Chapter 8 Ormdale
Chapter eight
Ormdale
No one could have considered Pip’s return home the night before as a success.
First of all, his return was badly timed, and coincided with Friday supper.
Ever since Pip’s little half sister had been born, Janushek had begun to make a fuss over Friday supper, getting out a polished pair of candlesticks and teaching the little girl to imitate his incomprehensible foreign prayer.
It didn’t seem to bother him that there was an albino dragon sitting under the table waiting for scraps.
So it was over this supper—already an awkward one for Pip—in the snug cottage on the outskirts of Ormby village, that Pip announced to his family that he was sick of London and had given up art school.
His mother was hurt by this, he could tell. Whether it was because she had dreamt of a great future for him or because she knew he was lying, he could not tell.
But his stepfather saw more than Pip had told.
“They made things hard for you, your fellow students?” his stepfather said with a flash of sympathy on his scarred face.
Pip mumbled something in response and ate his supper. Of course his stepfather was offering him sympathy—and of course the very last person in the world Pip wanted sympathy from was Brik Janushek.
For Janushek—Jewish, foreign, and defiantly proletarian—represented the opposite of everything Pip longed to become.
Pip felt peeved that his stepfather had probably guessed it all already—that the insurmountable barrier between him and his fellow students was the very thing that had driven him to ruin his future among them.
To Pip, self-destruction seemed preferable to rejection.
At least you did it yourself, and did not wait for it to happen to you.
Pip had gone up to the abbey on the morning after this unpleasant homecoming.
He always approached the old pile with a mixture of longing and loathing.
He’d spent most of his childhood overworked and underpaid, emptying chamber pots before the new plumbing was put in, mucking out stables, carrying numberless pails of water that sloshed and froze him year-round, for it was always cold inside its rambling passageways.
But for all that, the mildew-tobacco-brandy smell of aristocracy kindled a fierce longing alongside the resentment. Was this to be his doom? To be half servant and half master, even in his deepest self?
On his second evening home, Pip ventured to bring up his hopes for the year.
“I thought I might travel on the Continent this year,” he began.
His mother and stepfather exchanged a look that made him feel instantly defensive.
“Lots of people do at my age,” he said. “I was one of the only ones at school who hadn’t. I’d learn more from a museum in Italy than I would at school, anyway.”
“Where do you expect to get money for that, Pip?” his mother asked plainly. The northern directness grated on him.
“The money that was being used for art school might be allocated differently,” he said stiffly.
Couldn’t they see he would never be anything but small, if he did not broaden his horizons? Or did they want him to be small?
“Now it is time for the havdalah candle, my little mouse,“ Janushek said, lifting their tiny daughter from her chair.
He held her on his lap as he helped her dip the burning candle into his cup of wine, which she did with great solemnity, giving a wriggle of delight when the wick hissed at her.
Then he sang a short song to signal the end of his religious observance.
The little girl joined in, though the words surely meant little to her, thought Pip. But it made his mother smile, and Pip was surprised by how young and lovely she looked, her hair golden in the firelight.
During his childhood her smiles had been rare. Now, she seemed to grow younger every year.
“To bed!” Janushek declared.
“Smok! Smok!” the child cried, and Janushek whistled. Smok lumbered out from under the table, ruby eyes glinting, for the child to be put on its back. Janushek snatched up his violin from the sideboard and led the girl and the dragon away to the accompaniment of a wild Slavic tune.
In the quietness left behind, his mother got up and put the kettle on the hob.
“You understand where the money comes from, Pip?” she said, all seriousness again.
“From the squire’s family.”
She did not answer.
“Help me with the dishes, lad.”
While the water was heating, he scraped the crockery, putting the scraps into a pail for the chickens.
“You could hire someone to help out, Mam,” Pip pointed out.
She took a tea towel from its hook. “I like doing for myself,” she said simply. “I had years of doing for other people. I can please myself now.”
Lily Dugdale had done the jobs of five or so servants for the down-at-heel squire’s family, until the family’s fortunes had turned around. She had her own little cottage garden now, with a pen for fowl and a bee skep. There was a slow pleasure in the way she kept busy about the place.
“You’re right about the money coming from the abbey family,” she said, grating soap flakes into the sink. “Have you wondered why?”
“I know why,” he said. “I’m not a fool.”
She looked at him, her face soft. “You’re twenty-one this year, Pip. And you’re already a man.”
Here was an opportunity for him to make his point. “Can’t you see that’s why I need to go abroad? To make something of myself, before it’s too late?”
She took a deep breath. “There’s something you should know, lad. About your father.”
Pip stopped breathing. An old, wild idea—a secret hope that scared and elated him so that he daren’t even admit it to himself—flickered alive inside him.
And he was scraping a plate. Would he really be scraping a plate into the chicken pail when the world finally turned right-side up?
Her voice was very soft when she finally spoke. “It wasn’t the old squire, lad. You’re not one of his.”
Without speaking, Pip put down the plate and walked out of the lodge.
For a moment, he had been so filled with pain, he couldn’t speak or respond at all. Outside in the moonlight, he took great gasps of air.
Then something alive butted into his shoulder in the dark, and a hard object dropped onto his shoe.
The live thing was hard and bumpy, with a warm tongue and an insistent huff.
It bit him.
“Oi!” he shouted, and batted at it, but it was crumpled on the ground at his feet now, exhausted.
Oolong.
Pip was aware there was something wet on his hand. He held it up. It was blood. And it wasn’t his, because the dragon bite had not broken his skin.
“Mam!” he shouted.