The Peppermint Pig (13 page)

‘I’m afraid Poll will never be a worker like Lily and George and she isn’t naturally clever, like Theo,’ Aunt Sarah said. ‘I really don’t know what we’ll do with her!’

‘Plenty of time,’ Aunt Harriet said. ‘Leave her be, she’ll make something of herself yet.’

‘If you’ve got nothing better to do, Poll,’ Mother said, ‘you can find a bit of emery paper and clean that steel fender.’

Poll found something better to do. In the afternoons, while everyone else was locked up in school, she kept out of Mother’s way and roamed, free as air. She went to Bride’s Pit and if there were no gipsies there, poked the water buttercups away with a stick and picked up the horrid black leeches that crawled on the sandy bottom near the edge of the water. Or explored the woods, kicking puff balls into dust clouds and keeping a sharp look-out for Keeper Green. Sometimes, if it was hot and she was feeling lazy, she just crossed the Square and went down Tank Lane and climbed an old elm tree and watched the world go by.

Not that many people came down Tank Lane. Tramps sometimes; Mr Snoop the postman with the two cows he grazed on the lush roadside verges; the rabbit-skin man, a long stick with rabbits skewered on
it over his shoulder; Percy the washerwoman’s son who helped his mother by fetching and carrying the washing in a wooden box on wheels. Percy was dumb except for a queer noise he made in his throat, midway between a croup and a crow – hoo
up
, hoo
up
– as he pushed his old box along, dipping his head up and down like a bird drinking. He passed up and down Tank Lane several times most afternoons while Poll kept watch in the elm tree and the squeal of his cart wheels and his croupy sing-song were part of the dreaming summer days like the feel and the pungent smell of the hairy elm leaves when she squeezed them between her hot fingers.

She saw Lily once, wheeling her bicycle with the handsome wooden-legged Vicar limping beside her and giggled privately when Mother said, later on after supper, ‘What are you so cock-a-hoop about, Lily? You look like a cat that’s been at the cream.’

Another day, she saw Theo and Noah Bugg. They were walking along like friends, heads together, and she noticed, surprised, that Theo was almost as tall as Noah now. She heard Noah laugh and say, ‘You’ll have to think of something else then won’t you, if you want to keep on.’ Theo said something she couldn’t catch, and Noah laughed again. ‘Give over then, Greengrass. S’all one to me!’ He walked off, whistling, and Theo stood and stared after him. When Poll called out softly he looked up and turned red as a poppy.

‘You spying on me?’ he said, as she slid down the tree.

‘What are you blushing about?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Yes you are. I can see your face, can’t I?’

‘You scared me, that’s all.’

‘No it isn’t.’ She saw his sly, silly smile, his eyes puckering up at the corners. ‘He’s still teasing you, is he?’

‘Blackmailing’s the word!’

‘Because of that
egg
you stole? But that’s
stupid
!’

‘You didn’t think so at the time,’ he reminded her. ‘You were scared he’d tell Aunt Sarah and that she’d be so disgusted she’d cast us all off. Hell fire for thieves and liars. The workhouse, anyway!’

He was laughing at her. She said, ‘That’s not fair,’ and gave an indignant sniff, like her mother. ‘I was only young then. I didn’t know any better. It’s not fair blaming me!’

He kicked a loose stone on the road. ‘I’m not, really. You were right in a way. Not about the workhouse, of course, or him telling Aunt Sarah – he’d be too scared for that – but he might have told Mrs Bugg and it would have upset Mother if she’d spread the tale round. Like Mrs Bugg said,
blood will out
. I mean, there was that trouble when Dad left his firm and I thought, suppose Mrs Bugg knows and wants to make something of it? It ’ud give her a fine chance if she knew I’d been caught stealing too! Well,
not
too
, because Dad didn’t take any money but you know what I mean.’

‘No I don’t,’ Poll burst out. ‘You’re just muddling me up like you always do. Muddling yourself as well, I should think.’

‘You un-muddle me, then!’

He looked so wretched that she felt sorry. Poor Theo! He was older than she was, and cleverer, but sometimes it seemed that being clever just made him unhappy. She said, ‘Well, it was such a long time ago, wasn’t it? Ages and ages. If Noah went sneaking now, no one would listen.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not as simple as that, I’m afraid. Trouble is, once you start a thing, you get caught up and it all gets more complicated.’ He squatted on his haunches, picked up several small flints, threw them up and caught them on the back of his hand. When he had done this four times he dribbled the flints through his fingers and said in a sad, hollow voice, ‘Aunt Sarah would say, what a tangled web we weave when once we practise to deceive…’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

He looked at her, then stood up, and sighed. ‘I’ve said things to Noah that I shouldn’t and that I wouldn’t like to get out. Just to keep him quiet in the beginning, and then as a sort of game.’

‘A game?’ She was quite bewildered now.

‘A story, then.’

‘What about?’

‘If I told you, you’d hate me. I hate
myself
.’

‘Because of a
story
? Stories can’t hurt anyone.’

‘Lies can, though. If you tell…’ He looked at her desperately. ‘Please, Poll, don’t ask me to tell you. I’d rather die. Really!’

‘You’re always saying that!’ She thought for a moment. ‘Was it lies about
me
?’

‘No.’

‘Will you tell me sometime?’

He screwed his eyes up. ‘I might. Yes, I expect so.’

‘That’s not good enough!’

‘I’ll tell you before – before your next birthday.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

He spat on his finger, dried it on his jacket, then drew it across his throat with a gurgling sound.

Poll smiled. ‘All right.’ He blinked at her and she added generously, ‘And I promise not to ask before then!’

She would be ten in September. It was only July now and as they walked home it began to seem a long time to wait. She wished she had insisted he must tell her earlier, next week perhaps, but she had promised now. And his serious look made her feel serious too, old and responsible, so that when he said, ‘I’ve got a penny, Poll, what would you like? Sherbet suckers or Cupid’s Whispers? We’ve time to go to the shop before tea,’ she was hurt. Did he think she was a baby
to be bribed with sweets? She said haughtily, ‘I don’t want anything, thank you, you can keep your rotten old penny
and
your rotten old secret, I don’t suppose it’s even worth knowing,’ and ran on ahead, tight-lipped and angry.

Although she continued to feel deeply injured and let Theo know it, pretending she hadn’t heard whenever he spoke to her and being extra nice to Lily and George in his presence to make the point sharper, she couldn’t keep it up. Theo was so quiet, so meek and withdrawn, that there was no fun in tormenting him. And besides, so much was happening just at this moment, the summer suddenly exploding like a firework into a sparkling burst of excitement, she had no time left to brood.

The end of term first; a week later, the Sunday School Treat to the sea in two hay wagons drawn by spruced-up shire horses, coats gleaming like satin; and then, at the beginning of August, the King’s Coronation.

That was a perfect day from beginning to end. Trestle tables were set up in the Square, the whole Town had a huge meal of roast beef and plum pudding, and afterwards there were races and games in the big Vicarage garden. Poll and Annie were among the girls chosen to dance round the maypole, wearing white dresses with fluttering ribbons, and Lily played the harmonium, brought out of the
Church Hall for the occasion. There were races for everyone: egg-and-spoon and three-legged for the children and a comic obstacle course for grown-ups that Aunt Harriet won, losing her hat as she wriggled through an open-ended beer barrel and beating Mrs Snoop the postman’s wife in a close finish. George had too much beer with his beef and had to lie down most of the afternoon but recovered in time for the fancy dress ball in the Assembly Rooms in the evening. The chandeliers tinkled and the floor shook with thumping feet; everyone danced, even Aunt Sarah did a dignified waltz with the Headmaster of the boys’ school and Lily’s copper curls flew as she whirled round in the arms of one young man after another. Poll, watching her, thought she had never seen anyone look so happy and beautiful. She was so happy herself it made her heart sore, a bruised ball of joy in her chest, and when she won first prize for the Little Boy Blue costume Mother had made her, and everyone clapped with delight, it was all she could do not to cry.

One moment it seemed that the lovely evening would go on for ever; the next, they were out in the still, starry night, going home. Poll clutched her prize, a big box of chocolates tied with striped ribbon, and Mother carried the hunting horn Aunt Sarah had lent to go with Poll’s costume; a real hunting horn that had belonged to a long-dead great uncle. Aunt Harriet picked up her skirts and skipped like a girl,
and Lily danced backwards in front of them all and said breathlessly, ‘Did you hear what the Vicar said to old Mr Pocock this afternoon? He said, “That girl’s got nice legs,” and he meant me, I heard him!’

Aunt Sarah said, ‘I thought that dress was too short! You must lengthen it before she wears it again, Emily.’

Mother nodded meekly, but her eyes shone. She put the hunting horn to her lips, and, standing in the middle of the wide Market Square, blew a long wailing blast that echoed back from the houses and silenced them all. Poll looked at her family as the beautiful, sad, haunted sound died away and felt weak with happiness because she loved them so much. She saw Theo smiling at her as if he knew how she felt; she smiled back and forgave him for ever.

She said, ‘This is the best day of my life,’ and they all smiled at her.

Aunt Harriet said, ‘Bless you, Poll, this is nothing. You just wait till you’ve seen a good Harvest Fair!’

George went harvesting and Poll and Theo carried his dinner out in a basket and sometimes stayed to watch the field finished. As the cutter clattered round, the square of wheat in the middle grew smaller and smaller until the terrified rabbits sheltering there came shooting out, ears laid back, zig-zagging wildly over the stubble while everyone shouted and chased them with sticks. Theo once caught a small rabbit but
Poll never did and in the end the farmer gave her a dead one to take home to her mother. There was dust on its eyes and dark blood at the side of its mouth and it stretched out across her arms, stiff and straight as if it was running still. Poll saw the farmer’s wife watching and said, ‘Poor rabbit’ in a sad voice and stroked its long ears and the farmer’s wife smiled.

They had rabbit stew for supper that night, fragrant with herbs from the garden. Theo said, ‘Smells almost as good as a gipsy stew. D’you know how gipsies cook hedgehogs? They roll them in clay and bake them in ashes and the skin comes off with the clay, prickles and all, clean as a whistle.’

The gipsies came into Town several days before the Harvest Fair and camped in the Priory ruins. They kept themselves apart from the other Fair people and spoke their own language: Poll and Theo lingered round their caravans just to hear the flood of strange, bubbling words, although the gipsies often fell silent if they came too close and stared at them with dark, gleaming eyes. But they were friendly enough when they came to the door, selling wooden pegs, and cotton lace, and birds for the pot that they always called ‘pigeons’. ‘Pigeons my foot!’ Mother said, when one of them offered her a cock pheasant, but the man laughed and said it was a Japanese Peacock.

After the gipsies, the rest of the Fair began to arrive and the Market Square filled up with great wagons and caravans carrying tents and side-shows and
merry-go-rounds. Some of the caravans were painted with pictures to show what was inside: sword-swallowers and Fat Ladies and two-headed calves. The Fire Eater was the best, a giant dressed in red satin knee breeches and lace-ruffled shirt, spouting yellow flame from his mouth, but when Poll and Theo hung round, hoping to see him, the only person who got down from the caravan was a short, bald man with a squint.

The day of the Fair, Poll woke up early and went mushrooming. The best mushrooms grew in a field that belonged to a notoriously bad-tempered farmer but Poll was lucky this morning: she had a full basket by the time he appeared in the gateway, yelling and waving his stick. ‘Tan your backside for you if I catch you again,’ he roared after her as she wriggled through the gap in the hedge, and when her heart had stopped pounding she sang as she ran down the lane to show she wasn’t scared by that rude, silly threat: Aunt Harriet had said he wouldn’t dare lay a finger on respectable citizens.

The back door was open and Johnnie sitting on the step in the sun. She gave him a handful of blackberries she had picked on the way home and put the basket of mushrooms inside the kitchen. Then, hearing her mother’s step on the stair, she darted into the garden before she could be asked to lay the table for breakfast.

Out of sight, out of mind – that was the best
course when you might be asked to do something! Safer in Aunt Sarah’s garden, she thought, and went through the wooden gate, Johnnie behind her. ‘You keep to the path,’ she warned him, ‘Aunt Sarah won’t like it if you trample her flower beds,’ and he walked at her heels, dignified as a mayor or an alderman.

Halfway up the cinder path she saw a twist of smoke rising from the summer house and stopped dead. Aunt Sarah sometimes lit a fire there in winter, but rarely in summer, and never at this time of the morning! She waited a minute, feeling uncertain, then marched up and pushed the door open.

An old man was sitting by the fire, roasting an onion stuck on the end of a knife. Poll said sternly, ‘Don’t you know this place is private? What are you doing here?’

He turned his head slowly. He had a stubbly grey beard and long hair so thin that his pink scalp showed through.