Miss Appleby's Academy (14 page)

Connie didn’t look like his child these days, Mick thought, more like some wild creature from the hilltops. She had hacked at her hair with a pair of blunt scissors, it would appear. It hung, dirty blonde, about her face. She looked like a boy except that she was too fragile to be any such thing, and in spite of the ragged clothes there was a grace about her which made her unmistakably Isabel’s child.

It was on his lips a dozen times to say ‘Aren’t you cold?’ because Connie wore nothing on her grubby feet and a boy’s shirt and trousers, much too big – where she had
got them and what colour they had originally been he had no idea. But he had never tried to alter anything she was, it was bad enough for her having to live here like this. The familiar feelings of guilt swept over him in such waves that he was surprised to find he was still standing.

He thought briefly of the woman who had invaded the Black Diamond, strange, middle-aged, prim little soul. Plainly dressed, plainly spoken, too thin to be pretty, too white-faced and long-nosed with her hair scraped back, and then he remembered her eyes. She had lovely eyes, deep green.

And then he thought that his marriage had made it impossible for him to see any woman in a good light, but she had shown courage tonight such as he had not seen before. He thought of the way that she had shouted back at him and he thought of the long voyage across the sea.

She must have had tremendous faith to have done such a thing and even though it must have been so very hard she had made it here. He wondered how bad things had been that a middle-aged spinster would leave everything she had for something as uncertain as this.

He never went to bed without looking in on his child. She was the only good thing to come out of their marriage. She wasn’t asleep. He always hoped that she would be, but he knew now that she waited until he came home before she slept.

The lamps blazed in her room. It was cold, but at least it was clean. It was the one thing he insisted on, that his bedroom and her bedroom and the bathroom should be
clean, and that Connie should have meals brought to her room. They had long given up any pretence of meals in the dining room.

The bed was huge and Connie was tiny, huddled there under her blankets.

‘Did you go to school today?’

She rolled her eyes. He asked her every day, even on Saturdays and Sundays. It had become a standing joke.

‘Of course I did.’

He hadn’t mentioned boarding school to her in a long time. Now he did. She didn’t reply. Mick sat down on the bed and knew how tired he was, his body ached for night after night and day after day of conflict and business and trying to get things right and failing so badly here at home and from the bruises and knocks which he had endured, trying to take control of the Black Diamond away from the intruders.

‘What is the point of school?’ She looked directly at him and both her face and her voice were filled with scorn. She reminded him of his mother: she had the same fine and rather acid intelligence. ‘I can read, write and add up, all of which you taught me before I went to school. The rest of it has been a waste of time,’ she said, her mouth going into a thin line. And then she stopped.

He had hoped she wouldn’t notice but he hadn’t seen his face in the mirror. She stared. Her eyes got wider and wider.

‘You’ve been fighting!’ she said. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘Where?’

She touched his cheek.

‘I think it’s somebody else’s blood,’ he said. ‘Some of the Crook lads tried to smash up the bar.’

‘Is Ed all right?’

‘It’s Mr Higgins to you and yes, he’s fine. Now go to sleep.’

She said something else, but it was inaudible. And then she said again what he had not caught. She didn’t look at him when she said it, as though she were ashamed to betray any affection. ‘I will never leave you here,’ she said harshly, ‘to her and to this.’

She sounded like an adult. It hurt him so much, the child being mother to the man. It was not to be borne and yet it reminded him what he was doing, how much he loved his child. She flung herself at him, then away from him, towards the pillow which she grabbed. He tucked her in, kissed her, saw her comfortable and then he left the room, softly because he knew that she would sleep now. He threw off his clothes and fell into bed; he didn’t even notice that Isabel wasn’t there.

*

There was food now at the Black Diamond. Edward Higgins practically lived there. He had a small house, Emma had discovered, two doors up, which he went to when the night was old and he was exhausted, so he didn’t sleep at the Black Diamond, but he was always back early in the morning. Emma wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing or not. She didn’t like the idea of being alone there, but since the boss, Mr Castle, stayed until the middle of
the night there were actually only about four hours when she and George were alone. She did worry that somebody would break in, but when she voiced this to Mr Higgins he laughed.

‘Why is that amusing?’

‘Nobody’s going to break in here, love, not these days. We had one break-in and after that Mr Castle made sure that there’s nowt to take – and it’s the middle of nowhere. And also folk know now that we won’t have it.’

So, the Black Diamond was as safe as you could get, she thought. Mr Higgins was two doors away, the streets were silent by then, she quite liked the old house, its creakings in the night became her comfort. Knowing that Mr Higgins would be there for breakfast, more prompt than ever, she made pancakes.

Pancakes were cheap. There were hens at the back of the pub. She liked hens: they had always kept them at home and all she needed after that was flour and water. Mr Higgins recommended beer. She didn’t know how he knew, but after she used beer she knew that it was the answer to the best pancakes, and she would put butter on them and sugar, and Mr Higgins could eat a great many of these so she would make stacks of them. After Mr Higgins appeared, shamefaced, with sausages from the local butcher the pancakes seemed even better. The sausages would bake slowly to golden brown in the oven and the pancakes were delicious.

She fed the hens with leftovers, such as they were, boiled up, and the hens seemed to like it. They had their own
space out the back and she almost envied them. The view looked down beyond the moors, into the little fields and small grey farms which made up the land. The hens had a great big field. She remembered having once heard someone say, ‘The way to keep your goat happy is to give it a very big field,’ and she thought that was true of everything, be it goats, hens or people. They could have laid waste to the rest of the garden out the back, but they did not because they had about a quarter of an acre to themselves and a wire fence between one and the other.

Nobody said anything. Mr Castle acted as though she and George were not there. Mr Higgins came in regularly and eagerly for his meals.

*

As soon as the customers began to come in at noon every day she would retreat to the back and there she taught George his lessons. She was aware that he saw no other children and was afraid that he would become lonely, so she decided to enrol him at the nearest school which was just along the road. It was a big, rather gloomy-looking building. She had seen the children going in.

George didn’t object to the idea when she suggested it to him, and she thought that she had been right: he needed the company of other children. She took him there on the following Monday morning.

Inside it was freezing, the floors were bare, the walls high, and when she found the door which led into the classroom she was worried.

There were great rows of scholars. This room too was
bitterly cold and worst of all at the front of the class a middle-aged man was attempting to remonstrate with a child, a thin and badly dressed child, whom she assumed at first to be a boy. To her astonishment the child was actually laughing and swearing at him and evading his grasp quite successfully, dancing around him as though it were some kind of boxing match, while he stood, thin, shabby and bewildered.

The children shouted too, some of them were standing in the aisles, others on their desks or chairs and Emma winced at their language, glad she did not understand all of it, in their thick guttural voices. George stood, gaping. The child was tiny, dainty, and that was when she knew that it was a girl.

‘Come on then, you old bugger!’ the child taunted him. ‘Make me do it. Go on!’ Her voice was light and rather elegant, she barely had an accent and her eyes shone, but there was something hard and withdrawn about her, her tiny fists clenched and when the man put out both hands in despair she laughed and ran away, down the aisle and beyond where George and Emma stood.

She was half-starved, her rags hanging off her in spite of the chill and her limbs so white beneath. She was dirty and her eyes were huge and dark. She stared at them for a few seconds and then turned and ran out of the door.

The schoolmaster seemed not to notice them, he stood there confused and then he shouted, ‘Silence!’ and he picked up and waved the cane at the other children. Gradually, they subsided and peace descended.

George drew nearer to her. The schoolmaster noticed them, but Emma withdrew from the room. She marched George out of the building and there she took great breaths of air as though there had been none inside. She led the way back to the Black Diamond and into the kitchen, which was thankfully deserted. There she made tea and they sat by the fire.

‘You don’t want me to go there?’ George said anxiously.

‘Certainly not. It was chaotic. I’ve never seen any school like it.’

*

Mr Higgins came in; he had taken to doing so from time to time before the customers arrived and he would buy foodstuffs for the meals. He seemed to have some arrangement with the butcher and with the men who went fishing. Having questioned him on this matter Emma discovered that they drank at the pub and Mr Castle was happy for him to make bargains of this kind so that their beer was cheap or free.

Other things which she needed, such as flour, coffee, tea, sugar, butter, cheese and milk, Mr Higgins would provide. It was an unspoken agreement. He bought these and she cooked and now he had all his meals with them. She thought he was beginning to look better for it. He ate breakfast, eggs and bread, had a cheese or meat sandwich for his lunch (he called it his dinner), and in the evening, early for him because he had to see to the bar nearly all the time between noon and late in the evening, he would hastily consume fish and vegetables – Mr Higgins
did not believe in vegetables and Emma had had to go to the greengrocer and take what she could get, mostly potatoes, carrots, Brussels sprouts and what they called turnips. The greengrocer had a very large garden behind his shop and a very big attic for storage and a cellar too. It was important to have vegetables, though she didn’t recognize all of them. What was unfamiliar she baked slowly and none of it was a disaster.

Mr Higgins was mesmerized by Emma’s baking. She couldn’t think why. She made bread, she made cakes, as she had before Verity and Laurence moved in and with them a cook so that they were more grand than before and her talents were not needed in the kitchen.

She liked the cooking and baking; it was familiar and she spent more and more time at the stove. She liked the hot water, the ovens, there were two of them, and the way that she could put pans over the fire, but best of all was the top oven where she would bake bread almost every day. It brought Mr Higgins in from the bar and she would smile and give him a big chunk of still-warm loaf thick with butter to eat as he went back to his work. He even smiled sometimes and he always thanked her.

Also he liked her coffee. At least she could get good beans. She found a grinder in the cupboard, old, brown and square, and the smell from the beans as she ground them mixed with the smell of bread baking made her close her eyes and think of herself at home when her father was still alive and everything was bearable.

It was ridiculous, she knew, but Mr Higgins was not
much younger than her father would have been now, she realized, and she wanted him there in her kitchen. She wanted to put good food inside him and for him to prosper. He had had a hard life by the look of him and sometimes he was very tired and she wondered why Mr Castle employed someone of that age to run his pub when Mr Higgins was so elderly, but she soon saw why.

Mr Higgins had found a home there. She wanted to laugh at this until she saw that she and George had done the same and that in some ways Mr Castle was running ‘a bloody orphanage’. She had not thought him sentimental, yet he got a lot for what he gave. Mr Higgins was very good at running the place, the men liked him, the beer flowed, and she was keeping the place clean and she had no wages.

She had no money at all. She had to apply to Mr Higgins for her trips to the shops, but since she spent so little and he benefited so much he didn’t seem to mind. She had not quite ignored Mr Castle’s command not to go near the shops, but she only went when she had to because she was aware of people talking about her. Their voices dropped as she drew near, they looked down or away, but the shopkeepers endured her because she had money. She was grateful to the poachers who frequented the pub for rabbits, pigeons and brown trout.

The end of the week had come and gone, and while she had half waited for Mr Castle to say something to her, in her heart she knew he would not. Everything had altered after the fight, so the end of the week was not
noted in any way. They went on into the second week and the third, and she even made the room upstairs more habitable for herself and George. Mr Higgins put up the fallen curtain and she found decent sheets and bedclothes, and she stopped worrying about where she would go from here.

*

Emma became more and more conscious of the fact that she hadn’t been to church since she had left home. That Sunday she determined to take George and made her way with him down the narrow lane to where the parish church stood above the fields which led to the dale. She was not late, but she had not wanted to be early because she knew no one and wanted to take this slowly, but as she and George sat down near the back of the church she was aware of heads turning and of whispering, and of people staring and trying not to be seen doing so.