Mr Wrong (11 page)

‘Nothing at all!’ Mrs Bracken’s triumph suggested that dogs commonly wore or had hung about them innumerable clues to identity.

‘You haven’t tried the local police station?’

‘Why ever should I do that?’

‘The point is that
she
won’t give him food at
all
. Don’t you see? He gets no food unless I give him some of mine, and that only means we’re both hungry.
You’ll have to take him with you!’

There was a short silence. The whole business had something funny about it, the Inspector thought, but he hadn’t got all day. He took the collar out of his pocket and moved over to the dog
and the little girl; the dog cringed again. The girl bent down and stroked his head, and he kept still while the collar was fastened. He looked to the Inspector very like one of the innumerable
dogs – mongrel – whom owners get tired of the moment it has stopped being a puppy: they were everywhere these days, including motorways. What some people would do to their animals beat
him, it really did.

When he straightened up with the dog on the lead, the little girl asked him: ‘What will you do with him, now you’ve got him?’

‘Well – we shall try and find his owner – wait a bit to see whether anyone comes for him –’

‘And if they don’t come?’

The Inspector looked at her. He had thought her ridiculous when he first saw her, but she seemed to have changed. ‘We’ll try and find him a nice new home,’ he said. He was
afraid she wouldn’t leave it here, and she didn’t.

‘And if you can’t?’

‘Oh – we’ll find someone – don’t worry,’ he said. As usual, when he told people lies, he looked her straight in the eye. Just as he felt that she had thought
it over and was beginning to believe him, the mother, stupid cow, said:

‘Oh well, if you can’t find him a home, you’ll have to put him away, won’t you? He’s only a mongrel, after all.’

After a second, the little girl said to him: ‘You don’t do that, do you? Kill them, I mean, to stop people being cruel to them? You
never
do that!’

‘Stupid
cow
,’ he thought again: surely she knew better than that? He tried to give her a warning, quenching, generally silencing look, but it was he who quailed when
she
met
his
eye.

‘No – we don’t do that,’ he said, with all the authority he could bring to the statement. ‘I must be off,’ he added, as it occurred to him that the stupid cow
could also turn out to be a muscle-bound bitch. ‘Do you want to say good-bye to him?’

‘No. Yes, I do.’ The little girl bent down by the dog, who seemed very fond of her, kissed him, and said, ‘I hope you have a lovely good home.’

The Inspector left as soon after that as he possibly could. He could see that the child was nearly crying and he dreaded another catty outburst from the mother. It was only when he had put the
dog in his van that he realized that really he’d simply wanted not to be present when she started . . .

‘. . . using the telephone behind my back and creating these scenes! Have you lost your tongue or something?’

‘Yes! I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘If we go on like this, we may not get any supper.’ Fern said wearily, ‘I wouldn’t get any anyway. I gave it to him. I’m going to bed.’ She walked past her
mother and out of the room. ‘
That
settled her,’ she thought mechanically. It always outfaced her mother to find that a threat had become empty, as it were, behind her back. In
her bedroom it was plain to see where he had scuffed himself a nest of eiderdown to sleep in. She threw herself on the bed: for the first time in her life she was neither afraid nor simply
distressed, but urgently miserable. If there had been a bolt inside her door she would have bolted it. She felt as though she had never had a chance until the dog came, and when he left, all the
chances she might have had were suddenly impressed upon her. Lots of children lived marvellous lives with a father and brothers and sisters, as well as animals: she had known this for a long time
through classes and jobs in studios where there were other children, but she had never compared herself to them because it had seemed silly even to try. But now – because she had lost the
dog, she realized that he was all she had to lose . . .

A long time later
She
came in, and said that Fern could have some tongue and scrambled egg if she liked. Fern said she didn’t want it – leave her alone. To her surprise Mrs
Bracken did leave – without the usual voice-raising argument ending with a threat. ‘I just thought in view of your interview,’ she said, but when Fern repeated, more sulkily, that
she didn’t want anything: that was that.

When she was sure that her mother was having her supper, Fern cried for the dog. She kept repeating to herself that the Inspector had said that they didn’t kill dogs to stop people being
cruel, but the more she thought about it, the less sure she felt that this was true. What could they
do
with dogs that people didn’t want? If it was true, then her mother was a
murderer. This thought gave her surprising satisfaction – funny, you wouldn’t think that you could bear to think that your mother was a murderer, but she
liked
thinking it. She
had always known there was something horrible about her, and this was what it was. Before she went to sleep, she undid all her curlers, and combed out all her hair with a wet comb. There
wouldn’t be any ringlets for the audition.

In the morning, her mother cried whatever-had-she-done-to-her-hair, but the tones were of powerless dismay, and not the usual frightening voice that led up to her losing her temper. So at
breakfast, Fern refused eggs and bacon in her new, cold, sulking voice, and to her amazement, her mother asked her quite quietly what
would
she like. A cup of black, sugared coffee, she
said. She had to have something or she’d faint, and black coffee struck her as the most sophisticated choice. She got it, didn’t like it, but managed to sip it down gazing into a new
distance – not her plate, nor her mother, nor the wall – but somewhere incalculable, a place that certainly did not include her mother. She refused to talk at all, except at the end of
breakfast, when she announced that unless her mother bought her a pair of jeans and a sweater and proper shoes, she would not go to the interview at all. And
that
worked as well, as easily
as anything! Her mother took her out and actually got them – even a black sweater (which she had always wanted) and red moccasins. Fern brushed out her long straight hair without any parting
and clipped it at the back of her head with a tortoise-shell slide. She looked at herself: everything was much better, if only she didn’t go on finding herself wondering whether the dog was
all right, and what was being done to him. Each time she wondered that, she found it easier to be as horrible to her mother as she could think of. Because of all the shopping they had to go a large
part of the way to Mr Strong’s (South Kensington) by cab . . .

When the door-bell rang, Ted Strong thought it was Jake – round to support him over the Bracken girl interview. Then he saw through the frosted glass that there were two figures on the
doorstep, and his heart sank. It was bad enough meeting Mrs Bracken at all, in
any
circumstances that he could possibly think of; meeting her with that pathetic backward precocious child of
hers was worse, and meeting her for a
second
interview – when clearly she must think her child’s role was in the bag – was worst of all. But the truth was that he had left
the whole thing too late – treated it far too casually, and now he was paying for it. He’d been so pleased with himself over the casting of the old man and the middle-aged couple that
when the producer had started some grotty argument about the script, he’d turned all his attention on to winning that without seeming to, and he simply hadn’t thought about the
child’s part – more than that there
was
one – until about ten days ago. Since then, after hours of nightmare, he had found only one child he thought really suitable –
and Fern Bracken (God! what a name!). The suitable one had of
course
got measles, of
course
, so now, given how little time there was left before filming actually started, he was more
or less saddled with Miss Fern Bracken. And her sodding awful mother, who reminded him, he remembered, of some over-upholstered gym-mistress-cum-sadist-cum-lesbian? Or bird of prey. Or something. By now he had opened the door and saw to his relief that Jake was paying off a taxi beyond Mrs Bracken and Fern.

‘Good good. All arrived together, I see,’ he said.

‘Good morning, Mr Strong. Say “good morning, Mr Strong”.’

The child looked at him – very coolly, for her age – and said: ‘Hullo.’ Behind her, Jake was extravagantly miming his sorrow at being what amounted to late. Mrs Bracken
turned from the door to look at her daughter, and would have nearly caught him had he not stopped instantly as though frozen or shot.

After that they all trooped into the dark hall that Ted had not decided yet how to decorate, and Jake took off his suède-and-beaver coat, while Mrs Bracken declined taking off anything.
This made Ted wonder whether if she had stripped off her gigantic herring-bone beetroot tweed overcoat she would seem less awful, because that must make less of her, or whether if you could more
clearly see what less of her there was it would be nastier. Fern simply stood quietly until they moved upstairs.

Upstairs, Ted had a good look at her. She seemed taller, older, and far more – well, more of a
person
than a category. Either she had changed drastically, which seemed impossible in
less than a week, or his powers of observation were flagging. He remembered the snowflake routine and swallowed – no, he had rightly been attending also to Mum, and
she
hadn’t
changed at all. There she was, establishing herself on his sofa and crossing her ankles in that particularly unwinning manner.

He picked up the script: Jake balanced himself on an Italian chest and pretended to stare at a picture by Fuseli, whom Ted knew he loathed, and Mrs Bracken leaned – ever so slightly
– forwards.

‘If you want me to read anything, I would rather do it alone with you.’

‘Right!’ This was his cue – mad not to take instant advantage. ‘Jake! I wonder whether you’d take Mrs Bracken upstairs and give her some coffee.’

It was surprising how easy everything suddenly became. Jake, although he gave Ted one look that combined astonishment with imminent revenge, got Mrs Bracken to her feet and herded her (she
really was someone who suited this collective verb) up the stairs, out of sight, and finally earshot.

The moment that he heard the door upstairs close, he turned to the girl and found that she was staring at him so urgently that he could notice the shape of her eyes: they were not childishly
round as he remembered.

‘You’re not really eight, are you?’

‘Of course not. I’m twelve – nearly.’

‘Why does your mother say you’re eight then?’

‘Because she’s wicked. She’s probably the most wicked person you’ve ever seen in your life!’

‘Oh, come now!’

‘What do you mean? She
is
. She’s cruel, too. There’s a Society isn’t there? I don’t mean the animal one. For not being cruel to people. Have you heard of
it?’

‘Yes. Well, there’s the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.’

‘If you reported her, where would they put me?’

‘My dear girl,
I
can’t report your mother for anything. I know nothing about her. I think we’d better get on with –’

But, without his noticing, she had moved up to him until she was barely a foot from where he sat on the arm of the sofa. She clenched her hands and then shook them in a recognizably theatrical
gesture:

‘Report her! You’ve got to! Once you know that someone’s as wicked as that, you’ve got to!’

‘As wicked as what? Look here, Fern, what does she do to you?’ Perhaps there might be something in it, after all. The poor child couldn’t help her gestures; they’d
probably been dinned into her since she was a baby.

She took a deep breath, and he could feel her thinking.

‘She – she washes my hair so that it hurts. Boiling water, and the soap gets in my eyes. She won’t ever let me have cakes or anything like that, but
she
eats them all
the time. I don’t go to a proper school because she won’t let me. She never gives me any pocket money. She’s always making me do dancing exercises and go to class and practise
horrible French and that. And when she smiles, it only means she’s being more cruel than ever! It’s not fair!’

Ted relaxed: the final cry, ubiquitous to all the children he had ever encountered – even his sister’s children about turns on the pony – on top of what seemed to him typically
childish resentments, showed quite clearly that Fern was only griping about what was probably too much attention from her mother, and possibly a stricter discipline than ordinary children
encountered. Of course the wretched little creature hadn’t
chosen
to act: almost certainly her mother had decided upon the career for her, and all those mothers became obsessed with
pushing their children in what they considered to be the appropriate directions.

Fern, who had watched him to see his reaction, realized that she had not had the desired effect upon him. ‘She beats me! With a big wooden spoon! Every night she does it!’

‘Now Fern, I think you’re exaggerating. In any case, if you want to do this audition without your mother, you’d better get on with it.’ He picked up the script again, and
pretended to be studying it to give her time to cool down a little. She gave a sharp little sigh, but when he glanced at her she was looking at him quite steadily – seemed calm as though
nothing had happened. He explained to her what he wanted her to do, and she listened with surprisingly professional attention. ‘What age am I supposed to be?’

‘Let’s say about ten. I don’t think you could play anything younger than that.’

‘Not unless I was a silly snowflake.’