“Pardon me?”
Her face was too small. No, it wasn’t that. It was that her eyes were so big. And dark, but full of light under rather heavy black eyebrows. Her mouth was wide. Below the full lips, her chin was a soft little triangle. She looked Spanish, Clem thought, not really knowing what that meant; perhaps that he’d seen her in a painting projected onto Jiffy’s wall.
He had to say something. “You’ll get told off.”
She stared at him without expression. Or maybe a smile refusing to be seen.
“I really don’t think so,” she said. A posh voice. Mocking him?
Clem glanced to his left. The foreman was walking in their direction, his face red and slick with sweat beneath his flat cap.
“Clem,” Goz said. A warning. But Clem couldn’t stop looking at the girl. She put the strawberry into her mouth, its plump tip first, and bit it in half. She closed her huge eyes.
“Mmmn. God!” Mumbling it.
A thin rivulet of juice ran from the left corner of her mouth onto her chin. She turned her head and wiped it away on the shoulder of her shirt. She looked at Clem, swallowing.
“You think you’ve got sick of them, but every now and again you get one that’s too luscious to resist, don’t you?”
It seemed to Clem that the world had gone entirely dark for an instant, but he hadn’t blinked.
“Yrrng,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Yeah. I picked that one.”
“Thank you,” she said, apparently seriously.
The foreman came alongside the trailer. He glowered at Clem, then saw the girl. He touched the greasy peak of his cap with two fingers.
“Orright, Miss Mortimer? The work suit you, do ut?”
She waved the remainder of the strawberry at him: a gesture that might have meant anything. The coral-pink flesh of the fruit was neatly grooved by her teeth.
The two boys walked down their rows to where they’d left their marker, three lines of brown earth scraped in the straw. They bent and rummaged, saying nothing to each other. A quarter of an hour later, Goz was a good five yards ahead of Clem. He straightened and carried his full basket back down the row. It was his second; Clem was still on his first.
“Yer mind’s not on the job, comrade. I’m not gorn halvsies if you don’t pull yer finger out.”
Clem looked up. With his back to the sun, Goz was a glowing silhouette.
“Christ, Goz. What a bit of stuff! You see the chest on her?”
Goz leaned down. Blinding light streamed over his shoulder.
“She Mortimer, you Ackroyd. She Montague, you Capulet. Or is it the other way round? I never can remember.”
“What the hell’re you on about?”
Goz punted Clem’s half-empty punnet with his toe. “Do the work, comrade. Me mum’s gonna have the tea on the table in an hour whether I’m there or not. And I’m bleddy starving.”
When they joined the line for the cashing up, the girl had gone.
The next day, Friday, she wasn’t there. Clem and Goz made five shillings in an hour and a half.
SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS were the busiest days for picking. Whole families went: mothers with toddlers perched in wickerwork child seats behind the saddles of their bikes, men with boys on their crossbars and lunch bags over their shoulders. Clem and Goz stood up on their pedals, overtaking at high speed.
The picking had moved to an adjacent, much larger, field. There were two weighing stations. Mortimer’s men were stretching a tarpaulin over a three-sided shelter made of hay bales. Even at this early hour, the day was very hot, and the filled punnets of strawberries would need shade. The two boys pushed their bikes over the baking ground to the far side of the field, where a line of ash trees separated it from a shimmering expanse of ripening wheat.
“There,” Goz said, gesturing with his head.
One ash had lost its grip on the earth and slumped against its neighbor. In their conjoined shadows, a few of last season’s bales had been overlooked. The boys parked their bikes there and stuffed their rucksacks into the spilled hay.
At dinnertime they returned to this den, away from the noisy mob, shuffling themselves into the narrowing shade. They unwrapped their sandwiches with reddened fingers.
“Wanna swap one?”
“Dunno,” Goz said. “Wotcher got?”
“Cheese and piccalilli.”
“Cawd, no. Dunno how you eat that stuff. It’s like yellow sick.”
“Thank you very much, Gosling. I’ll enjoy them all the more for that.”
“My pleasure.”
They drank over-sweet orange squash from a flip-top Corona bottle. It was as warm as blood, despite their precautions. Goz had a packet of ten Bristol cigarettes. They smoked, sighing pleasure. A segment of time passed.
A voice that was neither of their own said, “Give us a drag on that.”
They squinted up. She was wearing the same knotted shirt and short blue jeans as before, stained now, and a misshapen, big-brimmed straw hat that webbed her face with shadow.
Goz reacted first. He held up his ciggie, and she reached down and took it from his fingers. She took a theatrical pull on it, then stepped forward, pushed the boys’ legs apart with one of her own, and flopped onto the ground between them, her back against the broken bale. She took another drag, with her eyes closed.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “Daddy doesn’t know I smoke.”
Clem and Goz leaned forward and goggled at each other (Daddy?) and then, as one, took a peek down her shirt.
Goz found his voice. “Your dad? That’d be the Lord High Mortimer, would it?”
She laughed, snortling smoke. “God, is that really what they call him?”
She opened her eyes and looked at them in turn. There was a little slick of perspiration in the hollow where her throat met her chest. She smelled of sweat and strawberries and something like vanilla ice cream.
“Some do,” Goz said. “We don’t. We’re Communists. We’re making plans for the revolution.”
“Are you? Are you really? Is that why you’re down here away from all the other workers?”
“Yeah. People talk. You can’t trust anybody. There are informers everywhere. Walls have ears.”
“So do corn,” Clem said, and instantly regretted it.
“That was feeble, Ackroyd,” Goz said.
She turned to Clem.
God, her eyes.
“Ackroyd? Any relation to George Ackroyd?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “He’s my old man.”
She studied him. He trembled with the effort of holding her gaze.
“Yes,” she said. “You look like him, come to think of it. I like George. He’s nice. Daddy thinks the world of him.”
“Yeah, well,” Clem said, thinking, She knows my dad? He knew she existed?
“So what’s your first name, son of George?”
“Clem. My ugly mate is Goz.”
The girl stubbed the cigarette out, carefully, on a patch of bare soil and pushed herself forward onto her knees. She looked around the field, then stood up.
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for the smoke. I’ll see you later, alligator.”
“Hang on,” Clem said. “What’s your name, then?”
“Frankie.”
“Frankie?”
“Short for Françoise.” She pronounced it ironically, with an exaggerated Norfolk accent: Fraarnswaars.
“Cawd strewth,” Clem murmured, watching her walk away.
“Dear, oh, bleddy dear,” Goz said sorrowfully.
At three o’clock, Clem straightened up and faked a groan.
“ ’S no good. I gotta find somewhere for a leak.”
Goz didn’t lift his head. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”
Clem hurried for the hedge, stepping over rows, then glanced back, turned right, and walked casually up the field.
She was not among the throng at either of the weighing stations. A tractor was pulling a laden trailer
out of the field. Was that her riding on the back of it? No, just a boy in a blue shirt. Clem stood, indecisive and achingly disappointed. She’d gone. Like a drunk surfacing from a stupor, he realized that he was being looked at and that he knew most of the faces around him. Half the Millfields estate was here today. God, what was he thinking of?
“Orright, young Clem? Lost someone, hev yer?”
That nosy cow Mrs. Parsons from Chaucer.
“No, I . . . No. I was just . . .”
He retreated hastily.
Halfway back, he looked over to where their camp was and saw — could it be? — a soft flash of blue. Just beyond the trees. Two brushstrokes of blue and one of black where the leaf shadow edged into the green-gold haze of wheat. Yes. His breath failed briefly. He made his legs move, made himself take care where he set his feet, crossing the rows. When he next looked up, the vision had gone. Dismay made him gasp and swear. And hurry. He stumbled up and through the gap between two of the ash trees. Their dense shade was like a moment of night, and his eyes were baffled for an instant. But then, there she was, sitting cross-legged but leaning back on her hands, on the narrow berm of dandelion-freckled and daisy-splashed grass beyond the tree line. The straw hat was on the ground beside her left knee. Her head was lifted away from him, and her eyes were closed. She was smiling. She seemed to be listening to the frantic debate being conducted by a parliament of greenfinches in the branches overhead.
He would remember all these things long after they’d been blown away. Scraps of talk, sound, would drift back like flakes of burned paper on a spiraling wind:
“You took your time.”
“I thought you’d gone. . . .”
The chirrupy hissing of grasshoppers.
“Yeah. A levels. Art, English, history. . . .”
Her comical grimace. “Brainy with it, then?”
A noisy exodus of skirling birds.
“. . . I dunno. Art school, probably.”
“Dirty devil. So you can look at girls sitting there in the nude? I don’t know how they can do it. . . .”
A whisper through the grain.
“No, not that. I want . . .”
“Are you any good at kissing?”
An intense silence, everything stilled, at the moment she took hold of his collar and pulled his face down.
The panicky thrill throughout his body with her mouth on his. Not knowing what to do with his hands, so keeping them pressed into the grass. Something, an ant perhaps, crawling on the stretched skin between his thumb and forefinger. Awkward twisting of his shoulders. Tongue? Hers doing it. Slithering into his mouth. Hot breath tasting of cigarette and strawberry juice and something else. Coarse distant laughter, like a pheasant’s call, coming from somewhere. Squirming to keep the hard thing in his jeans from touching her leg. Wanting the aching moment to go on and on and on, because he had no idea what she might expect him to do next.
And then a snappy rasp from behind them: Goz, with his back against a tree, lighting a ciggie.
“Funny sort of a widdle, comrade,” he said.
Clem pulled away from her, gasping, lost.
SHE WAS YOUNGER than he was, which would surprise him. He’d thought she was at least his age. She seemed it. But she was only just sixteen. She’d been born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1946, on an April night during which an unseasonably late snowfall muffled the city. Hers was a difficult birth. Afterward the senior obstetrician took her father aside and told him that it would be extremely unwise for his wife to have another child. Gerard took it badly. The Mortimer estates in England had been inherited by sons for countless generations. That he — or Nicole, rather — would break that continuous line troubled him enormously. He stood over his daughter’s hospital cot, gazing at her yellowish and clenched little face, and understood that he would have to be very careful about whom she would marry.
One of her earliest memories was of her father and mother pulling her bumpily to the crèche on a sled. The cars parked on the silent suburban streets had fat white pillows on their roofs. She wore a coat with a fur-lined hood that teased her face.
Almost effortlessly, she became bilingual, like her mother. Her schooling and her friendships were in French. Her home life, when her father was there, was in English. (Gerard spoke French like a man translating a dead language. Nicole couldn’t bear to listen to him; she’d cover her ears and sing loud nonsense when he tried.) Françoise flip-flopped between the two languages almost without thinking, as you might turn the pages of a book. Just now and again she’d forget and speak to her mother in French at dinner. Then Gerard would slap the tabletop, making the wineglasses and the maid jump, and bark, “In English, please, Françoise!”
Her father loved her in a prowling, anxious sort of a way. He called her Treasure but often seemed disappointed in her, like a miser with too small a hoard.
Nicole Mortimer was a famous beauty from a rich family. Françoise liked to kneel on a chair beside her while she applied her makeup before going out for the evening. The fastidious ritual and its materials — the lotions, the powders, the brushes in their shiny little scabbards — hypnotized the child. She would stare into the boudoir mirror, not breathing, during the tricky processes that transformed her mother’s eyes.
“Voilà!” Nicole would say, at last. “Qu’en penses-tu, Françoise?”
And Françoise would say, “Tu es belle, Maman,” and lean to kiss her.
But always her mother turned her face away.
“Pas de bisous, ma chérie. Tu vas gâcher mon lipstick.”
The slow calamity, England, began when Françoise was ten years old.
She came home from school to find Agnes, the maid (who was also Françoise’s nanny and best friend), in tears. From the hallway Françoise could hear her father talking loudly, in his terrible French, on the telephone. She found her mother in her dressing room, tapping cigarette ash into a tray already half full of butts.
Grandpa Edmund, her English grandfather, had had something called a heart attack: une crise cardiaque. He might die. They were all going to England soon. They might have to stay for quite a long time.
The train journey from Quebec to New York was boring and thrilling in equal doses. A black man with a shining face and a beautiful uniform served them dinner while Vermont blurred into darkness outside the window. He risked a wink at her when he poured her Coke from a frosted bottle. In the sleeping car, she insisted on having the curtain of her bunk open so that she could see where her parents were, across the aisle. Eventually she was jiggled, juggled, into sleep by the regular racketing of the wheels on the rails beneath her.
Of New York she had only two abiding memories: a huge ice-cream sundae in the cafeteria of a huge store (Bloomingdale’s?) and the vast black wall of the ship.
During the whole long Atlantic crossing, she felt slushy in her guts. One night, wearing a bib-fronted silk dress, she sat on a velvet-upholstered chair at the edge of the ballroom, watching the adults dance. The window behind her right shoulder framed an infinite moon track, shifting on the soft swell of the sea. The little orchestra was playing a waltz. Her eyes were locked on her parents. Partway through the dance, she saw her mother break away from her father and raise her hands and shake her head. She saw him say something angrily. Her mother hurried away toward the arched doorway into the salon, with one hand over her mouth. For a moment, her father stood islanded on the dance floor with his hands in his pockets, then set off after her. At the doorway, he remembered and came back. He stooped down to her.
“Bedtime, Françoise. Your mother is not feeling well.”
England was dismal. Sooty rain streaked the windows of the train that took them from Southampton to London. Cattle stood, like unfinished black-and-white jigsaw puzzles, in sodden fields, watching them pass. The compartment smelled of fart and smoke.
London was full of wet gray air, and Françoise was amazed that it was still so bomb-damaged. Long lines of black brick houses were punctuated by areas of r
ubble, in which grubby children swarmed. Colorless and poor-looking people stood in queues outside dimly lit shops.
Her father tapped her arm and pointed.
“There, Françoise, look: Saint Paul’s Cathedral!”
But she was still looking back from the taxi window at a pair of houses propped up by great balks of wood. Their faces had been ripped off, exposing peeled wallpaper, bedroom fireplaces, the splayed blackened rib cages of floors under torn linoleum skins.
She was astonished, alarmed, by how foreign England was. The fact that she spoke its language was — it seemed to her — no more than a weird coincidence.
Grandpa Edmund had sent a car to collect them from the railway station in Norwich. The driver was a red-faced young man with receding hair. Neither Françoise nor her mother could understand a word he said.
When the car emerged from the city, Norfolk was in its autumn beauty. Fields rolled away toward woods and hedges the colors of spices: cinnamon, ginger, paprika. A tractor towed a plow and a snow flurry of seagulls. The sky was immense.
Her father pointed out items of interest: “A windmill, Françoise; see?” A black-and-white wooden building, like a giant cuckoo clock with four overgrown hands.
They passed through a village where a humpbacked bridge gave them a view of sailing boats and a tract of glittering water.
“The Norfolk Broads,” her father announced.
Her mother laughed incredulously. “Broads, Gerard? Did you say broads?”
“I did,” he said, turning in his seat to look at her, grinning. In American parlance it was a vulgar term for women.
A little later, he pointed again, his finger just under the driver’s nose. “You see that church, Nicole? That’s where I was christened.”
Its great gargoyled tower dwarfed the brick and flint cottages clustered around it.
Françoise had been to Norfolk once before, as an infant. She had no memory of it. Now she was baffled that things that were small by Montreal standards should look so big. It was hard to make sense of scale. Of anything. She was Alice in Wonderland. She had been removed from the story of her life and plopped into a different story altogether, a story in which words wandered around the dictionary, and everything was old-fashioned. No, ancient. Like in a book where witchcraft and stuff like that was real. The huge chestnut trees that lined the avenue to the manor, for instance, with their swirled crusty bark and their branches that were all gnarled elbows and knuckles. What might they do in the night? What might emerge from their darkness?