Everlasting Lane (19 page)

‘But you said—’

‘I know, I know. You’re quite right,’ he said. ‘I say a lot of things, but …’ and then he muttered, ‘Oh, Norman, you’re skating on thin ice here. Why should Peter listen to you? Why should he learn from your mistakes? Why should you, Peter? Listen, do you remember when we first met and I told you a little about my secret?’

I did.

‘Then let me tell you a little more. When I was a young man I was in the army. I wasn’t alone, of course. There was a war on after all. I knew a girl and I loved her very much. She loved me too, I think, but she didn’t want to marry a soldier. Why should she? It was a terrible time. It must be hard for you to imagine what it was like. When you watch the movies, well, you always know how it’s going to end, don’t you? Of course you do. We emerge victorious. Hurrah! Hitler’s defeated. Mussolini too: strung up on a lamppost. And, what’s his name, the Japanese fellow: Hirohito.

‘But what was it like then? Have you ever wondered? We didn’t have the comfort of knowing how it would end. It
wasn’t like that. Wouldn’t we all have liked to shriek at the silver screen, “Come on, Mr Projectionist! Skip to the last reel! Let’s find out how this nightmare ends!” It wasn’t like that to live through, Peter—like the films is what I’m trying to say. We didn’t know what people know today. We didn’t know it was going to be all right. We didn’t know we were going to win. Or even that it was ever going to end, no matter what Mr Churchill said. Let me tell you, Peter, that kind of life,’ he said, ‘that kind of existence, well, it leaves its mark.’

Norman removed his glasses and buffed them on the corner of his sleeve. Without his spectacles his eyes seemed larger, the opposite of Mr Merridew, but they were kind eyes surrounded by a flurry of tiny wrinkles.

‘You were in the army, Norman. North Africa and Italy. Do you remember?’ he said in that way that made me feel like I wasn’t really there. ‘Remember?’ he exclaimed. ‘I can still taste the sand between my teeth.’ He picked at them as if he’d been eating raspberries. ‘Oh, and the heat,’ he went on. ‘Each day, Peter, someone would wake us up and we’d polish our rifles and whatever else we had to do for King and Country and we would go out to face the world. And each morning as you looked out on the desert or across a valley you wondered whether you’d still be alive to see that same sun go down or whether you’d be … I knew a lot of men, Peter, decent men from all over the country: Merseyside, London (‘All right, Guv’nor?’), Geordies, Scotland who died in places they’d barely heard of. Imagine that: six years of going to bed never knowing what tomorrow would bring.’

I had never heard anyone talk about the war like that. Certainly my dad had never spoken about it. It all seemed such a long time ago and yet here I was talking to someone who had lived through it, with memories so sharp that to him it
must’ve seemed like yesterday. And then I thought about my father. It must’ve been the same for him, of course: getting up in the morning, going to work, even as he lay there dying the war, the whole war, must have been in the back of his mind—and maybe not so far back. And as he stood there washing his car or, later, lying in bed gasping for breath listening to me running around in the garden taking pot-shots at German trees, what must he have thought?

‘Difficult times, Norman,’ muttered Mr Kirrin. ‘Dreadful times. Greg,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the shop, ‘was in the RAF. Very dashing he was, with a glorious,’ he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together twirling an imaginary, ‘handlebar moustache. Me: I was in the army: eighth army to be precise.’ He shot to his feet, snapping to attention and saluting, cast on the opposite wall, his own thin shadow: ‘Kirrin, Norman, 70th Infantry Division, Sah! Africa and Italy,’ and then he laughed. ‘Your face, Peter, says it all. No,’ he reclaimed his seat shaking his head wearily, ‘I wasn’t much of a soldier then either.’

For a whole minute Norman sat with his forehead resting on the back of his right hand. I took the opportunity to rescue the crunched ball of paper from the mug and sneak it into the pocket of my shorts. When he continued speaking his voice was, at first, a mumble: ‘Her name was Lois,’ he said. ‘What can I say about Lois? There’s nothing to say except that she was … extraordinarily light. I used to tell her she could fly if only she’d flap her wings hard enough. But she never would try. I don’t know why. She never would indulge … She looked like Deanna Durbin, you know? The movie star? Well, of course not. But anyway, she wanted … stability.’ He laughed. ‘Didn’t we all? And I wanted … her. And peace. To me the two … the two concepts … were inextricably linked,’ and he entwined his fingers like a church roof. And then he said:

And then he laughed again. And then he stopped short. ‘Do you understand the word “wanton”?’ I shook my head. ‘It’s probably for the best,’ he said with a thin smile.

‘Anyway, I asked Lois to marry me—I proposed—Hyde Park, 1942:

‘But she declined the offer. She’d met a man—a butcher, as I recall—who for reasons unknown … Perhaps it was just one of those jobs we couldn’t do without. Butchery! How out of place that would’ve seemed on the battlefield. Perhaps even in the face of the oncoming Nazi hordes we couldn’t do without the great British banger feeding and fortifying the generations. Lord preserve us,’ his voice had begun to climb, ‘from having to face the day without six inches of pig fat and gristle shoved into an intestinal sock,’ climbing like a schoolboy up a tree. ‘ “The rest of you,” says good old Mr Churchill, “are expendable as long as the young ladies of Blighty are getting a regular diet of good old British saus …” ’ Norman, blushing, stopped and looked at me. He certainly didn’t sound like
The Archers
now. ‘I apologise, Peter,’ he muttered. ‘You are witness to levels of cheap innuendo that would disgrace the business end of a seaside postcard.

‘My point is, and I feel, Norman, that you must hurry to
address your point before young Peter is as old and meaningless as you are, is this: Lois had a secret and it was my failure to discover the truth of her secret that threw her towards the faithless arms of the butcher. And that is why I would encourage you to persist in your endeavours. Half a secret, half the truth, is no better than no truth at all and where would we be, Peter, without the truth?’

‘But …’ I waited.

‘Go on. Go on. I know you can do it.’

‘That thing you said about never knowing whether you’d be alive or dead at the end of the day …’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘Isn’t that always true? I mean, when I woke up this morning I didn’t know whether I’d even be alive at lunchtime. I mean, not really. We don’t even really know whether we’ll be alive at bedtime, do we?’

Norman Kirrin shook his head. ‘You’re right, Peter,’ he said. ‘We don’t know. Not really.’

The afternoon sun grazed my head as I walked back to Everlasting Lane, its gaze finding me even beneath the shelter of the trees.

I unscrunched the ball of paper which I had taken from Norman’s kitchen. It read:

But choose what? Mr Kirrin hadn’t been as much help as I’d hoped.

As I approached the cottage I could see Anna-Marie perched on the wall waiting for me, her hand sliding along Kitty’s silky back. She looked up but said nothing, occasionally flicking her hair from her eyes as I approached. Eventually I stood before her and prepared myself for the usual—

‘Peter,’ she said softly, ‘I need your help.’

I hadn’t expected that at all. ‘What?’

She glanced back at the cottage. ‘I’ve been up all night,’ she whispered. ‘I knew there was something about the nursery that didn’t make any sense. I mean apart from the fact that it existed at all.’

‘What?’ I didn’t know what she meant.

Anna-Marie growled. ‘Look, Peter, it’s like I said: that nursery didn’t spring into existence the moment you and Kat arrived, did it? I mean you’ve only lived here five minutes.’

‘But—’

‘Oh, give me strength.’ She stood and seized the lapels of my T-shirt, pulling the collar tight around my neck. ‘Do I look like an idiot? You’re not talking to Tommie, you know. That nursery must have been there when the old lady, Mrs Whatnot, Mrs Goodwin her name was, the nursery was there when she lived there. Yes?’

I nodded. Ever so slightly. I didn’t want to encourage her if I could help it.

‘And then I thought but that doesn’t make any sense either because Kat’s still keeping it a secret from
you,
isn’t she?’

I—

‘Isn’t she, Peter?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then she was next to your Grandma’s grave. So, what
I want to know is why is Kat protecting you from some old woman’s secret?’

‘I think,’ I said, and cleared my throat, ‘I think she was my grandma: Mrs What-not.’

‘I beg your pardon.’ Anna-Marie’s fingers had released my collar and were trying to rub the tired shadows from her eyes. ‘Who? What are you talking about?’

‘The old woman,’ I said. ‘I think she was—’

Anna-Marie slapped her forehead with the open palm of her hand. ‘Your Grandma. Of course. It’s so obvious. Now we’re getting somewhere.’

‘And I lived here when I was little.’

‘You lived here? Why didn’t you tell me, Peter? That’s a clue. A really important—’

‘But you said no one even recognises a clue until twenty pages after they’ve seen it.’

‘That,’ said Anna-Marie, ‘is no excuse.’

We were sat on the riverbank opposite the Lodge. It was early Sunday morning, the day before we went back to school, and a lazy morning mist hung over the nettles and the tall meadows, yellows, blues and reds sprinkled on top. Anna-Marie and I had settled beneath the branches of the great tree. I overturned a piece of bark, still damp with dew, and watched the woodlice scatter for cover. Ants marched backwards and forwards along a branch, bits of leaf or twig balanced on their shoulders, an everlasting stream pushing upwards like the man in that story forever pushing his boulder up a mountain.

I sat beside Anna-Marie, her thin leg close to mine, listening to the rattle of the leaves, the birdsong and the busyness of the insects. We held our breaths and watched a family of wild rabbits appear on the Lodge’s golden lawn, nervous and sniffing the warm air. Time drifted like smoke across the morning, nature unfolding before us, and we watched in wonder as …

Well, actually we got bored and began unwrapping and stuffing ourselves with sandwiches.

Anna-Marie was saying something about the Bay City Rollers and how much Alice liked them but I wasn’t really listening. It was like I had all these things in my head squeezed together like Mr Gale’s class on the story carpet, all shoving
and snapping at each other and saying: ‘Think about me! Think about me!’ and my voice like Mr Gale’s saying, ‘Pipe down, squids, or we’ll never get this bloody story finished.’

It was funny because thoughts are just like words really—words in your head—but bigger somehow. And I had such a lot of thoughts to think about that I didn’t really want to think about. It didn’t seem fair that Anna-Marie’s talking was forcing me to keep everything in my head, so I said, ‘What do you think she’ll do when she finds out about the vase?’

‘What?’ said Anna-Marie crossly. ‘Who?’

‘Mrs Carpenter!’

‘Oh, that,’ said Anna-Marie belching cheese and onion. ‘I don’t know, do I. She can’t do anything to me, can she. I’m leaving in a few weeks anyway. And I’ll be glad too—horrible little place.’

‘But why don’t you like it?’ I asked. ‘School I mean. I thought you were clever.’

‘Cleverer than you anyway,’ she said with a sigh, nibbling the rim of her Jaffa cake. ‘Look, Peter, it’s got nothing to do with what I like. The school, that is the teachers, Mrs Carpenter: they don’t like
me.
Except Mr Gale. He’s all right. It’s like I told you before: kids do stupid things because they never think about the consequences; adults hardly do anything because that’s all they think about. Mr Gale’s a bit of both. He makes school more interesting.’

‘But Tommie says Mr Gale’s mad,’ I said. ‘He could’ve killed Tommie. Sometimes he’s like a big kid.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ she said with a yawn. ‘Anyway, schools are for sheep.’

‘Sheep?’

‘Of course, mutton-head.’ She popped the centre of her Jaffa cake into her mouth like one of those aspirins my mum used to take whenever her leg was bothering her. ‘If there was
a school in the whole of England that taught children anything worth knowing they’d bolt the doors quicker than you could recite your two times table. By which I mean,’ she added under her breath, ‘within the hour.’