Absolute Hush (12 page)

Sissy is infected with me and I can feel the universe. Anything prodded anywhere in the universe hurts me. Anything stirring in the cosmos tickles me. I twitch to the tickling of the toes of a mouse in Tibet.

There came a sudden sound of footsteps and the strong smell of scorch. And into the kitchen rushed George, his eyebrows burnt away, his face black, holes burnt in his clothes, and his breath coming fast.

‘The police are after me,' he gasped.

Martin, Mrs Lovage's nephew, fighting the fire in the cottages at Bedham, had recognised him and shouted, ‘The Plague House boy!'

The firemen would have caught him in a moment, for the boy was short and puffed, and too afraid to be evasive, but, at the very moment of Martin's shout, the door caved in and the firemen were too busy to even think of sneaking little arsonists from the big house of the next village.

‘Well, who would have thought it of a boy from a good family like that?' said Martin to his aunt.

‘Me!' cried Mrs Lovage, pulling on her coat.

‘And living in the biggest house in the village too,' sighed Mrs Lovage's nephew.

‘That boy's got a mother who suffers constantly for her children,' mourned Mrs Lovage, hurrying into outdoor clothes. ‘Though does she ever get a crumb of gratitude? Does she?'

Martin shook his head, brought up on tales of the bad children from the Plague House.

‘I hope your Shirl is as good a mother,' said Mrs Lovage, knotting her headscarf. Then, with a sob in her throat, ‘This'll break my lady's heart,' as she stuck her feet into her carpet slippers, which she would not normally have gone to the Plague House wearing under any circumstances, but this was an emergency.

‘Anyway, the police have been set on his trail and they're probably at his mother's house at this very moment,' the fireman told her, helping her out with her bike.

‘The police!' gasped Mrs Lovage. ‘Oh, my poor lady! You should have told me first so I could be there to console her.'

Mrs Lovage ripped her stockings getting astride. ‘When you think how I wrote a note for your teacher saying you had nits and couldn't get to school the day you wanted to go to the football match, when your own mother wouldn't do it for you. And now you can't even let me know in advance that the police are after my poor lady, and you know how sensitive she is.'

‘But it wasn't my responsibility, Auntie,' wailed Martin.

‘You're the one who identified him,' accused Mrs Lovage, pedalling away.

She went through the village gasping with breathlessness and excitement, wisps of hair bursting from flying headscarf and stockings concertinaed, shouting to anyone she met on the way, ‘They've caught our George making a fire at last! He'll be put into borstal for sure!' She was jubilant. ‘I knew it was him!'

When she reached the Plague House, the police had already arrived. Mrs Lovage recognised their bikes at once, stern, chipped, and tall. She leant her own alongside and rushed into the house. The policemen were standing in the kitchen, fiddling nervously with their helmets. Elizabeth was sitting, looking frail but brave, at the breakfast table. Sissy was hunched among a litter of broken toast looking sulky. Mrs Lovage arrived like a rescuing army.

‘Well, well, whatever's going on?' she asked.

Elizabeth's face lit up and she stretched out her arms like a drowning person begging for rescue. ‘Oh, thank God you've come, Mrs L. They say my son has set fire to a cottage but you can tell them that's impossible.'

Mrs Lovage, after the briefest of pauses, said, ‘Of course, mum.'

‘I'm so upset.' Elizabeth leant forwards and covered her eyes with her hands while the young policemen shuffled with embarrassment.

Elizabeth, her lips trembling, said, apparently irrelevantly,
‘My husband was shot down in the first month of the war, you know. I am a war widow.'

‘Oh,' groaned the policemen.

Sissy sat unmoving, shoulders hunched, not any longer chewing, though she had marmalade round her mouth and tea splashings down the front of her nightie. Elizabeth tried studiously ignoring her, and hoped that the two policemen would not notice her either, for squalid Sissy, thought Elizabeth,
looked
like the sister of a pyromaniac.

‘You shouldn't of come here troubling her about such foolishness,' Mrs Lovage began to rage.

Elizabeth said swiftly to Sissy, keeping her voice low, talking out of the side of her mouth, accompanying her words with shooing gestures, ‘Don't you think you ought to go and change, dear?' The gleam in Elizabeth's eye was hard.

Sissy gazed at her mother as though she had not heard.

Mrs Lovage was saying, ‘Can't you see she's not the sort of lady whose kid sets fire to things?'

‘If we might have a word with the young man, just to clear things up,' one of the policemen said hesitantly.

Elizabeth sighed and slumped, causing Mrs Lovage to catch hold of her hand in a grip that was both meant to comfort and to support. Elizabeth shuddered at the rough touch and would have loved to withdraw her hand but dared not, with the policemen watching. She looked up murmuring, ‘Thank you for everything, Mrs L,' as though she was on her death-bed.

‘Ah! Don't take on so, mum,' cried Mrs Lovage, terribly moved.

Sissy, dull-eyed before uneaten toast, suddenly seized it and sank her teeth into it. It crunched with the same sort of crumby explosion that had once, maybe, caused Mr Parson to wink his eye. The two policemen swung round, alarmed, at the sudden pop and Mrs Lovage scowled, feeling sure the whole thing was the girl's fault. It always was.

‘I'll go and get him,' said Sissy through dry toast.

‘There's a good girl,' smiled one of the policemen. ‘He's in no danger unless he's been a bad boy.'

‘Which we are sure he's not,' said the other, looking fondly in the direction of Elizabeth, ‘Seeing as what a good home he's got.'

Elizabeth, feeling somewhat braced by these words, bestowed a beautiful and grateful smile on the young man.

Sissy rose, still chewing, screeching her chair legs back on the flagstones in just the way that Elizabeth hated.

When she opened the attic bedroom door, she was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of burning and saw George cower in the darkest corner, sucking his thumb as though he was three instead of thirteen.

‘I didn't do it, Sis! I didn't! I didn't! I didn't!' he whimpered, cringing.

‘Come out and tell them, then,' urged Sissy.

‘I'll run away. I'll jump out of the window,' wept George.

‘They'll catch you, George. You're only a little boy and they're big men. You haven't a chance.'

‘I'll kill myself!' cried George. ‘I'll throw myself into the moat and drown!'

‘Now you sound just like Mummy,' said Sissy contemptuously.

Eventually, after much persuasion, George scrambled cautiously out, covered in cobwebs, Sissy whispering, ‘I'll be at your side.'

Halfway downstairs, George stopped suddenly and said, ‘Suppose they put me in prison, Sis.'

‘I thought you said you didn't do it,' she retorted.

‘Well, they might not believe me,' he whined.

‘Then you'll just have to persuade them you didn't do it. Like you have me,' said Sissy drily.

They went on down in silence for a while, then George stopped suddenly, as though he had just thought of something, and yelped, ‘They might hang me, Sissy.'

‘Oh, come on,' said Sissy, giving him a tug. ‘They don't hang children any longer. That stopped a hundred years ago.'

But at the sight of the policemen he stopped, jerked back out of Sissy's grasp, and, with a gagging sound, backed violently into the hall.

The policemen shot off after him, catching him in the middle of the hall, and it was as though they forgot that they were adult men and George a child, for there followed a short struggle in which the boy disappeared entirely under the bulk of the two men, and Sissy thought they must be crushing George to death. When they straightened, they had George by either elbow. His burnt shirt was up to his shoulders, his face scarlet, his singed hair wild, his nose running, and he was crying with his mouth open. Keeping him a little too high, so that his toes only barely brushed the ground and he hung looking like a long bolster drying on a too-low washing line, they frogmarched him back towards the kitchen.

Elizabeth had not stirred. It was one of those situations she would have liked to have pretended was not happening. She sat, her gaze vague, trying to keep her attention on the thrush singing in the garden and the butterflies that hovered over the hogweed in the yard.

Suddenly George screamed, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Help me!'

A great shudder winced through Elizabeth and, gripping the sides of the table, she began to push herself up, and then she let her head sink and could go no further, for her limbs had become numb like her mind. There she stayed, swaying a little, half-up half-down, a tiny groaning sensation stirring in her throat.

George's shout had made the hairs on Sissy's scalp prickle and the blood drain from her face. She would never forgive George, she realised.

George, having yelled out, peered through the kitchen doorway, to where he could see his mother swaying.

There came a long long silence during which George dangled between the two policemen, who stood hesitantly.

Then, after ages, it seemed as though George understood that his mother was not going to save him.

He turned his head, looked straight into Sissy's eyes with his own gaze wide with honesty and frankness, and said the thing that made Sissy forgive him utterly.

In a croaky little voice that was as dry as the cobwebs he had hid among, he said, ‘I got so flustered that I called you “Mummy” by mistake, Sis. And I wish you were.'

That was the moment Sissy lunged, whacking the policemen in the belly with her fists and screaming, ‘You filthy bullies! You'rejust like Hitler!'

The policemen, taken by surprise, staggered, loosening their grip on George's elbows. He was running even before Sissy had time to tell him, ‘Make a dash for it, Georgie!'

Mrs Lovage made a grab as he dived through her legs, but missed him. Turning to Sissy, she said, ‘You'll get done for aiding a criminal to escape from the police, my girl,' and Sissy put her hands on her hips and laughed sneeringly.

In a wiggle of battered legs and dirty knees George was gone through the open window. The policemen leant out of the window and watched as he plunged through the cow-parsley.

One of the policemen said, ‘We'll leave it now, but we can get him whenever we want to.'

Sissy rushed for George the moment the police were gone, dashing over the yard, dust rising under her pounding sandals. As she approached the yard, she heard the bolts of the stable door shut.

Left alone in the kitchen, Mrs Lovage lit two cigarettes with one match and placed one between Elizabeth's lips. ‘You'll be ever so much better without him, ducky.'

Elizabeth took a long nourishing draw and the grey colour began to leave her cheeks.

‘They'll take him into a Home and make a man of him,' said Mrs Lovage. Elizabeth let out a shriek of anguish.

‘They'll let you see him on Sundays. And for the rest of the week he'll be taught to do all sorts of things that'll be useful to him when he's grown up.'

‘What sort of things?' cried Elizabeth, like one denying an accusation.

‘Well, polish his boots, wash behind his knees. Even lay the table. Sissy will be more docile after the boy's gone, too.'

Elizabeth rocked a little like a bereaved Arab and cried, ‘Part with my darlings? Oh, no, Mrs L. Never! Never! Never!' but there was a lack of conviction in her voice which Mrs Lovage found encouraging.

Mrs Lovage told her carefully. ‘They're reaching the difficult age, you mark my words. You won't be able to cope with two such children turned teenager, dearie.'

Elizabeth began to sob into her hands. She looked up after a while, her eyes sparkling with tears, and said in a small shaky voice, ‘After all, Mrs L, it will be fun for him to be with other boys, instead of only having his sister to play with.'

Mrs Lovage let out a sigh as though some great victory had been won.

Out in the stable Sissy said to George, ‘You will have to hide all the time from now on. If they catch you now it will be borstal because, by running away, you have let them know you did it.'

‘But I didn't,' whimpered George. ‘I keep telling you.'

‘You'll have to live up in the attic all the time and not even Mummy or Mrs Lovage can know you're up there. And when you hear anyone but me, you'll have to get out on to the roof and run. Those policemen will never catch you round the chimneys.'

‘Oh! Ah!' wept George.

‘Come on. Stop blubbing. You shouldn't have done it if you can't take the consequences,' snapped Sissy, totally in charge now.

‘But I didn't,' moaned George.

Sissy said, ‘You've got to come out of here or they'll have you trapped with a hand grenade.'

‘A hand grenade?' gasped George, the blood draining from his face.

‘I think they've gone to get weapons,' said Sissy.

By the time Myrtle arrived with the blue chiffon dress tacked up for a fitting, Elizabeth was on her second cigarette and cup of tea, and feeling better, almost optimistic. The sight of the dress set her back, but Mrs Lovage swiftly calmed her.

‘It's all right, dearie. I've seen our Sissy as good as gold sitting reading a book in the drawing-room. Her hands are even clean.'

Elizabeth was amazed, and tried to picture Sissy good and Georgeless. Perhaps this was what Sissy was going to be like after George had gone into the Home.

‘Where is George?' she asked Mrs Lovage, a bit nervously, not really wanting to know, but feeling she ought to. Mrs Lovage shrugged.