The Wolf in the Attic (18 page)

‘My theory is, he gave it up as hopeless, and began living high on the Committee funds. On top of that, he owed money to people in the City, not regular businessmen or banks you understand, but an underclass of moneylenders.’

‘Bloody Jews I expect,’ Bristol snorts.

‘A murky business indeed. In any case,’ the Inspector goes on, ‘I would not be surprised if that were the cause of his demise. You do not cross those men and expect to get away with it.’ There is a clink of glasses.

‘The poor girl,’ Miss Hawcross says.

‘A stint in the workhouse will do her good,’ Bristol declares. ‘Rub off some of the sharp edges. Pride comes before a fall, Miss Hawcross. That’s in the Bible, that is.’

‘Shall I tell her, Inspector?’ Miss Hawcross asks.

‘Best not. There’s no telling what she’ll do. She’s a pretty little thing, but I sense a wildness in her.’

‘That’ll be the dago blood,’ Bristol says. ‘I’ll bet it was dagos as did him in. They all carry knives, that sort. They’ll have your eye out as soon as look at you. Not like an Englishman, who will look you square in the face and give you his fist.’

‘I’ll talk to Weatherforce,’ the Inspector says, ignoring him. ‘Come New Year, we’ll get her out of here and into the Receiving Ward. You’ll still be able to visit her on Sundays, Miss Hawcross. It’s not a prison.’

‘Can she leave of her own volition?’

‘Not until she comes of age.’

‘Then it will be a prison for her, Inspector. She’s a bright, educated girl, and whatever her father did, she is not of the class that commonly makes up such establishments.’

‘Needs must, when the Devil drives, Miss Hawcross,’ the Inspector says. ‘I agree with Mr Bristol. The girl has had an eccentric upbringing. By all accounts, she has been indulged. It may do her a positive good to mix with her social inferiors and have some discipline applied. I was something of a tearaway itself, until the Army knocked it out of me.’

I hear a hand thump a table in triumph, and glasses jumping.

‘There you are Miss Hawcross,’ Bristol exclaims, ‘As prettily put as you like. It will be the making of her, I’m sure. Now stop your worrying and let us put it to the good Inspector how we are to get the monies that are still due to us. There has to be something left. A crook like George Francis will have something put by in a corner, and I says we have first claim to it, for doing right by his brat of a daughter if nothing else.’

I step away from the door and quietly walk up the hall; all the while the thoughts are running about my head like those merry-go-round horses again. What I know of workhouses I have read in stories.
Please sir, can I have some more, sir?

And I know that the last bits and pieces of the world I knew are not to be here much longer.

I
AM NOT
a thief, even if they think my father is one. But the Inspector was quite right about the Devil driving and all that. Pa used to say that too.

The things I heard them say have suddenly cleared away all the black wool from my head, and I feel I am thinking clearly again for the first time since Miss Hawcross came into my room that horrible morning.

Pa is gone, buried in an English Graveyard. The other Greeks have disowned us, and those grown-ups who still have anything to do with me are going to sell me into servitude. Or something like.

I could go to Jack, the way he said I should if I were in trouble, but when there are policemen involved, and a murder, and all these legal things, I feel sure that turning up on his doorstep would do nothing but start a whole other kind of trouble, and I do not want to bring that on him.

The law says I am a child and the State must look after me. But I can look after myself. Or at the very least, I have to try.

I
NEVER USED
to take much notice of the moon before, but now at night I find myself studying it, and gauging just how fat or thin it is. I wonder if the sight of it right now still brings the thing in Luca to the boil, and lets it out like steam from a whistling kettle. It’s odd, how the way you see things changes after a time. The men in the black hats and suits frighten me more than the wolf in the attic, and the attic itself seems like a hideaway, somewhere safe from the plans the world is hatching for me. Luca does not fear the dark, because he is a creature of it. I should like to be that way too, because what goes on in the daylight world fills me with dread.

I
N THE NEXT
two days the house becomes like... like Toad Hall filled with weasels. Mr Bristol has admitted a series of new lodgers.

There is Mr Bartholomew, a skinny long-necked young man who takes Pa’s old bedroom and makes thin porridge in the morning for breakfast and burns the bottom of the pot. He works in the University Press on Walton Street, and always has ink on his fingers.

Then there is Mr Beeswick. He is a carter with thick forearms and a big pot-belly who sets up in Pa’s study and smokes cheroots and stinks out the house with them. He wears a leather apron to work, and hangs it up in the hall, and smells of horse, which I rather like. But I don’t like the way he watches me as I make up my meals in the basement. And he was drunk the first night in the house and tapped his knee and told me to sit on it and I told him to go to the Devil, and he slapped his thick thigh and said I was a little spitfire.

Miss Hawcross has been in and out. She was chaffed by Mr Beeswick and looked as though she should like to slap him – I would love to have seen that. But I sense that she is already washing her hands of me, and she has an odd guilty play on her face every time I speak to her. She is Mr Bristol’s creature now I think. Perhaps the two of them truly believe that Pa has secreted money about the house, like he was Captain Flint. But if he had, surely he would have used some of it to pay the rent and buy proper food at the end of the month?

In any case, there are no more lessons – so I don’t suppose I will ever learn which king came after fat Henry, and I do not greatly care. Miss Hawcross has given me another half crown, and told me not to let on, as if I needed telling.

I wish I knew what had happened to Pa’s watch. It had a photograph under the lid which he never let me look at, but I am sure it was of my mother. And now there is a murderer walking about Oxford with it in his pocket, who knows what she looked like better than I do.

I
HAVE ALMOST
twelve shillings saved up now, and I have been taking other items out of the kitchen when no-one is looking, and under my bed I have built up quite a little kit-bag of useful things. At night when the house is finally quiet, I lay them all out on a blanket. There is small hurricane lantern which I found in the garden shed. The glass is cracked, but it works well enough, and I have the oil for it too.

Matches. A tin water bottle and enamel mug. A knife and fork, and some soap and a facecloth and spare socks. The stubs of some old candles, a pencil, Pa’s scarf and wool cap. And a small cloth bag into which I cram cheese and biscuits and a tin of bully beef.

It is like preparing for an expedition. I wonder what Shackleton or Scott would have included. It would be nice to have a revolver, for polar bears and other things. I miss my little knife.

I try loading in some books too, but they take up too much room in the little knapsack which holds everything. Once I have wrapped the lantern in a blanket and strapped it to the outside and have crammed everything else inside, the bag is chock-f. There is nothing for it but to leave the books behind, but I will not abandon them for Mr Bristol to pawn or paw over. They have been my friends in a way, as much as Pie has been. So I take all of them up to the attic and store them in a box.

It is a strange feeling to stand over them in that forgotten place, to see my things put away up there as so many others were in the years gone by. In some ways it feels almost like another kind of funeral.

I promise myself that I will come back for them, but I wonder how many of the people who lived in the house thought the same. Perhaps one day another girl will find her way into the attic and come across my books years from now, and wonder who it was who put them there. My name is on the fly-leaf of every one. No doubt the girl of the future will wonder who Anna Francis was, and whether she ever amounted to anything. The thought is rather horrible. I do not want to be a lost life. I do not want to be forgotten. That is what the workhouse would mean, and I simply will not have it.

I
T IS
N
EW
Year’s Eve, and the 1920’s are just about done. This night is my last in the old house where I have lived ever since we fled Greece.

It is a queer feeling to know that. I was five years old the first time Pa and I walked down Moribund Lane, and now I feel more grown-up than I ever thought I would, though I am barely twelve.

I certainly feel more sensible than some of the people who are laughing and shouting downstairs. Mr Beeswick and Mr Bartholomew have invited some friends of theirs here for the evening, and they are all in Pa’s study, drinking. There is a gramophone playing Blue Skies, and then Bye Bye Blackbird, and I stop to listen to the music for a few minutes on the landing.

As I tiptoe down the stairs I am crying. I can’t help it and no-one can see me, so I don’t suppose it matters. I stand in the hall and listen to them with their big, beery laughter in the study which was always so quiet when Pa was alive, the music crackling out of it now along with rattles of talk. I hitch up my knapsack, hug Pie close, and open the front door.

There are quite a few people walking up and down, and the snow has died back to frozen rinds of blackened slush. It still feels very cold, and I stand on the front step of the house by the open door for a few minutes. Even now, none of this seems quite real. It is not until I close the door quietly behind me and I hear the lock snick into place that I am sure I can walk on, one step at a time.

One step at a time. I wipe my face, and kiss Pie, and the straps of the knapsack feel heavy and good and purposeful on my shoulders. I get a few looks as I tramp down the road towards Walton Street, and I put a brave face on it in case someone should stop me and ask what I am about. That is the problem with being twelve. All the grown-ups think they have a right to know your business.

The music fades, I turn the corner where once Luca saw me off, and Moribund Lane is behind me, and whatever life I had there is now in the past, as much as is the lost city where I was born. Of all my family, I am the only one left now, and I have to start making a life of my own.

Part Two:

The Roads of England

And the Lord said unto Satan,

Whence comest thou? Then Satan

answered to the Lord, and said

From going to and fro in the earth,

And from walking up and down in it.

Job 1:7

13

T
HE
P
UBS ARE
busy, and there is piano music plinking out of the Jericho and people have spilled out of the front bar onto the pavement. Someone tugs on my knapsack as I go by, but I wrench free and plod on, head down, ignoring everything they say.
Drunken louts
, I think, and part of me wishes I could see their faces if Luca suddenly appeared as the wolf in their midst. The thought makes me smile, and I feel almost light-hearted as I walk north, then make the familiar turn down Walton Well Road.

Here, it is quieter and there are more patches of snow still clinging to corners and dark nooks. I start to hum Bye Bye Blackbird – it is one of those tunes that gets into your head – and the dark of the old decade’s last night on earth deepens all around me, and the chill seems to seep up out of the shadows which loom under the railway bridge, and I cannot help but feel that I am being watched, though there is not another soul around.

All of Oxford is back in the gaslight and music of New Year’s Eve, and not a person passes me as I continue on to Port Meadow and the wide darkness there, and the sky opens up above me with a few stars burning in and out of the clouds. There is no moon that I can see. But still, the notion that I am being watched, even followed, grows on me until I am turning around in my tracks every hundred yards to look back, sure that there will be a dark shape somewhere behind.