Familiar and Haunting

  She found that she had a headache. She was surprised at the headache and wondered if the tight-tied handkerchief had caused it. Then she connected the feeling in her head with a feeling in her stomach; she was hungry. They had all been hungry for the picnic even before the pirate fight, and she had ridden away without eating.

  She was so tired and hungry that she cried a little as she pedaled along. She knew she had nearly twenty pence in the pocket of her anorak. She could buy herself some food.

  But these were not roads with shops on them. Another farm, a derelict cottage, and suddenly a bungalow with a notice at the gate: FRUIT. VEG.

  She leaned her bicycle against the hedge and went up the path toward the front door. But the front door had a neglected look, and a power mower was parked right against it, under the shelter of the porch. She turned and went around the side of the bungalow, following a path but also a faint, enticing smell. The smell grew stronger, more exciting. The side door she came to was also a kitchen door, and it stood ajar. From inside came a smell of roast meat and of delicious baking.

  Val went right up to the door and peered in. The kitchen was empty of people. A meal had just been finished. A baby’s high chair stood near the table, its tray spattered with mashed potato and gravy. There was no food left on the table except more mashed potato and the remains of a treacle tart in a baking tin.

  And there was the smell, overwhelming now.

  Val inhaled and looked.

  A door opened, and a young woman came into the kitchen. She picked up the tin with the treacle tart in it, evidently to put it away somewhere. Then she saw Val’s face at the crack of the door. She gave a gasp.

  Val pushed the door wide open to show how harmless she was, and with the same intention said, “I saw the notice at the gate.”

  “Oh,” said the woman, recovering, “that shouldn’t be there still. Should have come down last week. We’ve not much stuff left, you see. What did you want?”

  “Something to eat now,” said Val. The woman had put the treacle tart down on the table again.

  “Blackberries?” the woman suggested.

  “No,” said Val. “Not blackberries. Thank you.”

  The woman had been staring at her. “Why’s your head tied up? Have you had an accident? You’re very pale.”

  “No,” said Val. “I’m all right really.” The woman’s hand was still on the treacle tart tin; she remained staring.

  “You have had an accident.”

  “Not really.” Val didn’t want to think of what had happened among the brambles. “I fell off my bike.”

  The woman left the treacle tart and came across to Val. She slipped the handkerchief from her head and laid it aside. She examined Val’s brow. “It’s really only a scratch, but it’s bled a lot. You sit down.” She cleaned the wound and then bandaged it. Then, “You’d better have some tea. I was going to make a pot while the baby slept.” She boiled the kettle and made the tea. She also cleared the kitchen table, taking the treacle tart away and shutting it into a larder. Val watched it go, over the cup of tea the woman poured for her.

  Next the woman opened the oven door just a crack. A smell of baking, hot, dry, delicious, came out and made straight for Val. The woman was peering into the oven. “Ah,” she said. “Yes.” She opened the oven door wide and took out two tin trays of scones, done to a turn. She got out a wire rack and began to transfer the scones one by one from the trays to the rack. They were so hot that she picked each one up by the tips of her fingers and very quickly.

  “Have another cup,” she said hospitably to Val.

  “I won’t have any more to drink, thank you,” Val said. The scones sat on their wire rack, radiating heat and smell. The woman finished with the trays and began washing up.

  There were footsteps outside, and a young man appeared, carrying a pig bucket. He left it just outside and came in. “Hello!” he said to Val. “Where’ve you sprung from?”

  “She fell off her bike. I’ve given her a cup of tea.” The woman dried her hands. “You might like a scone, too?”

  Val nodded. She couldn’t say anything.

  The woman slit a scone, buttered it, and handed it to her.

  “What about me?” asked the man.

  “You!” said the woman. From the rack she chose a scone misshapen but huge, made from the last bits of dough clapped together. She slit it, pushed a hunk of butter inside, and gave it to him.

  “Would you like another?” she asked Val.

  Val said she would. The woman watched her eating the second scone. “Haven’t you had much dinner?”

  Val didn’t decide what she was going to say. It came at once. “The others all rode away from me when I fell off my bike. Rode off with the picnic.”

  The woman was indignant. “But didn’t you try to catch up with them again?”

  “I got lost.”

  The woman gave Val a third scone and her husband a second. She went to the larder and came back with the treacle tart, which she set before Val. “There’s a nice surprise for you,” she said.

  They asked where Val lived, and when she told them, the man said, “Quite a way on a bike.”

  Val said, “If you could tell me how to get to the main road from here. All these lanes and not many signposts …”

  “Tricky,” said the man.

  Then the woman said, “Weren’t you taking the van to the garage sometime to get that part?”

  “Ah,” said the man. “Yes. I could set her on her way. Room for the bike in the back.”

  “No hurry,” the woman said to Val. “You sit there.”

  Away somewhere a baby began to cry, and the woman went to fetch it. While she was out of the kitchen, the man helped himself to another scone and butter, winking at Val. The woman came back with the baby in her arms. “You!” she said to the man. He kissed her with his mouth full of scone and kissed the baby.

  The woman said to Val: “You hold her while I finish the washing up.” So Val held the baby, smelling of cream cheese and warm woollies and talcum powder. The baby seemed to like her.

  “Well,” the man said to Val, “I’ll be back for you later.”

  His wife gave him the old mashed potato and other remains for the pig bucket. “It wasn’t worth your coming for it specially,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “But I remembered about the scones.”

  “You!” she said.

  He laughed and went off with his pig bucket again.

  Val nursed the baby, and gave it a rusk, and helped to change its nappies, and played with it. The mother cleared and cleaned the kitchen and washed out the nappies.

  It all took some time. Then the man came again.

  “Ready?” he said to Val. Val took her anorak, which the baby had been sucking, and went with him. He had already hoisted the bicycle into the back of the van. The woman came to the gate with the baby in her arms. The baby slapped at the notice saying FRUIT, VEG. “You never get around to taking that notice down,” the woman said to her husband. He grunted, busy with the van. Val kissed good-bye to the baby, who took a piece of her cheek and twisted it.

  Then Val got into the van, and they drove off. Val was not noticing the way they took; she was thinking of the warm, sweet-smelling kitchen they had left. As they drove along, she half thought they passed one of the two farmhouses she had noticed earlier when she was cycling, but that was all.

  She began to think of what it would be like when she got home.

  They reached the main road at last and drove along it a short way to the garage. Here the man lifted Val’s bicycle out of the van, and she mounted it. He gave her clear directions to set her on her way, ending with “You should be home well before dusk.”

  So she was, and they were all waiting for her. Even Chris was there. The Turner children had wanted to stay, too, but Dad had packed them off home.

  There was a great explosion from Dad about what had happened at the blackberry pick and after. Val was given some supper, b
ut the row from Dad went on during it and after it. Their mother started her ironing; Chris settled down to TV; Peter played a quiet but violent game with soldiers and tanks behind the couch. Dad went on and on.

  “And what about that bandage?” he shouted suddenly. Their mother knocked the iron against the ironing board, almost toppling it. “Where’s my red handkerchief that I lent you?”

  In a flash of memory Val saw the red handkerchief laid aside on the dresser in that scone-smelling, baby-smelling kitchen. “A woman gave me a cup of tea,” she said. “She took the handkerchief off and put the bandage on instead. I must have left the handkerchief there.”

  “My red handkerchief!” Dad shouted.

  “Oh,” muttered Chris, without taking his eyes off TV, “a red cotton handkerchief!”

  “I’m sorry,” Val said to Dad.

  “Sorry!”

  Then Dad cross-questioned her. Who was this woman, and where did she live? All Val could say was that she lived quite a way from the bramble patch and from the main road, in a bungalow with a notice at the gate saying FRUIT. VEG.

  “Right,” said Dad. “You’ll come with me tomorrow. You’ll cycle back the way you came. You’ll help me search until we find that bungalow and the woman and my red handkerchief.”

  So the next day—Sunday—Val cycled with her father alone into the country. Just the two of them; once she would have loved that.

  He led them systematically to and fro among the country lanes. (“Do you recognize this road? Could that be the bungalow? Look, girl, look!”) Dad knew his map, and he was thorough in his crisscrossing of the countryside, but they saw few bungalows, and none with a notice at the gate saying FRUIT. VEG.

  As they passed one bungalow, Val looked up the path to the front door. Against it, under the shelter of the porch, was parked a motor mower. Also a pole with a board at the top; the inscription on the board faced the front door. And behind the glass of a window Val thought she saw movement, the odd, top-heavy shape of someone carrying a child. But they were cycling past too quickly for her to be sure.

  When they got home at last, Dad was too tired to go on with the row. He just said: “A day wasted!”

  Val was even more tired, and she said nothing.

  Lucky Boy

  This was just about a perfect summer afternoon, with sunshine, flowers blooming, and birds singing, even to a cuckoo (only that happened to be Lucy next door, who was good at it), and it was Saturday into the bargain. Everything was in Pat’s favor: jobs done and his family safely in the back garden. He strolled down the front garden to the front gate. Clicked open the gate …

  Free…

  And then: “Where are you going, Pat? Will you take me with you, Pat? Take me, too, Pat!” The cuckoo had stopped calling, because Lucy had given up mimicry to poke her face between the slats of the dividing fence. “Take me.”

  If he went through the gate and on, without her, Lucy would bawl. That was understood on both sides. The question was: would anyone from either house come in response to the bawling? And if they did, would they bother to get to the bottom of things: detain Pat for questioning, cross-examine him on his plans, ruin his perfect afternoon?

  Of course, he could run for it—now, instantly. That was perhaps the only certain way of keeping his afternoon to himself. He would just leave Lucy bawling behind him. What made him hesitate was that once he used to take Lucy on expeditions even without her asking. When Lucy had been a baby in a pram, he had helped to wheel her. Later on, when she was old enough to walk, he had taken her to the sweetshop, and he had even shared his pocket money with her. Not so very long ago he had taken her regularly to the swings and the sandpit and seesaw on the recreation ground.

  So he paused, holding the gate open before him, to reason with her. “I’m not going where I could take you,” he said; “you’re too little.”

  But she simply repeated: “Take me.”

  Pat had delayed, and Lucy’s mother must have been watching from the window. She opened the front door and came down the path toward them, carrying a pair of red sandals. She had misunderstood the situation. “Lucy,” she said, “you put your sandals on if you’re going out of this garden.” And then, to Pat: “Are you taking her to the shops or to the swings?”

  Pat was going to neither, so he said nothing.

  Lucy’s mother went straight on: “Because if it’s the shops, she can have fourpence.”

  “No,” said Pat. “Not the shops.”

  “Well, then!” said Lucy’s mother to Lucy. “You do as Pat tells you now.” She turned briskly back to the house. Lucy’s mother was always like that.

  Lucy had been putting on her sandals. Now she went through her front gate and waited for Pat to come through his. She held out her hand, and he took it.

  They walked to the recreation ground, toward the swings. The sun still shone, flowers bloomed, birds sang—and Lucy with them—but the afternoon was ruined for Pat.

  They were within sight of the swings. “Will you push me high?” Lucy was saying.

  He made up his mind then. Instead of loosening his hold of her hand, so that she could run ahead to the swings, he tightened it. He gripped her attention. “Listen, Lucy. We could go somewhere much better than the swings.” Yes, he’d take Lucy, rather than not go at all. “We’ll go somewhere really exciting—but secret, Lucy, mind. Just you and me, secretly.”

  “Secretly?”

  “Come on.”

  They veered abruptly from the direction of the swings and scudded along the fencing that bounded the recreation ground on its far side. They left behind them the swingers, the sandpit players, and even the football kickers. Down to the lonely end of the recreation ground, where Pat had poked about a good deal recently. He had poked about and found a loose fencing stake that could be prized up and swung aside, to make a gap.

  “No one’s looking. Through here, Lucy—quickly. Squeeze.”

  Gaps in the fencing of the recreation ground were not unheard of, nor boys getting through them when they should not. But trespassing through such holes was disappointing. On the other side of this fence lay only a private garden. True, it ran down to the river, but what was the use of a riverbank neatly turfed and herbaceous-bordered and within spying distance of its house? And if one tried to go further along the riverbank, one soon came to another fence, and beyond it, another private garden, and so on. Trespassing boys looked longingly over to the other side of the river, which was open country—thin pasturage, often flooded in winter, with ragged banks grown here and there with willow and alder. They looked, and then they turned back through the gap by which they had come. And in due course the groundsman would notice the hole and stop it up.

  Pat’s hole had not yet been found by the groundsman, which was a bit of luck, but beyond it, in the garden, lay the best luck of all.

  “Now,” Pat said as Lucy emerged from the hole in the fence into the garden. “Keep down behind the bushes, because of being seen from the house, and follow me. This way to the riverbank, and now—look!”

  Lucy gazed, bewildered, awed. The turf of the bank had been mutilated and the flower border smashed by a tangle of boughs and twigs that only yesterday had been the crown of an alder tree, high as a house, that grew on the opposite bank. For years the river had been washing away at the roots of the alder, dislodging a crumb of earth here and a crumb there, and in floodtime sweeping away the looser projections of its bank. For years the alder had known that its time was coming; no roots could hold out against it. In the drowsy middle of the day, on Friday, there had been no wind, no extra water down the river, but the alder’s time had come. It slid a little, toppled a little, and then fell—fell right across the river, bridging it from side to side.

  The people of the house were exceedingly annoyed at the damage done to their grass and flowers. They spent the rest of Friday ringing up the farmer from whose land the alder had fallen, but the farmer wasn’t going to do anything about a fallen tree until after the weeken
d, and they certainly did not intend to, they said.

  They did not know about Pat. After school on Friday, he found his hole in the fence and, beyond it, the new tree bridge to take him across to the far bank of the river.

  Then he had had no time to explore; now he had.

  “Come on!” he told Lucy, and she followed, trusting him as she always did. They forced a passage through the outer branches to the main trunk. The going was heavy and painful. Pat, because he was just ahead of Lucy, shielded her from the worst of the poking, whipping, barring branches, but still he heard from behind him little gasps of hurt or alarm. More complaint than that she would not make.

  They got footholds and handholds on the main trunk, and now Pat began—still slowly and painfully—to work his way along it to the far bank. The last scramble was through the tree roots, upended at the base of the trunk, like a plate on its edge. From there he dropped onto the riverbank of that unknown, long-desired country.

  And now he looked back for Lucy. She had not been able to keep up with him and was still struggling along the tree trunk, over the middle of the river. She really was too little for this kind of battling, too young, yet Pat knew she would never admit that, never consent to his leaving her behind.

  As he watched her creeping along above the water, he was struck by the remembrance that Lucy could not swim. But she was not going to fall, so that did not matter. Here she was at the base of the trunk now, climbing through the tree roots, standing beside him at last. Her face, dirtied and grazed, smiled with delight. “I liked that,” she said. She put her hand in his again.

  They began to move along the riverbank, going upstream. “Upstream is toward the source of the river,” said Pat. “We might find it. Downstream is toward the sea.”