A Winter Book Part 4

I knew that Jeremiah wanted to hammer on his own. He didn't want her to come with him but she just came. If one wants to collect stones, one should be allowed to do so on one's own. She could have looked for them on her own, but she didn't. She kept appearing from a different direction and always pretended to be surprised at meeting Jeremiah. But her game of pretending was phony and hadn't anything to do with us two.

I followed behind with Jeremiah's little box and stood waiting while he hammered away. I made sure that the boat was properly tied up. But of course we couldn't play our game of how tiny I was while she was there.

In the beginning she smiled at me, but in fact all she did was bare her teeth. I stared at her until she looked away and went on hammering. I followed them and stood waiting, and every time she turned round she looked at me and I never looked back at her. We froze because the wind blew right in our faces and the sun never shone. I could see that she was freezing cold and that she was afraid of the water. But she came in the boat too and she never let him go out to the islands by himself.

She sat in the stern and gripped the gunnels with both hands and I could see from them how scared she was. She pressed her knees tightly together and craned her neck and gulped. She didn't look at the waves but just stared at Jeremiah the whole time, and he rowed zigzag as best he could against the wind, and off they went together and got smaller and smaller.

I wasn't allowed to go with them in the boat any longer. They pretended that it was too small. It was a stout flat-bottomed boat and I could well have sat in the bows. Jeremiah knew it but he was afraid of her. I waited until I saw them set off and then come back to the bays. Then I would hide in the shelter of a rock and watch them, and wherever they came ash.o.r.e I was there to meet them and tie up their boat.

I knew that nothing was fun any longer and couldn't be, but I followed them all the same. I couldn't stop following them, every day and all day until the evening, and I had my own food with me. But we didn't swap sandwiches any more. We kept ourselves to ourselves and we all sat at the same distance from each other and none of us said anything.

Then we would get up and walk along the sh.o.r.e. Once she stopped and stood still and waited for me without turning round. I stopped too, because her back took on a dangerous shape. And then she turned round and said something to me. It was the first time she had opened her mouth. At first I didn't understand. Then she said it again, over and over, very loud and in a shrill voice: "Go home! Go home, go home!" Somebody had taught her to say "Go home!" but it sounded queer.

I looked down at my feet and waited until she went on, and then I followed again.

But in the morning she wasn't there. So I put my present on the steps of the pilot's hut and hid. I could stay in hiding as long as they liked. Then Jeremiah came out onto the steps and found the present and was surprised. He began to search for me and I was terribly tiny; so tiny that I could have fitted into his pocket.

But gradually everything changed. I grew and he found me much too quickly. He wasn't at all surprised. At last the awful thing had happened: we were playing the game because we had started to play it and thought it was something too embarra.s.sing to stop.

One day Jeremiah came out onto the steps and found his present. He threw his arms into the air as usual and clutched his head. But then he didn't take his hands away but held his head far too long. Then he came right up to the pine tree where I was hiding and stood in front of me and smiled and I could see he was baring his teeth just like she did and wasn't at all friendly. It was so awful that I just ran away.

I was ashamed for both our sakes all day. At three o'clock the sun came out and I went back to the bays.

They were in the third bay. He sat hammering and she was looking on a little way away. She wasn't cold any longer and had taken off her woolly cap and undone her hair ma.s.ses of it that fell all over the place while she was looking at him. Then she went closer and laughed and bent down to see what he was doing and her hair fell all over, him and he got scared and straightened up and b.u.mped her nose. I think it was her nose. She nearly fell over, so Jeremiah took a firm hold of her and for an instant they looked like paper dolls. Then she began to speak very rapidly and Jeremiah held on to her and listened.

He was so far away from me that I had to shout so that he would hear me, and I shouted for all I was worth. But he just walked away and she was left standing there staring at me and I stared back. I stared and stared at her until I had stared her into little pieces and I thought, 'You're big and scraggy like a carthorse and n.o.body can hunt for you in the gra.s.s and you couldn't hide anywhere because you can be seen the whole time and you can't surprise anybody and make them feel good! You have completely spoilt our game for no reason at all because you can't play games yourself! O alas and alack! No one wants your presents. He doesn't want them. You're n.o.body's surprise, and you can't understand because you're not an artist!' And so I went a little closer and humiliated her by saying the most terrible thing of all: "Amateur! You're an amateur! You're not a real artist!"

She stepped backwards and screwed up her face. Then I daren't look at her any longer because it's an awful shame to see a grown-up person cry. So I looked at the ground and waited a long time. I heard her walk away. When I looked up she had gone.

Jeremiah was on the point hammering away. So I went back to the pilots' hut and took back my present. It was a very beautiful skeleton of a bird, and quite white. Mummy gave me a box just the right size and I took the skeleton with me when I went back to town. It's very unusual to come across the skeleton of a bird which is the right chalky-white colour.

The Spinster Who Had An Idea.

WEEK AFTER WEEK SHE SAT MAKING STEPS WITH CEMENT outside Old Charlie's little house. But it was very slow work. They had to be terribly pretty and unlike any other steps in the whole world. They were to be her present to us for being allowed to live in our attic.

She woke up earlier and earlier in the morning. We heard her squeaking terribly slowly down the stairs because she was so afraid of waking us up. Then she started moving her buckets and her stones outside the veranda just as slowly, and occasionally we heard a little clanking sound and then a sc.r.a.ping noise and a thud and a splash, and in the end we were wide awake and lay waiting for the next cautious movement.

Sometimes she creaked across the veranda to fetch something she had forgotten and opened the door, put her fingers to her lips and whispered: "Sleep soundly, Shh! Don't worry about me." And then she smiled sadly and secretively. She was tall and thin and had anxious eyes set close together and she had reached that certain age. What exactly that certain age was, and why she had reached it, no one would tell me, but in any case life wasn't easy for her and the steps were all she cared about. That's why we admired what she was doing so much.

When we came out on the veranda she shouted: "No! no! no! no! wait a moment!" She jumped to her feet quickly and began to haul up a plank and lifted one end of it onto the threshold and the other end onto a box. While we were balancing ourselves on the plank, she looked terrified and implored: "I've only just cemented it! Do be careful and please don't tread anywhere near it!"

Then Daddy picked up the plank so she could go on cementing and she thanked him much too profusely for his help.

Day after day she was on her knees trying to fit stones into the cement, and round her she had buckets of cement and water, and sand and rags and trowels and small sticks and spades. The stones had to be flat and smooth and pretty in colour. They lay there arranged in piles according to a very well thought-out plan and on no account were they to get mixed up. The smallest stones were red and white and were kept separately in a box.

We started to get out through the bedroom window, but only when she wasn't looking. Once when Mummy was carrying some pails of water over the plank, she spilled a few drops and a very important part of the concrete was spoilt. Then we started lifting the pails of water through the window, too.

I knew I wasn't allowed to help her because she wanted to play on her own. So I just stood and looked on.

She had begun with the small red and white stones and was poking a long row of them into the cement. It was supposed to be some kind of saying, and every time a little stone got into the wrong place she gave a little wail.

"Don't you like playing?" I asked.

She didn't understand what I meant. "It's so difficult," she said. "You mustn't look!" So I went away.

She had thought that she would put 'Bless All Those Who Cross This Threshold' on the steps but she forgot to measure it. So when at last she got to the end there wasn't enough room for 'Threshold'. 'Thresh' was all that she could fit in.

"You ought to have measured it before you started," Daddy said. "And used a bit of string to keep it straight. I could have shown you how to do it."

"It's easy to say that when it's too late!" she cried. "I don't think you care one bit about my steps! I know you climb in the window just to show me I'm in the way!"

"Dammit, what other way should we go, with your pots and pans all over the place," Daddy said.

Then she started to cry and rushed up to the attic. Daddy was left standing there looking miserable, and said, "Oh d.a.m.n."

The steps never really got finished. She lost interest in them and moved all her things down to the big rock instead, in order to cement stones in the big tub. The plank was taken away. But the hole in the concrete where she had started to cry was still there staring at us.

All the next day she emptied the big tub with buckets. When she had almost reached the bottom, she borrowed the scoop. Then she used a tea cup and a sponge. But right at the bottom there were nasty creepy-crawly things living in the slime and she was afraid of them although she felt sorry for them. It was so awful getting them up from the bottom she was on the point of screaming, but she said, "It's got to be done," and she carried them over to another tub, and in between tea cups she put her arms in the sea and waved them about while her tears fell into the water.

When the tub was quite empty, she started to put rows of stones at the bottom and then cemented them. She twisted and turned each stone in order to get it to fit but she couldn't do it. She tried one stone after another but none of them would fit. Then she noticed that I was standing by the woodpile. "You mustn't look," she shouted. So I went away again.

She looked for new stones in the bay, but they were either the wrong shape or the wrong colour. But the hardest thing was to get the stones clean when they were finally in place. She washed them and wiped them and rinsed her rag again and again, but when the stone was dry it still had a little fleck of cement on it and then she had to start from the beginning again.

And in the winter the tub froze at the bottom and the whole thing cracked. It was very difficult being a spinster.

When she came back the following summer I was terribly afraid that everything would go wrong for her again. We had filled the hole on the steps with sand and poured a little milk into the tub so that she wouldn't be able to see how awful the bottom looked. But she wasn't interested in cement any longer. She had brought with her a whole suitcase full of her sc.r.a.pbooks with glossy cut-out pictures and she put them to soak in the washtub. Then she peeled off all the glossy pictures and laid them out to dry on the slope. It was a beautiful calm Sunday and the slope was dotted with pictures of roses and angels by the thousand and she was happy again and carried them up to her room in the attic. It was such a relief to see that she was happy!

"Things seem a bit better this time," Mummy said.

But Daddy said, "Do you think so? I'm not so sure, but as usual I'm not saying anything."

And she started sticking boxes together. She sat in her room in the attic making little boxes with lots of little compartments, which she covered with glossy pictures both on the inside and on the outside. The glossy pictures stuck straight away and kept their colour and didn't have to fit because she stuck them on top of each other.

The room in the attic was full of paper and pots of paste and boxes and big piles of glossy pictures that one wasn't allowed to touch. She sat down in the middle of it all, sticking and sticking, and in the end the pile of sc.r.a.p paper reached up to her knees. But she never put anything in the boxes and never gave any of them away.

"Are they always going to be empty?" I asked.

She looked at the box she was making and didn't answer. Her long face had an anxious look and there was a glossy picture sticking to her fringe.

I got fed up with her because she wasn't happy. I don't like it when people find life difficult. It gives me a bad conscience and then I get angry and begin to feel that they might as well go somewhere else.

But Granny liked her because she had been a good customer at the b.u.t.ton shop and they used to read Allers' Family Magazine together during the winter.

Granny had a lot of little boxes with lots of compartments, but at least she put b.u.t.tons in them. While Granny's b.u.t.ton business was a glorious success, each kind of b.u.t.ton was kept separate, but when the business went bust the b.u.t.tons got into the wrong compartments, which was actually much more fun.

Before the police came to the shop, Granny managed to rescue a lot of b.u.t.ton boxes, which she hid under her skirts just as she had hidden guns during the 1918 war. She also rescued tons of Allers' Family Magazines and little porcelain dogs and velvet pin cus.h.i.+ons and a quant.i.ty of nightcaps and silk ribbons, and then she sighed and said, "Bless me! Now we shall have to draw crosses on the ceiling again!" And she carried everything to Daddy's and Mummy's studio.

Mummy hid all the Allers' Family Magazines but Granny and I found them, particularly the ones with the whole-page pictures of sad things. A Young Witch Being Led to the Stake. A Heroine's Death.

And every copy of the magazine was kept for the spinster. Granny and she used to read them in secret in the bedroom. Once she came to read Allers' Family Magazine on the worst possible day she could have picked. Daddy was busy making a plaster cast. And it was a particularly large and difficult one that had to be made in sections.

The plaster was already mixed so, as you know, it was a question of seconds. You mustn't touch it and you must hardly breathe. I should never have dreamed of going into the studio just then. Mummy and Daddy were standing ready with their plastering clothes on and the whole floor was covered with brown paper.

And just then she came in and said: "Hallo! Hallo! Something's going on here, I can see. Don't let me disturb you!" I was standing behind the curtains and watching. She went straight up to the tub of plaster and poked a finger in it and said, 'Plaster! How funny, and just now when I'm particularly interested in plaster!"

Mummy said: "We're working." And Daddy looked ready to murder somebody. I was so frightened and embarra.s.sed that I climbed up onto my bunk. I was sure that Daddy would throw clay at her, because that's what he always does when he's angry. But the only thing I could hear was the soft slapping sound of wet plaster. They had started casting. She babbled away the whole time without realising that she was interrupting an almost sacred ceremony.

Granny came out of the bedroom for a moment, looked terrified and went back inside. After a while I ventured down. By that time she had got an overall on and was standing by the window with both hands in a little bowl of plaster.

"Now it's going hard!" she shouted. "What shall I do next?"

And, instead of hitting her on the head, Daddy went up to her and showed her what to do. I looked at Mummy. She grinned and shrugged her shoulders. The spinster had cut out a picture from Allers' Family Magazine and put it face down on a saucer.

"Have you greased the saucer properly?" Daddy asked severely.

"Yes, yes," she said. "Just as you said."

"Well, pour it on," said Daddy. "But don't put your finger in it."

She poured the plaster into the saucer and Daddy took the putty knife and made the whole thing even. Then he said, "Do you want a hook too?"

"Yes, yes," she whispered, and was so happy that she drew her breath as she spoke. "It's to hang on the wall."

Daddy sniffed and went up to the reel of steel wire and cut off a bit. He made a loop and stuck it in the plaster on one side. "Don't touch it," he said. "Leave it to dry."

"You are kind," she breathed and the tears came to her eyes. "I shall come back tomorrow and bring my glossy cut-out pictures with me. They will be even more beautiful."

And she did, too!

All the time the plaster-casting was going on, she stood at the workbench and put glossy cut-outs into a saucer and poured plaster on them and put a loop at one end, just as Daddy had taught her to do. A whole row of plaster pictures lay on the bench, each with a big bright glossy cut-out in the middle. The pictures curved beautifully over the chalky-white plaster and had no spots on them at all because she got better and better at it all the time.

She was beside herself with joy. Granny came in and praised her. She gave each of us a picture and she hung Daddy's on the studio wall.

I didn't know what to think. The plaster pictures were really the most beautiful things I had ever seen, but they weren't Art. One couldn't respect them at all. Actually one should really have despised them. It was a terrible thing to do to make such pictures in Daddy's studio and, what's more, whilst a plaster cast was being made.

The worst thing was that she didn't even look at the statue standing there waiting to be touched up and given its patina, but just babbled on about her own pictures. The whole workbench was full of them and looked like a cake shop.

In the end she was given a big bag of plaster, and all the pictures were packed up in a box and she took the lot and went home and disappeared.

"What a relief!" said Mummy, and began to clean the floor. "Now you can take it down."

Daddy took the spinster's plaster plaque off the wall and looked at it and sniffed. I looked at him and thought, 'Now I must take mine down too.' I waited to see what he was going to do. For a moment he held it over the rubbish bin. Then he went over to the bookcase and shoved the plaque behind some early statuettes of his on the top shelf. You could only just see a little bit of the glossy picture.

I climbed up onto my bunk and took my picture off the nail. I put it behind a candlestick on the bookcase and stepped backwards to have a look. It didn't look right. So I pulled the picture forward a bit, just enough so that the candlestick hid a couple of forget-me-nots. It couldn't be helped that the glossy cut-out picture was really very beautiful and, to tell the truth, for me it wasn't at all profane.

The Boat and Me.

WHEN I WAS TWELVE I GOT A ROWING BOAT OF MY OWN. It was two metres thirty long and clinker-built. When they asked me its name I said it's just called the boat. I had a plan for the boat and me: to row round the whole of Pellinge archipelago, uninhabited rocks and all, both the inner and outer parts, sort of encircle the lot and then it would be done. I don't know why it was important. The trip could take me twenty-four hours, so it was a good idea to take a sleeping-bag, but otherwise nothing but hard bread and fruit juice. As Dad says, you should never keep a single inessential object in your boat.

The start was fixed for the twentieth of August and it had to be kept absolutely secret.

I don't know how it was that Mum got wind of the project; maybe she noticed I'd taken the sleeping-bag out of the tent. She didn't say anything but somehow she let me know she knew about it and that she was on my side as far as deceiving Dad went. He would never have let me go. And I'm pretty sure Mum would never have managed to deceive her own father, who never let her sleep in a tent or even wear a sailor-suit collar. A terrible century.

Anyway, the boat and I were ready to start. The wind had been in the south-west for a couple of days, blowing the waves in and making them long. The boat was in high water, which reached up to the gra.s.s line, and when I launched her the keel slid out as if over velvet. As soon as she reached the sea she met the swell by the sh.o.r.e, but I held her steady by the gunwale and waited. The sky was white and empty as it usually is before sunrise and the gulls were alive in the heavens. Presently Mum hurried up with a cardigan over her nightdress, bringing sandwiches and a bottle of appleade: "Quick," she said, "Get going before he wakes!"

Departures are seldom what you expect.

We met heavy seas, there was a direct tailwind and, struggling to keep my balance, I pressed my feet against the floor and made good speed; Mum stood a long time waving from the sh.o.r.e.

Dad never waves at sea; it's something you should never do unless you're in distress.

I was taking the waves stern on but very soon realised this was a mistake: we needed to turn completely round pretty d.a.m.n quick so as to be able to ride over them, so I waited till we were in a suitable trough, then drove the left oar straight down and pulled like mad on the right one, and in a moment we had wheeled round and the motion of the sea had taken charge of us as if it was entirely the obvious thing to happen.

While we were running on before the wind towards the outermost promontory, it occurred to me that the sea really needs a boat on it to be in control I mean to be greater than everything else. Maybe it needs islands too, so long as they're small ones. And why not a gull in the sky? So long as it's cloudless, naturally.

And then the sun rose and shone right into my eyes and transformed the spray into pink roses, and we raced onwards and rounded the promontory until suddenly we were in the lee. It was quiet there. Of course you could hear the sea, but it seemed a long way off because now the wind was roaring through the forest nearby. Here by the sheltered shallows the forest stretches right down to the rocks on the sh.o.r.e, with the small islands sailing around like floating bouquets and everything's completely green I know, I've been here before.

I bailed the boat, even though she'd hardly taken in any water, then we let ourselves run on for a bit.

This is where the summer birds live, the carefree people Dad despises. They wake late in the day in their summer-houses and go down to the sea on their rickety white-painted landing-stages with their nearby saunas and jump into their flashy high-powered metal motorboats.

Dad despises metal boats. He says these young toffs and their girls are nothing short of criminal; they use twenty horsepower just for pleasure, putting everyone else's lives at risk, not to mention the professional fishermen's nets.

Of course, I remember. The girl always sitting in the bows as far forward as she could, tanned and happy with her hair flying in the wind, loving the thrill of speed! As they race past she waves to me but that was an awful long time ago.

I rowed on. It looked likely to be a very hot day and there was thunder in the air.

Gradually the shallows filled with people, travelling and fis.h.i.+ng and bathing, delighting in that summer world which is like nothing else, with small children milling about off every sh.o.r.e on rafts and in canoes when all of a sudden one of those flashy motor-boats drove straight through with bow waves like rainbows and the toff at the wheel shouted, "Hi! Want a tow?"

It was beneath me even to favour him with a glance.

Here came another. I rowed like mad and as it hissed past I saw the girl with flying hair in the bows and she waved to me.

I rowed on.

It wasn't the right girl, I knew that. But I could have waved even so though probably I wouldn't have. Did these people in the shallows have any idea how stupid they were? Probably not. Was I being unfair to them? I expect I was.