It’s been going on for weeks, this move, more work than any spring cleaning, and more complicated; as they empty drawers and shift heavy furniture things keep turning up,
churning up, each one a memory and a decision. After the boys dragged the brass-cornered trunk down from Clare’s attic room, Kez and Nan found an old-fashioned dress that must have been their mother’s, carefully folded beneath a tiny yellowed bonnet. Nothing to do but repack them, though they are things that have no real meaning for anyone still alive.
There were things that were less mysterious too, like Charlie’s slingshot, discovered on top of the tall corner cupboard. Dust-covered but still working, as he proved with a wadded-up dishcloth. “Right there, all these years,” Charlie said, turning it this way and that in his bigger hands. Still where their mother must have hidden it, after he startled the carter’s horse; she told him she’d burned it in the stove. And then they had to picture her, tucking in her skirts and climbing up on the stool to push it out of sight. And they had to think again about her hard hand and her punishments, think about what she must have understood about being a boy, and how she maybe planned to give the slingshot back as a reward for some run of good behaviour that he never achieved.
“Where have you been?” Nan says from the doorway, and suddenly Kez feels so frail she almost tells her. Everyone thinks they’re as close as two peas and they are, but once they were closer. They still never run out of things to say to each other, but there are also things they keep to themselves. And there are things they let go, as Nan does now, saying only, “I need your long arms. The good thimble’s rolled under the bed and I can’t reach.”
“It’s not your arms, it’s your fat behind that’s the problem,” Kez says as she stands, and Nan blows out her round cheeks, and does a little shimmy with her hips.
Up in their room, their mother’s sewing box is mounded with spools of thread that must have clattered and unrolled all across the boards. Nan tries to arrange them while Kez lies down on the floor and elbows her way into the farthest corner, thinking how dark it is here, how quiet. A good place to hide, though that’s not a thing she’s ever done. Her fingers close around the thimble and something else that is hard and round, wedged into a crack. When she wriggles out, her opening hand echoes a long-ago day and there it is, a tiny china teapot, painted with delicate blue flowers that are little more than dots.
“What was her name?” Kez says, though they both remember it. Lisbet, of course, the daughter of a man their father got talking to, likely in Armstrong’s tavern. A man who had recently arrived to take over the running of a factory, with a girl just their age who was so mopey just now, and missing her friends back in Cobourg. A visit was arranged, a thing that only two fathers could have thought was a good idea. Kez and Nan knocked on the glossy door, their hair plaited so tightly their faces felt pulled and changed. Dressed in their best, and marking the twitch of scorn on the little girl’s face before she said, in a syrupy voice, “Do come in.”
There was tea and conversation in the parlour, questions about their school, although of course, as her mother said, Lisbet would be going back to Miss Simpson’s. When the cakes were gone they were sent to the playroom, climbing the carpeted stairs behind Lisbet’s flounces and frills. “You may sit there,” she said, pointing to two low, painted chairs, and then she showed them all her toys and games and told them what fine quality they were, as if they wouldn’t have the wit to know. She had a lot to say about the grand house she’d left behind,
and its long green lawns. The white pony that was all her own, and how her father would buy her another as soon as he found one good enough. Kez crossed her fingers and said they’d also had ponies, called Star and Midnight, but of course they were too old for ponies now. “Actually,” Lisbet said, “my father is going to buy me a real horse. Maybe two.”
When she tired of talking Lisbet took down her china-faced dolls, one by one, from the shelf where they sat in a swirl of skirts, and told them their fancy names before she put each one back. Wilhelmina and Jocasta and Evangeline, Felicity and Charlotte. Over by the window there was a dollhouse, sitting on a table that made it taller than they were. Three floors of rooms all papered and furnished, and smaller dolls that lived in them. They played with it for a long time; Kez and Nan were the servant dolls and when Lisbet shook a little bell they had to clump up the staircase with a miniature tea service on a miniature silver tray, and pour for the Lisbet doll, who reclined on a velvet sofa. “You may curtsey and go,” the Lisbet doll said, but each time they arrived back down in the kitchen, with its heavy black stove and hanging pots, the bell would ting and she would say, “More tea—I’m parched.” Until the Kez doll knocked over the table as she passed it with her rocking walk, sending everything flying and making the real Lisbet stamp her foot and tell her she was horrid. Then they had to sit down on the hard, low chairs and watch as she brushed and dressed Jocasta’s hair, until it was time for them to leave.
“You must come again,” her mother said, already closing the door, while behind her Lisbet crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. When they were out of sight, around the corner, Nan opened her fist, her fingers spreading out like petals to
reveal the little painted teapot, and two cups with the tiniest of handles. They ran the rest of the way home, cheeks flushed with the thrill of their wickedness, and for a long time after they took turns pouring, behind the closed door of their room.
“Will you have a cup of tea, Miss Moon?”
“Oh yes, Miss Jug, I’m terribly parched.”
Kez drops the little teapot into the sewing box, just as Nan says, “Will you tell me now where you were all that time?”
“Keep your nose to yourself,” she says, blinking away the picture that rises in her mind. The warm glow of the fringed lamps and the fire behind its screen, the doctor’s kind face and her soft voice, so much worse than if she’d laughed aloud when she spoke of
unreasonable expectations
. There was a time Nan would have been in on everything from the start, but that’s long past and how dare she ask her questions, as if she doesn’t know it.
Downstairs the last of the soup is warming in the big pot, and if Clare remembers to pick up a loaf on her way home that will do them, with some left over for their breakfast. She’ll be lugging her satchel of books, and her head will be spinning with ideas from the lectures she’s been to, but she’s more likely to remember than Charlie, who is reliable only in his unreliability, as their brother Ben likes to say.
He’s still a bit of a worry, is Charlie, with his carelessness, and staying out all hours. Their mother always said he had too much charm for his own good, and said it to him every time he made her smile in spite of herself. If she was still alive she’d be fretting about his tired-looking eyes, the way money slips through his fingers. Still, he manages to pay his share, and the house is certainly more lively since he moved back.
It’s often wild around the supper table, all five of them, until Ben married, slipping into the jokes and silliness of their childish selves, those bits of their characters that don’t mean much, show much, until they spark off each other.
Charlie never said why Mr. Howell dismissed him from the jewellery shop, but he stepped right into a job in the new department store that suits him well, his dapper style and easy manner soon making him the top salesman of scarves and overcoats, of calfskin gloves and fine bristle brushes. He’d learned more than he thought from their tailor father, about fabrics and quality details, and he had a knack for convincing a man that those details mattered and would be noted. That this jacket might cost a little more but it was cut to the latest style in London, and sent an important message about his taste, his status.
It was even easier, Charlie said, if the man’s wife came with him. The lightest of touches on her back as he guided her into a chair. The twitch of an eyebrow, from behind her husband, that told her they were in this together, that they both knew she would do the persuading, her opinion the one that mattered. Better still was when the wives came on their own, to pick up new handkerchiefs, or a gift for some occasion.
Tricks of the trade
, he called it, the way he flattered and listened. The accidental brushing of fingers as he showed the fine stitching inside a slim wallet, or the way he demonstrated how an expensive tie would look, the four-in-hand knot neat around his own smooth neck.
Just
tricks of the trade
, nothing wrong in it, and perhaps only natural that he would also become a trusted companion. He was out most evenings, escorting someone to the theatre, someone else to a concert, or a lecture. The tickets paid for,
gladly, by husbands too busy or uninterested to do it themselves. Such manners he had, he imagined the ladies saying to each other. And a way of settling a woman’s cloak on her shoulders. A wooden box under his bed was slowly filling with collar studs, jewelled cufflinks and other unasked-for gifts he sometimes pawned when his wage wasn’t enough to keep him.
These were things he told Kez, the night she heard crashing in the kitchen. When she crept down with the heavy doorstop in her hand, and found him there, with his shirt mis-buttoned and a sheepish, tipsy look that reminded her of their father. He was trying to make a cup of tea in the moonlight that flooded through the bare window and she did it for him, and sat with him while he drank it, and talked and mumbled. “Ah, the wives,” Charlie said, a slow droop to his eye that was trying to be a wink. Kez said that she didn’t want to hear any more; it wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter. He folded his arms on the table and was instantly asleep, the moonlight hollowing his upturned cheek and giving it a skull-like look that made her shiver.
The door swings open and Charlie and Clare come in from the dark and the cold, in a flurry of talk and stamping feet. Clare says she had to go back for the bread, but it worked out well because she met Charlie and had company for the walk, and was able to show him Aldebaran, and the stars in Orion’s belt. Her eyes are bright, her cheeks flushed with health as well as the cold, proof, if someone was looking for it, that things can change for the better. Not so many years ago that they feared for her life and her mind, the doctor telling them the fever had attacked her heart. She would have to live a quiet life, he said, and take great care not to excite her body or her brain. But when Clare heard that the University was opening a few places
for women she was determined to sit the entrance examination, and when she passed in the first rank, determined to take up her scholarship. For all their worry it’s a joy to see her so happy, to hear her talk about all she’s learning, even though Ben’s the only one close to knowing what she’s on about.
They used to tease Clare about where she came from; she didn’t mind, she knew it was all in fun. Plucked from a tree like an apple or fallen off the back of a coal cart. She didn’t seem to remember anything herself, and that was a blessing, so their mother said once. The state of the room they took her from, and the daft baggage who handed her over. It was the day of that terrible windstorm, all the small boats smashed in the harbour and two men blown from a high roof they were trying to patch. The windows rattling so loudly that Kez didn’t hear the door open, turned from the stove to see her parents standing solemn in the doorway, holding a grubby little girl by the hands.
Ask no questions, you’ll be told no lies
; their father said he threw his shoe into a fairy whirlwind at the corner of Adelaide Street and chanted,
Mine is yours and yours is mine
, the way you had to, to rescue a stolen one. Since he had both shoes still on his feet they knew he didn’t expect to be believed, and besides, sound carried in their little house. Even though they were sent upstairs they all heard Ross when he came home from the Works. His bluster and his silence when their father said, “Why else would anyone send word to us, when the mother went off without her?” It became a thing they knew, though no one ever said it aloud; what mattered was how it was, having a little child in the house again. Watching their mother that first day, bathing Clare with soft soap in the washtub and so carefully combing the knots from her wet hair, Kez saw a
gentleness that they all must have received, even if they didn’t remember it.
Their parents never said more about what had taken them out through the howling streets that day. They had their secrets too, and things they saw no reason to explain. Things that will never be known, now they’re both gone, so really there’s no point in wondering about them. Even the simplest, like who Aunt Peach was exactly, and why she was suddenly in their lives. Knowing wouldn’t have changed the fact of her, the nastiness that oozed out all around her. “Come here and I’ll tell you a story,” Peach used to say, and it didn’t take long for them to learn that it wasn’t a kindness. All of her tales starting,
There once was a child …
A girl or a boy, sometimes disobedient, like the icicle children, but often just minding their business. Walking to market or tending the sheep, sent to fetch water from the stream. Their pure hearts no protection from the terrible things that unfolded, the attentions of the malicious spirit, cloaked in a harmless disguise. It tormented Kez, wondering how you could ever know which leaf to pluck, which stone to heave to break the spell. And poor Charlie woke screaming night after night, babbling about the Water Horse that carried children into the lake, their entrails all that ever washed ashore.
It was war for a time, she remembers. Secret and determined, and who knew exactly how it started. “Help me up, child,” Aunt Peach used to say, from her warm chair by the stove, and they learned to brace themselves for the hidden, vicious pinch. Maybe that came first, or maybe the sharp tack on that same chair, or the clever idea to remove the paper from the hook before her clockwork visits to the privy. Kez
remembers it going on for months, even years, a series of skirmishes, but Nan says, “Surely not.”