‘These kids come from broken homes, sir. I’ll do my best with your carpets, Mrs Malby.’
‘But what about my kitchen?’ she whispered. She cleared her throat because her whispering could hardly be heard. ‘My kitchen?’ she whispered again.
‘What about it, Mrs Malby?’
‘I didn’t want it painted.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly now.’
The teacher took his jacket off and threw it impatiently on to a chair. He left the sitting-room. Mrs Malby heard him running a tap in the kitchen.
‘It was best to finish the painting, Mrs Malby,’ Mr King said. ‘Otherwise the kitchen would have driven you mad, half done like that. I stood over them till they finished it.’
‘You can’t take paint off, dear,’ Mrs King said, ‘Once it’s on. You’ve done wonders, Leo,’ she said to her husband. ‘Young devils.’
‘We’d best be getting back,’ Mr King said.
‘It’s quite nice, you know,’ his wife added. ‘Your kitchen’s quite cheerful, dear.’
The Kings went away and the teacher rubbed at the yellow on the carpets with her washing-up brush. The landing carpet was marked anyway, he pointed out, poking a finger at the stains left behind by the paint she’d removed herself with the sponge-cloth from the bathroom. She must be delighted with the kitchen, he said.
She knew she mustn’t speak. She’d known she mustn’t when the Kings had been there; she knew she mustn’t now. She might have reminded the Kings that she’d chosen the original colours in the kitchen herself. She might have complained to the man as he rubbed at her carpets that the carpets would never be the same again. She watched him, not saying anything, not wishing to be regarded as a nuisance. The Kings would have considered her a nuisance too, agreeing to let children into her kitchen to paint it and then making a fuss. If she became a nuisance the teacher and the Kings would drift on to the same side, and the Reverend Bush would somehow be on that side also, and Miss Tingle, and even Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert. They would agree among themselves that what had happened had to do with her elderliness, with her not understanding that children who brought paint into a kitchen were naturally going to use it.
‘I defy anyone to notice that,’ the teacher said, standing up, gesturing at the yellow blurs that remained on her carpets. He put his jacket on. He left the washing-up brush and the bowl of water he’d been using on the floor of her sitting-room. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for your cooperation, Mrs Malby.’
She thought of her two sons, Derek and Roy, not knowing quite why she thought of them now. She descended the stairs with the teacher, who was cheerfully talking about community relations. You had to make allowances, he said, for kids like that; you had to try and understand; you couldn’t just walk away.
Quite suddenly she wanted to tell him about Derek and Roy. In the desire to talk about them she imagined their bodies, as she used to in the past, soon after they’d been killed. They lay on desert sand, desert birds swooped down on them. Their four eyes were gone. She wanted to explain to the teacher that they’d been happy, a contented family in Catherine Street, until the war came and smashed everything to pieces. Nothing had been the same afterwards. It hadn’t been easy to continue with nothing to continue for. Each room in the house had contained different memories of the two boys growing up. Cooking and cleaning had seemed pointless. The shop which would have been theirs would have to pass to someone else.
And yet time had soothed the awful double wound. The horror of the emptiness had been lived with, and if having the Kings in the shop now wasn’t the same as having your sons there at least the Kings were kind. Thirty-four years after the destruction of your family you were happy in your elderliness because time had been merciful. She wanted to tell the teacher that also, she didn’t know why, except that in some way it seemed relevant. But she didn’t tell him because it would have been difficult to begin, because in the effort there’d be the danger of seeming senile. Instead she said goodbye, concentrating on that. She said she was sorry, saying it just to show she was aware that she hadn’t made herself clear to the children. Conversation had broken down between the children and herself, she wanted him to know she knew it had.
He nodded vaguely, not listening to her. He was trying to make the world a better place, he said. ‘For kids like that, Mrs Malby. Victims of broken homes.’
Matilda’s England
1. The Tennis Court
Old Mrs Ashburton used to drive about the lanes in a governess cart drawn by a donkey she called Trot. We often met her as we cycled home from school, when my brother and my sister were at the Grammar School and I was still at the village school. Of the three of us I was Mrs Ashburton’s favourite, and I don’t know why that was except that I was the youngest. ‘Hullo, my Matilda,’ Mrs Ashburton would whisper in her throaty, crazysounding way. ‘Matilda,’ she’d repeat, lingering over the name I so disliked, drawing each syllable away from the next. ‘Dear Matilda.’ She was excessively thin, rather tall, and frail-looking. We made allowances for her because she was eighty-one.
Usually when we met her she was looking for wild flowers, or if it was winter or autumn just sitting in her governess cart in some farmer’s gateway, letting the donkey graze the farmer’s grass. In spring she used to root out plants from the hedges with a little trowel. Most of them were weeds, my brother said; and looking back on it now, I realize that it wasn’t for wild flowers, or weeds, or grazing for her donkey that she drove about the lanes. It was in order to meet us cycling back from school.
‘There’s a tennis court at Challacombe Manor,’ she said one day in May, 1939. ‘Any time you ever wanted to play, Dick.’ She stared at my brother with piercing black eyes that were the colour of quality coal. She was eccentric, standing there in a long, very old and bald fur coat, stroking the ears of her donkey while he nibbled a hedge. Her hat was attached to her grey hair by a number of brass hat-pins. The hat was of faded green felt, the hat-pins had quite large knobs at the ends of them, inlaid with pieces of green glass. Green, Mrs Ashburton often remarked, was her favourite colour, and she used to remove these hat-pins to show us the glass additions, emphasizing that they were valueless. Her bald fur coat was valueless also, she assured us, and not even in its heyday would it have fetched more than five pounds. In the same manner she remarked upon her summer hats and dresses, and her shoes, and the governess cart, and the donkey.
‘I mean, Dick,’ she said that day in 1939, ‘it’s not much of a tennis court, but it was once, of course. And there’s a net stacked away in one of the outhouses. And a roller, and a marker. There’s a lawn-mower, too, because naturally you’ll need that.’
‘You mean, we could play on your court, Mrs Ashburton?’ my sister Betty said.
‘Of course I mean that, my dear. That’s just what I mean. You know, before the war we really did have marvellous tennis parties at Challacombe. Everyone came.’
‘Oh, how lovely!’ Betty was fourteen and Dick was a year older, and I was nine. Betty was fair-haired like the rest of us, but much prettier than me. She had very blue eyes and a wide smiling mouth that boys at the Grammar School were always trying to kiss, and a small nose, and freckles. Her hair was smooth and long, the colour of hay. It looked quite startling sometimes, shining in the sunlight. I used to feel proud of Betty and Dick when they came to collect me every afternoon at Mrs Pritchard’s school. Dick was to leave the Grammar School in July, and on the afternoons of that warm May, as Betty and I cycled home with him, we felt sorry that he wouldn’t be there next term. But Dick said he was glad. He was big, as tall as my father, and very shy. He’d begun to smoke, a habit not approved of by my father. On the way home from school we had to stop and go into a ruined cottage so that he could have a Woodbine. He was going to work on the farm; one day the farm would be his.