
She leans forward again. I close my eyes, but this time I manage not to flinch. I’m aware of a fleck of tobacco on her lower lip, and of not being quite sure where the burning end of the cigarette has got to. An odd thought comes into my head: that I’ve found a value for x.
Again she takes her lips away and looks at me. ‘Well?’
‘Quite nice,’ I say politely.
She straddles across me, pushing me back on to the ground. What she’s doing is leaning over to take the bayonet out of the trunk. She slips the letter out of my fingers, and slits it open.
‘No!’ I say urgently. ‘No, no, no!’
I struggle to sit up, but I’m helpless underneath her. She smiles triumphantly down at me, and slides the letter out of the envelope.
‘No!’ I cry, thrashing about like a beached fish. ‘Don’t! We mustn’t, we mustn’t!’
I realise that someone’s peering in at us through the leaves.
‘Can I have a word with you, old chap?’ says a terrifyingly familiar voice.
Keith’s father. Here of all places. Now of all times.
He stands waiting in the street while Barbara gets quietly off me. We don’t look at each other. Keith’s father, I can see, also has his eyes averted. Barbara begins to put everything back into the basket. I crawl out into the open, and stand in front of him, awaiting my fate. He glances briefly at me.
‘Bring the basket,’ he says shortly, and waits while I go back and take it out of Barbara’s hands. ‘Don’t give it to him!’ she whispers, letting it go as helplessly as I’m taking it. ‘You mustn’t let him have it!’
I follow him across the street to the Haywards’ house, holding the basket with both hands, sick with apprehension. It’s the first time he’s ever addressed me direct. And he called me ‘old chap’, almost as if I were one of the family.
I’m not going to give him the basket, though. By the time he leads the way into the side door of the garage I’ve recovered from my surprise sufficiently to be absolutely certain about that.
I don’t know how I’m going to manage it, but I’m not going to hand it over, whatever happens.
Not even if he calls me ‘old bean’.
The light’s on above the workbench, and he bends over some small piece of metal held in the jaws of the great vice. He puts his head down very close to the work, still whistling. He seems to be measuring whatever it is with a micrometer. The air’s full of the smell of sawdust and oil, of concrete and car, and of fear.
Without warning he stops whistling. ‘Word of advice, old fellow,’ he says. ‘Silly games. Don’t play them.’
Silence. He loosens the micrometer, and tightens it on another part of the metal. I watch him, hypnotised, with no idea what to say or do.
‘Silly games of let’s-pretend,’ he continues, bending to read the micrometer. ‘Somebody asks you to play a silly game of let’s-pretend, tell them, “No, thank you very much – I’m not such a fool.” Child, grown-up – makes no difference. Tell them, “No, thanks. Nothing doing.”’
He suddenly looks up sharply at me, smiling his thin smile. ‘Yes?’ he demands. I nod mutely. He goes on looking at me. ‘People make awful asses of themselves with let’s-pretend, you see, old chap. Get themselves in no end of a muddle. I’ve had a word with Keith. I don’t want any more ideas put in his head.’
He smiles his terrible smile again, but this time I see just the slightest hint in it of what I saw in Keith’s mother’s smile. It comes to me that he finds this conversation as difficult as I do, and for a moment I glimpse a more general and more surprising truth – that adults are not after all members of some completely different species from myself. Even Keith’s father belongs to a branch of the animal kingdom that has some kinship with my own.
‘So – game over. Yes?’
I nod again. There’s nothing else I can do.
‘Basket, then.’
The basket. We’ve got there.
I look at the floor. Silence. The surface of the concrete is more complex than you might imagine. There are pebbles of different sizes embedded in it. Some of the pebbles have somehow freed themselves and disappeared, leaving little pebble-shaped craters.
‘Basket. On the bench, old chap.’
I go on looking at the floor. In some of the craters, I see, smaller pebbles have taken refuge, like hermit crabs in abandoned snail shells.
‘I’m not going to say it again, old bean.’
Still nothing happens, though. Slowly another revelation begins to form, even in the midst of my fear: he’s doing nothing because there’s nothing he can do. He can’t cane me, because by some improbable stroke of kindly providence he’s not my father. He can’t snatch the basket out of my hands, because it would be beneath his dignity to secure something by force and not by fear. All he can do is wait for me to submit.
And I won’t.
This is the bravest and the most shocking thing I’ve done in my entire life. I can feel my limbs trembling with horror and exultation.
Still the silence goes on. I lift my eyes from the floor and look at him. He lifts his eyes from his work and looks at me. For a moment we gaze at each other.
His smile has vanished. He doesn’t seem to be angry, though. He seems to be baffled. He doesn’t know what to do.
He also looks more wretched than I have ever seen anyone look before.
We both quickly look away.
‘
Please
,’ he says, in a strange, small, urgent voice.
And I give in. Against this shameless and terrible word I can’t hold out. I put the basket next to the jaws of the great vice.
I know that this is the weakest and most cowardly thing I’ve done in my life. In the course of a single minute I’ve tumbled from best to worst. And even as I do it, I hear the unhurried, tranquil footsteps crossing the yard behind my back.
‘Ted, darling,’ says Keith’s mother’s voice, ‘Keith
still
hasn’t finished his maths, but he has been working on it for an hour and a half, poor lamb …’
She stops. ‘Hello, Stephen,’ she says in surprise. I can’t look at her. There’s a silence that seems to go on for ever, and I know what she’s doing. She’s looking at the basket on the workbench. Another eternity, and I know she’s looking at me, then at Keith’s father, then at the basket again.
At the disarranged teacloth that no longer hides its contents. At the egg that Barbara has broken in her haste. At the opened envelope.
‘Oh, thank you,’ she says calmly, and scarcely a moment has elapsed after all. ‘Aren’t those the things you and Keith borrowed for your camp?’
She goes over to the bench to pick up the basket. Keith’s father silently moves it out of her reach, then bends over his work, smiling his smile.
Another eternity, and then she turns to me again. ‘Why don’t you go and find Keith and cheer him up?’ she says calmly. She turns back to Keith’s father. ‘I think he might reasonably call it a day on the maths now, mightn’t he?’
What happens after this I don’t hear, because I’m already out of the door. Keith’s waiting on the kitchen step on the other side of the yard, his maths homework in his hands. He looks at me, evidently too exhausted by his struggle with the maths, or too cowed by whatever’s been going on in this house, to be surprised. I don’t try to cheer him up, as his mother suggested. I don’t say anything to him, because I’m too ashamed to speak.
I run back to the street. Barbara Berrill’s lurking there, waiting for me, subdued and frightened. ‘The basket,’ she whispers, looking at my empty hands. ‘He took the basket. What did he do? Did he cane you …?’
I can hardly hear what she’s saying, though, because I’m already halfway down the street.
I’m running home to Mummy. My life’s over.
‘I can’t do anything’, says my mother for the tenth time, ‘if you don’t tell me what the matter is.’
‘
Nothing
’s the matter,’ I insist miserably, also for the tenth time.
‘But I can see you’ve been crying. Look at you!’
‘I
haven’t
been crying!’
‘Is it something at school? You’re not worrying about the exams? The other boys aren’t saying things about you again? They’re not calling you those names?’