Nursery Crimes Part 5

It was a very moving service. Everyone, including Clare, wept.

Zanny, who had spent the afternoon in the care of a neighbour, returned in time for the funeral tea at four. The tea was laid on the dining-room table. There were plates of ham and salad and little gla.s.s dishes of fresh fruit salad and cream. Mummy served her coldly, almost with dislike, and Zanny felt goosepimples on her arms and legs. The only person who took much notice of her and was kind was the Reverend Daniel Edwards of the Baptist chapel. He sat her on his knee and peeled her an apple and taught her how to count in Welsh. His breath smelled of tobacco and his knees were like the bony carcases of dead fowl but when you suddenly found yourself in the wilderness you embraced any Man Friday who happened along. She ate the apple delicately, her head a little averted, and a.s.sumed an att.i.tude of enjoyment. "You are a nice little girl," he told her, "a very nice little girl." Mummy, overhearing, wasn't impressed. It had been a very small coffin - a very deep hole. Perhaps Zanny should have gone after all. Perhaps she should have been frog-marched there and made to look.

On the day after the funeral Clare began to worry that Grandma Morton might want to stay on. Reparation for the horrendous sins of one's offspring didn't quite stretch to an indefinite putting up with a protracted visit. On that score, however, she needn't have worried. Grandma Morton's values were somewhat different from Dolly's. The air of gentility here was so rarefied that it hurt her lungs to breathe. Crisp white bed linen dared one to defile it. The comfortable, sheet-less bed at home, humped up with ancient blankets, had the sleep-inducing embrace of a disreputable kindly old friend. Here the food was good and plentiful but if so much as a morsel got stuck in the cavity of your last remaining tooth it had to lie there in painful politeness. At home you stuck your finger in and gouged it out. It was comfortable to be mannerless and dirty and to sing inebriated hymns to a G.o.d who sat up there somewhere above the German aeroplanes and willed the bombs to their appointed destinations. That life was mapped out in advance was something Grandma Morton implicitly believed. Her own life, she was sure, would continue in a Birmingham tenement amongst friends who went with her to the air-raid shelter and helped out with the rations when the need arose. Those that hadn't got anything very much were on the whole liberal with it. It was a tolerant community, rough-edged but aware. That Dolly should so obviously be happy to rise out of it and into this surprised her. She had come prepared to take her home if she wanted to come, and was relieved that she didn't. The parting would be permanent at some stage in the future and G.o.d no doubt knew what He was doing by planning for her to stay. Mrs. Moncrief wasn't the picture of an ideal mother figure, but Nancy, Dolly's mum, hadn't been either. It was a pity Mrs. Moncrief wasn't the same shape and size as Nancy. The winter coat she had offered hadn't fitted and her shoes were daft. As a final polite gesture she decided she would wear them to the station and put on her plimsolls when the train was on its way". They were good, floggable leather and should fetch something at uncle's.

The station was a little over a quarter of a mile away down a winding road thickly hedged with briar and honeysuckle. The mountains, sombre as calvinist chapels, brooded greyly in the warm sun. Dolly, proud possessor of the strawberry pram, pushed it happily. It contained a carpet bag full of dairy produce including eggs wrapped carefully in an angora jumper. Her grandmother and Zanny's mum walked behind slowly-- speed, or the lack of it, being dictated by the pressure on Grandma's bunions. Zanny, hotly resentful that the pram was no longer hers, masked it by singing vicious little ditties about c.o.c.k robin and p.u.s.s.y down the well. "Who saw him die?" she trilled, "I said the fly, with my little eye." Catching Mummy's expression she skipped ahead and began gathering flowers. "Ding -- dong -- bell - p.u.s.s.y down the well," she warbled. "Who pushed him m? Little Tommy thin . . ."

Grandma Morton hearing tunes, not words, couldn't make out why Mrs. Moncrief was scowling. Perhaps she was afraid that the eggs would break in the angora jumper and spoil it. Perhaps she thought her own daughter should be pushing the pram. Dolly had said that the pram was hers now - a present. If she believed that, then her brain was beginning to soften. That was the worst of living in a place like this - you began seeing the world out there like something in the talkies. No longer real. You stopped taking much notice of it. You sat in your plush cinema seat and were warm and cosy. Eventually you went to sleep.

She began thinking of all the films she had seen.

Zanny looked like Shirley Temple. Dolly, despite being clean, could have come straight out of "Our Gang". She had her hair washed once a week, and a bath every night, and still she wanted to stay. Well, good luck to her.

She whispered and muttered and wheezed and cursed her shoes and boomed out occasionally about the war and about being all sweaty and hoping she wouldn't lose the train. Clare, echoing the hope, sprinted on ahead when she saw it waiting in the station. One of the advantages of living in a village was the power to hold back a train long enough to get an old woman aboard it. With the aid of the porter who doubled as station master, Mrs. Morton was pushed up into a carriage and her luggage bundled in after her.

"Kiss your Grandma," Clare ordered Dolly, but neither Dolly nor Grandma took any notice.

"Skelp 'er if she don't be'ave," Grandma said fondly, easing off her shoes. It was good to be going home to dirty, smelly Birmingham. Here even the station was clean. The steam from the engine wisped up into the blue sky like soap suds. "And don't forget ter clean yer teeth, Dolly," she added, humour tinged with bitterness. Ivory castles they called them in this neck of the woods, how ruddy stupid could you get? She felt more cut off from Dolly now than she did from Willie. He, at least, had departed to G.o.d's bosom as she had remembered him -- runny nose and all.

She leaned out of the window and ran her hand roughly through Dolly's hair and noticed that Zanny stepped smartly back in case she did the same to hers. Funny kid - that one. Her mum should stop stuffing her with codliver oil and malt. She stuffed Dolly with it, too, but it made no difference. Bean thin - Dolly. Always would be.

Her parting words were to Clare as the train began to steam off. "Goldfish," she said, "aint right. Yer rubber's in the wardrobe. G.o.d bless."

Clare, unable to contribute a rational reply, waved mutely as the train steamed off into the distance.

The gloom that had settled on her spirits since the death of Willie began to rise a little. Everything had gone off very well. In time she might be able to train her mind to believe that it really had been an accident. Even if it hadn't been, the act had been impulsive, not planned. Her dislike of Zanny after the funeral had been a shameful reaction. Zanny was a little child. For most of the time she was a good little child. Had she been a quarrelsome, nasty, vicious child she would be making a fuss about the pram that Dolly was pushing. She had let her push it all the way to the station and now she was letting her push it all the way back. Perhaps she was sorry for what she had done. Of course she was sorry. Her loan of the pram to Dolly was her way of showing it.

She held her hand out to Zanny in a conciliatory gesture. "Hold hands with Mummy, darling - while Dolly has your pram?"

Zanny declined politely. She began singing again, a slow, muttered little dirge. "Three blind mice . . . see how they run ..." She ran ahead of Dolly and up the brow of the hill. "Cut off their heads with a carving knife." She stopped. "Cut off their tails with a carving knife." Heads was better. Heads could not be stuck on railings when there were no railings there. In the distance she could see the green van of Evans the Bread winding down the road towards them. He was a nice man - Evans the Bread. He had given her an extra hot-cross bun last Easter. He had given one to Dolly, too. He shouldn't have given one to Dolly. Dolly didn't belong here. She came and took things.

She began running back down the hill to Dolly and the strawberry pram. "Did you ever hear such a thing in your life," she bellowed, "as three blind mice?"

Dolly's hard little hands were clutching the pram handle as Zanny came up to her. Dolly, wary as a forest creature, felt the adrenalin flow, and the small hairs at the nape of her neck tingled as she prepared herself. The van was around the corner now, big and lumbering and coming at some speed. Zanny, with beautiful timing, hurled herself at Dolly, but Dolly, with even better timing, pivoted on her heels, tried to keep hold of the pram, failed and let it go. Evans the Bread saw with horror a child about to be killed - swerved into a pink object that shattered into the bonnet -- and then the van careered out of control and smashed through the low wall and into an ancient oak tree. The petrol tank exploded and flames leapt twenty feet into the branches.

Zanny smelt burnt bread - or it might have been burnt Evans the Bread. She could see him still sitting in the driver's seat, halfway up the tree. He was black like Guy Fawkes on a bonfire. And then she looked for her pram and couldn't recognise it. Dolly was perfectly recognisable. She was sitting in the ditch, glaring. "You've smashed me bleedin' pram," she wailed. "Watcher gone and done that for -- yer silly cow?" And then she turned and looked up at the blazing tree. "Cor!" she said.

Clare, silent until that moment, began to have hysterics. Laughter slashed her with knives and the tears poured down her cheeks. She went down on her knees in the gra.s.s verge and buried her face in a clump of bracken. She laughed and she howled. When she eventually sat up she saw Zanny looking down at her.

"I didn't mean to kill him," Zanny said. "And I didn't mean to break the pram." Her lips trembled.

"No," Mummy said, very coldly, very calmly, "I know."

Two.

The Convent, two centuries old, and built of mellow stone, was beautifully sited south of the Lleyn Peninsula. It was a very select boarding school for girls run by a teaching order of nuns. The syllabus stressed the fact that each child had individual attention and the number of pupils rarely rose above fifty. Emphasis was laid on character building. The spiritual and academic sides of the pupils were carefully nurtured so that the finished product, the syllabus implied, would be a young lady of considerable refinement. She would be good in every sense of the word. She might even one day be a nun -- though no pressure would be brought to bear.

"Both the children are, of course, Catholics?" Mother Benedicta enquired.

Clare, a lapsed Catholic, had been prepared for the question and had decided that for a while at least she would re-enter the fold. Graham, nominally Church of England, didn't give a d.a.m.n one way or the other. While Zanny had been busy murdering the breadman he had been busy dropping bombs on Cologne. His own activity he could forgive, but beloved child as she was, he couldn't quite bring himself to forgive Zanny. He was quite willing to put her anywhere - even in a Zen monastery - if it would do any good. Quite obviously Clare couldn't cope -- perhaps these nuns here could. Mother Benedicta, whom he regarded as the chief religious female, seemed sufficiently formidable. It was a French order and she was called Ma Mere though she was in fact Irish. Most of the nuns were Irish. He wished she would offer him a drink of her native Guinness - or better still some scotch. The last few weeks had been h.e.l.l - and he wasn't thinking of the war. You got used to that.

"My husband and I," Clare said, "are happy that both children should be instructed in the Catholic faith."

It was an adroit side-stepping and Mother Benedicta recognised it as such. "I can accept your religious plans for Susannah," she said, "but the other child, you tell me, is an evacuee. I think her parents should have some say in the matter."

"She's a war orphan," Clare explained. "We can't even trace her grandmother now."

This was true. Grandma Morton might have regarded it as the mysterious working of the Lord to arrange for a bomb to demolish most of the street where she lived very shortly after Zanny's own piece of demolition work. Graham, whose compa.s.sionate leave seemed to be spent in crisis situations, had spent some while trying to get news of her, but had drawn a blank. The fact that he would soon be "drafted abroad, possibly to North Africa, he was beginning to regard with some relief. Let Clare bed her doctor friend. Let Zanny deplete the population in her own inimitable way. Let him fly his bombers in peace.

"But," Mother Benedicta pointed out, "you are not Dorothy Morton's official guardians."

Dorothy Morton, Clare thought, you have not yet met. Neither have I. Neither has anybody. She is Dolly and she still wipes her nose on her sleeve.

"If you will have her," she said, "we are quite prepared to pay her fees - buy all her clothes - be responsible for her until she is old enough to look after herself. If we have to become her official guardians to do all that -then we will - won't we?" This to Graham.

He agreed. All this had been decided before they came. Clare, Graham was beginning to realise, was maturing with the speed of a tropical plant in a rain forest. The pretty, daisy-like little woman of a few weeks ago was becoming positively orchidaceous. She was pink cheeked, dominating, to be reckoned with. Most of this was due to desperation. Dolly couldn't be ditched. Zanny couldn't be incarcerated in solitary confinement. The convent as a compromise was the only possible solution. The convent was neutral ground. Here there was no Monkey. No pink pram. It was unlikely that Zanny would covet Dolly's rosary beads. If she did -then tough. Let Mother Benedicta remove the dagger. Her own mother had had enough.

"Both children," Mother Benedicta pointed out, "are very young. Six, you tell me, and seven?"

"Yes - but according to your prospectus you have children even younger."

"Only because their parents are unable for various reasons - mainly connected with the war - to have them with them. Your home is comparatively safe in a small village not so far from here. Unlike many of the parents you are not in an area of heavy bombing. You are robbing yourself of some of the joys of motherhood by sending them away so young."

Clare was careful not to look at Graham. "The joys of motherhood," she said, "I am prepared to forego."

"May I ask why?"

"Because it is better for both children that they should be here. I can't look after them as well as I should. I haven't the right type of temperament. I'm sure you and the other nuns have." (You even carry keys like a wardress and I've seen your nice neat little cells with a picture of the Bleeding Heart in them. You'll cope. Please G.o.d, the Blessed Virgin, and all the Holy Saints, you'll cope.) Mother Benedicta's slightly bulbous eyes looked like twin flares on a runway guiding an off-course aeroplane home. She turned them on Graham. "Why," she demanded, "should your wife believe she hasn't the temperament to look after two young children? Or do you think she can manage perfectly well?"

When captured by the enemy you gave your name, rank and number; you didn't impart unnecessary information. It was perfectly acceptable to invent. The truth, however, if it did no harm, was the best bet.

"Our daughter, Zanny," he said, "is jealous of Dolly. We can't handle it. We're sure you can."

Mother Benedicta stood up and went over to a bell by the fireplace and pushed it. In a few minutes Sister Bernadette would come in with a tray of tea for three. The problem here was quite obviously no problem at all. What child wasn't jealous of another child? The mother was particularly sensitive. She had no hesitation now about accepting the two little girls. They must be trained to love one another in the Lord. In the meantime there was the question of fees. The little evacuee would probably be extremely backward - extra tuition in reading might be in order. She began making an inventory of all the business details. Money was important, after all.

"As it's war-time," she said, "we have to do the best we can with the clothing coupons. The uniform used to be a dark blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar. Now, it's the rather ubiquitous gymslip. Still dark blue, I'm pleased to say, worn with a white blouse. The winter coat, once grey, is now navy-blue. Can you manage all this for the two of them?"

Clare, who would have raided Harrods if necessary, said she could.

They were in - that was all that mattered. The angelus began to toll. Ding-dong-bell, Clare thought. Board up the convent well. She reached over to Graham and touched his hand. He squeezed it.

It didn't seem fair to Dolly that she should be committed to a convent because Zanny had tried to kill her. On the whole, she thought, she would rather be dead. She had liked the little village school. She had liked its smell of chalk - of wild flowers on the window sills. There were flowers here, banks of them, around statues with naked feet or with sandals with strips between the toes. The flowers were real but they looked as waxen as the statues and they didn't smell. There was a funny pong in the church. It came out of a little gold thing on a chain which a boy swung when he followed the priest. She couldn't see the sense of being deliberately choked with the stuff. If Jesus wanted scent, why didn't He have Attar of Roses, or something? This stuff stank. She had made the suggestion to one of the nuns and the nun, shocked, had told her she'd pray for her. "Ta," Dolly had said bitterly, "ta, very much."

Zanny, on the whole, took to her new surroundings with an almost adult resignation. It was due to happen to her anyway in the course of time. All the Moncriefs had gone to boarding school. The Bradys on Mummy's side had gone to convents, which was much the same thing. It was right to go away to school when you were young; perhaps not this young, but young. The only difference in her case was that Mummy had got tired of her rather quicker than usual. Mummy's displeasure was like dowsing all the fires in the house -- you shivered in the cold. That the fiery end of Evans the Bread might have something to do with it, Zanny was wise enough to guess. Not that anybody had made any fuss about that. The dear, kind policemen hadn't asked her anything. Here there was no atmosphere of censure. Here she was accepted. For one thing, she spoke like everyone else. She handled her knife and fork properly in the refectory. She didn't spit. And on the rare occasions when the air-raid siren sounded and everyone trooped down to the convent cellars, the older girls took it in turn to sit her on their knees. She was a golden-haired little pet, they said, an adorable little sweetie.

Dolly, sitting on the broad end of a P.E. balancing frame because all the chairs had been taken, saw all this and didn't care. Let them go soft over Zanny. If this were a zoo and not an air-raid shelter they'd ooh and aah over cuddly little bears and leopards and orang utans. If tarantula spiders didn't look like tarantula spiders they'd probably ooh and aah over them, too. This last thought was prompted by a large spider which was crawling up the wall behind Sister Philomena. She gazed at it, willing it to drop on to the stiff white bit of fancy headgear that the nuns wore to jazz up the black.

Sister Philomena, misinterpreting the reason for Dolly's screwed up expression, suggested gently that she might like to sit on her lap. The child was quite obviously frightened. She had probably had some terrifying experiences of bombing in Birmingham. Here, n.o.body was scared. There had, so far, been nothing to be scared about. The characteristic engine note of German bombers thrumming overhead was something you got used to. A few months ago one had offloaded its bombs during combat with a fighter. They had made rather a mess of a turnip field, but that was all.