Chapter 12
The first thing Tom noticed when he opened his eyes was the naked woman on the wall.
He raised his head and regarded her curiously.
She held her arms above her; her large round breasts seemed to stick out like creamy globes, and she was smiling happily, as if she loved having no clothes on.
In her hands was a garland of yellow flowers.
Tom blinked, and rubbed his eyes. It was a painting, he knew that, but it was very large, and the room was very small, so it was alarmingly close.
There were other women, also naked, holding the garland, all smooth and laughing, and in the background was a grand park with Classical temples.
The women were painted with rough brushstrokes and – Tom didn’t know how else to say it – you could see the paint.
Tom peered out of the window. It was very high up, so he had to stand on the swaying, rickety bed to see out. He blinked again, unsure if what he was seeing was real, for what greeted him was another world.
Greying stucco houses stretched out in front of him in lines and wedges and crescents, with green spaces stuffed in between, new spring growth everywhere.
The effect was rather like a toy town, but the other strange thing was that lots of the houses were cracked, and dull, sometimes with plants growing out of the fissures.
And in the street and the street beyond and as far as he could see there were gaps, like missing teeth.
Normal-normal-normal, then a blank, a missing house.
Beyond that, more roofs, and smoke from chimneys, and a silvery sky.
He could smell the smoke; coal, not wood, it was.
In the far distance he could hear a train rattling past, and the sound of tradesmen on the street.
A nurse was pushing a pram along the pavement far along the other side of the road – the window was too high up for him to be able to look directly down – and she was singing to the baby as she walked along.
Two young boys, about Tom’s age, ran past, one tugging at the other’s torn, dirty shirt, the other ruffling his hair and pushing him away.
‘Get off!’ he was shouting, though they were laughing, then they fell to the ground, rolling over each other, half pummelling each other, half hugging.
Tom watched them hungrily. So there were children in London, he thought.
Without warning, the small, cold room felt overwhelming again.
Tom shuddered, and closed his eyes. Don’t think of him.
He sniffed, clambered off the bed, and with fumbling, cold little fingers pulled on his socks, shorts, his shirt and jumper and opened the door to go downstairs, to find where the smell of bacon was coming from.
‘Honestly, Jen,’ a voice was saying as Tom emerged into the hallway at the bottom of the stairs, four floors down. ‘It’s all rot anyway. Sell them the painting and be done with it. No one will know.’
‘We’ll know, Hen.’
‘It doesn’t matter, then, does it? It’s only us. I say! Who’s this fine fellow!’
Tom had taken the final flight down into the basement and found himself in a warm, gloomy kitchen.
A tall man leaped up, jamming a piece of toast in his mouth.
‘Hello, old thing,’ he said, spluttering crumbs over Tom as he pumped his hand up and down.
‘I suppose I’m your uncle Henry. Good to meet you at last. Dear me,’ he said, stepping back, his blue eyes blinking brightly.
‘I see what you mean, Jen. Spitting image.’ He swallowed.
Tom put his hands behind his back, clenching them to hide the fact his uncle had gripped his fingers far too hard. ‘How – how do you do,’ he said.
‘Tom darling.’ Jenny came over to him, and put her arm around his shoulders. ‘Forgive me, you must have been dreadfully confused when you woke up. But you were sound asleep last night, and I didn’t have the heart to disturb you.’
‘Bacon did the trick, what!’ said Henry, winking at Tom. ‘Sit down, have some breakfast.’
Tom said nothing, but leaned shyly against the large pine dresser.
‘It’s fine,’ said his uncle, kicking out a chair with one foot. ‘Sit down, young ’un. You’ll soon forget home – ah, well,’ he added, awkwardly. ‘So, Tom. Jenny’s told you about your new school, I suppose! A fine place. I had no end of fun there. Like school, do you?’
Immediately, Tom knew with a sense of alarm and also with a quiet thrill that, much like his sister, this person was someone not used to talking to children: you did not ever ask a child about school in the school holidays. He shrugged, and edged on to the chair. ‘Yes … sir,’ he said.
‘Here,’ said Jenny, manoeuvring eggs and bacon, with difficulty for they had stuck to the pan, on to a small chipped plate, upon which danced gold-and-blue patterns of an intricate, if sadly worn, design.
‘Mushrooms?’ she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes with her oven glove and leaving a smear on her face. ‘Do you usually have mushrooms, Tom?’
‘Oh! No, thank you,’ said Tom. He swallowed. ‘Please may I – have some –’ He trailed off, and bowed his head.
‘Poor feller,’ said Henry, looking at him with kindly concern, as if he were an exhibit in the zoo. ‘Can barely understand a word he says – the accent, you know.’ He raised his voice slightly. ‘What’s that, old thing? You want some coffee?’
‘Henry, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Jenny, and she rushed to the worktop and poured some milk. ‘Here, dear one.’ She passed him a cup – also chipped, and with a large crack running down it, so that beads of milk blobbed through it. ‘Drink this.’
He stared at her, at her kind, flushed face, holding out the cracked mug, at her smudged cheek, her hand shaking slightly, and he saw she was nervous too.
That she did not know what she was doing either.
He took the milk and drank it – it was thin, and blue coloured, and without any cream, and he thought briefly of the milk from the Belted Galloways dotted around the gentle rolling pasture leading down to Kirkcudbright.
It was some of the richest milk you could get, that’s what they said, pure cream, and every year Tom’s father made a set of chairs or a table or something new for a farmer over in Twynholm in exchange for all the milk he wanted for a year, and when he delivered the new piece of furniture in Twynholm he was always given a pie, a proper pie with gravy and potatoes, by the farmer’s wife.
This was usually in winter, and they would celebrate with extra wood on the fire so it crackled all night and eat the pie and his father would raise a glass of beer to Tom: ‘Have you ever been so cosy, Tom, my dear boy? Have you?’
No.
‘Now, Tom,’ said Jenny, when he’d finished his breakfast. ‘You’ll start school on Monday, and we must be ready.
I’ve ordered your uniform –’ She coughed, and Henry sat up.
‘It needs to be collected this morning from Arlington and Frobisher, which I shall do presently, so that we can try it on and they can make any alterations before you begin at Knoll Hall. While I’m gone, Henry will – yes, dear? ’
‘Excuse me,’ said Tom. ‘What’s Knoll Hall?’
‘Knoll Hall, dear, it’s a very good preparatory school on Holland Park Avenue.’ His aunt rolled her r ’s, giving the syllables in ‘preparatory’, a word Tom had never heard before anyway, distinct and separate emphasis.
‘I thought I was going to Westminster,’ said Tom, confused.
‘Silly! Not until you’re thirteen, and you’re only nine, aren’t you!
’ she said, as if he were the one exhibiting a deplorable lack of clarity.
‘Knoll Hall is jolly nice, Tom. You can walk there – Henry did – and there are lots of nice young boys there and in the area roundabouts – you’ll make some nice friends –’
‘I saw some boys playing on the street,’ said Tom hopefully. ‘I was wondering if I could go out and find them in a bit.’
‘Oh, no, Tom,’ said Jenny, flushing with alarm. ‘You mustn’t play out in the street. There are some very rough boys who play on the bomb site.’
‘A bomb site?’ Tom said eagerly.
‘Twenty people died, Tom, it was dreadful. And some of those children were caught up in it. There are some roads that aren’t’ – she hesitated, then fell back on a favourite word again – ‘at all nice round here, not at all. Start as you mean to go on.’
‘Area’s gone downhill,’ Uncle Henry said. ‘Like everything.’
‘Isn’t this a … nice street, then?’ said Tom, not sure what this meant.
Henry took another sip of coffee. ‘Was once, Tommy old boy. But the war, you see. And the repairs, the bomb damage … no money.’
‘No money?’
‘No money to fix things, no money to buy things. Can’t sell the paintings either. No market for Father’s stuff – bottom’s fallen out of it, you see.’ He drained his cup.
Tom felt as though he kept saying things and they kept hearing something completely different. ‘What bottom?’
‘Yes, well,’ Jenny interrupted sharply, ‘in any case, Father didn’t want us to sell, and that’s that.’
Henry said shortly, ‘We may have to, now you’ve decided it’s time to play happy families.’
Jenny pushed the fluffy hair that fell in her face out of the way, raised her head and stared at him, and Tom saw the steel in her eyes. ‘We agreed. Always, there was an agreement we would take him. For Irene.’
‘For Irene my foot,’ said Henry, and his tone was not kind.
There was a short, charged silence. Uncle Henry stood up and pulled a moth-eaten deerstalker off the hatstand. ‘I say, young Tom – what do you say to a walk round your new neighbourhood?’
‘Rather,’ said Tom, leaping up. ‘May I go, please, Aunt Jenny?’ He carried his chipped cup and plate to the side and started washing them up. His aunt and uncle watched.
‘Good grief,’ said Uncle Henry. ‘A Caldicott. Doing the washing-up.’
‘Oh,’ said Tom, standing back from the sink. He felt his cheeks burning red; he had made a mistake yet again. ‘I’m sorry, should I –’
‘No!’ said Jenny. ‘No, dear. You see, when we were children we had maids to do all this –’ Her hand swept round the dingy basement, at the bare floor, the dusty corners, the acres of neglected space. ‘We weren’t ever in the kitchen.’
Tom didn’t know how to point out without being rude that they were, at this exact moment in time, in the kitchen. Instead he said, ‘You don’t know how to wash up?’
‘Of course we do,’ said Henry indignantly. ‘If you’d seen me in the war, at Sevenstones washing up – twenty plates a minute, I did once!’
‘Sevenstones?’
‘Rubbish,’ scoffed his sister. ‘Both the claim and the standard of your washing-up. You never did the washing-up at Sevenstones. Irene, now, she made the place sparkle within ten minutes, top to bottom, then she’d be out in time to report to the air base after no sleep.
’ She turned to Tom. ‘Irene was one of those people who was good at everything,’ she said.
‘My mother,’ said Tom proudly.
‘Yes,’ she said, her blue eyes shining.
‘What was Sevenstones?’
‘Sevenstones was my father’s little bolthole,’ said Jenny, glaring at her brother. ‘He gave it to us in the war, so our friends had a place to go. It’s where your parents met. Run along now – go and get your coat on. It’s chilly outside.’
Tom wanted to laugh; if she thought this was chilly she should try March in Galloway, but he did not say this. He fingered the wooden house in his pocket. Sevenstones. Now it had a name.