Out of her desk drawer she took the blunt hunting knife which she’d bought with her own money at the fair when she was staying with Granny at Hertford; and from the blue jar on the mantelpiece she took the coral and gold necklace which one of her godmothers had given her at her christening, but she could never remember which.
Then she ran down to the kitchen, picking her way to the larder between the horrible smashed machines. Two bottles of lemonade and one of soda water from her last pub raid; the packets of nuts and the salty biscuits. Her satchel was full now, and heavy too. She slung its strap over her shoulder, picked up her pencil from the hall table, and pushed the door wide open until she could lean against it to write on her notice without its moving away.
She crossed out her last message, about being up at the Green, and wrote beneath it “I’m going away now. I waited for twenty-eight days.”
She was pulling the door shut when she thought that that sounded as though she was blaming them, so she pushed it open again and wrote underneath “I’m sure you would have come if you could. Love, Nicky.”
When she pulled the door shut for the last time she felt that there ought to be some way of fastening it, but she couldn’t remember how the lock worked. So she just made certain that the drawing pins were firmly fastened into her note, turned away and walked down the street without once looking back. She started to be afraid that she would be too late, but it was awkward to run with her satchel so heavy. It didn’t matter; they were still there when she reached the Green again; the strange, dark children were playing a game of “touch” under the trees.
Beyond them the adults lolled or squatted on the grass. The whole group chattered like roosting starlings. The noise of their talk bounced off the shop fronts, and all of a sudden made the green feel as though people were living there once again. Yes, thought Nicky, these foreign-looking folk would do. She could go with them, and yet stay strangers always. It was a good thing they were so different. She sidled like a hunter toward the scampering children.
She was waiting by a tree trunk, beyond the fringe of the game, when one of the smaller boys scuttered from an exploding group which the “he” had raided. He came straight towards her squealing with laughter until he was hardly six feet away; and then he saw her. At once he stopped dead, called with a shrill new note, and pointed at her. Then he stood staring. His eyes were very dark; his hair was black and gathered into a little topknot behind his head. His skin looked smooth as silk and was a curious, pale brown — not the yellow-brown of suntan, but a grayer color, as if it was always like that. His mouth pouted.
The game stopped at his call, not quite at once, but in spasms of scuttering which stilled into the same dark stare. Now the adults’ heads were turning too; the thick beards wagging round; the worried, triangular faces of the women turning toward Nicky. One of the women called; two children ran to her side and stared from there. The other children melted back toward the adults, looking over their shoulders once or twice. Several of the men were on their feet, grasping their heavy staves and peering not at her but up and down the Green. Now the whole group was standing, except for the little old woman who had ridden on the cart; she still sat on the ground and gazed with piercing fierceness at Nicky from among the legs of the men. Then she cried out suddenly, only three or four words, like the call of a bird. The words were not English.
A big man bent and scooped her off the grass, like a mother picking up her baby; he carried her to the cushioned cart, which was brightly painted with swirling patterns — it was the sort of handcart that street-market stall holders had used for pushing their goods about. The old woman settled herself on the cushions, stared at Nicky again, and called another few words. At once the whole group trooped off the grass and took up their positions for the march.
Nicky ran forward from under the trees. They were all watching her still, as though she might be the bait in some unimaginable trap.
“Please,” she called. “May I come with you?”
A rustle ran through the group like the rustle of dead leaves stirring under a finger of wind. One of the worried women said something, and three of the men answered her. Nicky could tell from their voices that they were disagreeing with her. The old woman spoke a single syllable, and the nearest man shook his head at Nicky. He was short and fat and his beard was flecked with gray; his hat was pink, only it wasn’t a hat, of course — it was a long piece of cloth wound in and out of itself in clever folds to cover his head and hair.
“Please,” she said again. “I’m all alone and I don’t know where to go.”
“Go away, little girl,” said the fat man. “We cannot help you. You are not one of us. We owe you nothing.”
His voice was light and odd. Though he spoke proper English, he didn’t speak it like an Englishman.
“Please,” began Nicky, but the old woman called again and at once the whole group began to move.
They walked off quite slowly, not because they wanted to move like a funeral, but because they couldn’t go faster than the slowest child. Nicky stood and watched them, all shriveled with despair at the thought of facing the huge loneliness of London once again.
She stepped into the road to watch the strange people turn the corner north. (If they’d wanted to go south they would have started down the other side of the Green.) But instead they went straight ahead, up the Uxbridge Road, towards the doorstep where the one-legged man had sat in the sun.
Nicky began to run.
Her satchel dragged her sideways and thudded unsteadily into her hip. A rat-tail of dirty fair hair twisted into her mouth and she spat it out. Her soles slapped on the hot pavement and the echo slapped back at her off the empty shops. When she crossed the big road at the end of the Green the strange people were only a hundred yards down it, so slow was their march. She ran on, gasping.
They must have heard her coming, because one of the four men who walked in the rear came striding back towards her, his stave grasped in both hands like a weapon.
“Go away, little girl,” he said sharply. “We do not want you. We cannot help you.”
Nicky stopped. He was taller and younger than the fat man who had spoken to her before, and frowned at her very fiercely.
“No! Don’t go that way!” she said between gasps. “There’s a bad sickness that way. An old man told me. He said he was going to catch the sickness and die. He made me promise not to go down there. He said he’d seen people staggering about and then falling down dead in the street.”
The dark man moved his stave, so that it stopped being a weapon and became a stick to lean on.
'‘This is true?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
He looked at her for several seconds, just as fiercely as before. Then, without another word to her, he turned and called after the procession in the strange language. Beyond him Nicky could see two or three faces turn. A cry came back, the man answered and another cry came. By this time the whole group had stopped.
“Come with me,” said the man without looking round, and strode off up the street. Nicky followed.
Men, women and children stood staring and unsmiling, still as a grove of trees, while she walked between them. When they reached the cushioned cart where the old woman lay the man stopped and spoke for some time. The old woman creaked a few words back at him. Her face was all shriveled into wrinkles and folds as though it had been soaked too long in water, but her thin hooky nose stood out of the wrinkles like the beak of a hawk, and her dark brown eyes shone with angry life. She looked like a queen witch.
“Tell your story again, please, miss,” said the man.
Nicky had stopped panting, so she could fit her words together into proper sentences; but she was so afraid of the old woman that she found she could hardly speak above a whisper. She felt the other people drawing closer, so as to be able to hear.