The Outcast (5 page)

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’ Giggling.

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‘Where are the others?’ said Tom.

‘I don’t know. I saw Tamsin, but I don’t think she’s playing.’ ‘Did you see Ed?’

‘I haven’t seen anyone for ages.’

Kit didn’t tell them her fears of being last and hopeless; she had been invited into the boys’ hiding place with Lewis Aldridge and she wasn’t going to spoil it. It was the best thing that could have happened.

Kit couldn’t remember all that far back, but as far back as she could, she had wanted to be Lewis. He looked just right to her. He looked how people should look. She remembered seeing him in the summer holidays when she was trying to join in with the boys who were climbing trees in the woods behind her house. She was five then and couldn’t manage. Lewis was there and he, at nine, was so grown-up – grown-up first and then heroic – because he had stopped a boy teasing Kit and taken her to the edge of the woods so that she could find her way home. He hadn’t talked to her or anything; it was that he was kind. She wanted to be him, and knowing that he was coming to the party had been a good thing that came into her mind sometimes and made her smile and feel nervous in case he wouldn’t be as nice as she’d thought.

‘Maybe they’re outside.’This was Tom, worrying. ‘We weren’t including outside,’ said Lewis.

‘But maybe they are.’

‘They might be in the attics.’

‘There’s mice there. Rats,’ said Kit, who heard the mice above her room at night. She tried not to lisp like a baby, but it was hard with no front teeth.

‘There are mice in here,’Tom said, staring down through the slats at her, and doing a creepy voice.

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‘No, there aren’t,’ said Kit, wanting to look round and hunching up her shoulders. Norman sniggered.

‘And spiders,’ said Tom, realising he was onto something.

Lewis looked at Tom, ‘I can see a spider on your head,’ he said.

Tom jumped and banged his head on the ceiling. All four momentarily exploded into hysteria. Footsteps. They froze. There was light around the edges of the cupboard door and an adult voice, one of the nannies.

‘Boys and girls! Come along! It’s time to go. I want Lewis Aldridge, Joanna Napper and Ed Rawlins. Right now, please!’

The children exchanged looks of resignation. ‘You can keep on playing,’ said Lewis to Tom.

‘It’s no fun now,’ saidTom, and all four allowed themselves to fall out of the cupboard. Kit tried to stop smiling at Lewis – not that he was looking at her – he’d gone already.

‘Bye,’ he said over his shoulder to anyone who was there, and started down the stairs.

‘Aren’t you glad we drove?’ said Gilbert, pulling away from the house. He peered through the glass, wiping the inside with a gloved hand.

‘Terribly,’ answered Elizabeth, resting her head against the cold glass and imagining running through the dark woods. It was dead of night now and winter rain fell onto the wind- screen.

Gilbert felt a sudden rush of joy. He decided he couldn’t wait to tell Lizzie about the job. He’d planned to get home, and have the boy safely in bed and tell her properly, but now seemed the only time. He took a hand off the wheel a second and put it over hers in her lap, looking across.

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‘Lizzie, Dicky’s given me Roberts’s job. You know he’s retiring.’

‘No! Gilbert! Lewis, did you hear? Gilbert, that’s wonderful.’ The car swung out of the drive and into the road.

‘Steady!’

‘But Gilbert! That’s superbly and fantastically lovely news.’ The headlights barely made an impression on the darkness and the rain that was falling.‘We’ll be so very rich.’

‘Well, not exactly.’ He laughed, pleased she thought so. Lewis leaned forward between the seats to be included in the excite- ment, and Gilbert steered the car around the big bend towards home.‘Can’t see a bloody thing!’

‘Maybe it will freeze later; be awfully pretty tomorrow.’

Their own drive appeared through the blackness before there was any more talking and Gilbert turned the car into it. He saw his house shining white ahead of him.

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C
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Lewis was ten on the twenty-ninth of December and thought it a particularly important age. Elizabeth always decorated their places for birthday breakfasts; holly and small white snowdrops for Lewis in December and narcissi for Gilbert in the spring. In November, for Elizabeth’s birthday, Gilbert would send Lewis out into the wet garden early to look for flowers, and then together they would dry them and put them around her place, enjoying that they were men and not good at it. If it had been very mild, there were sometimes still roses in the garden for her birthday table and Lewis would cut them and carry them back to the house with the petals dropping onto the grass. Whatever else happened on birthdays, whatever treats there were, or presents, nothing came close to that feeling of seeing the decorated table, the unusualness of the garden come to the house.

Gilbert made a speech for Lewis’s being ten and he got a bicycle and a penknife, and the bicycle was pleasingly too big for him and the knife was sharp enough to cut quite big bits of wood if you sawed at it, and Lewis was very happy with them. It was a good year and they felt they had habits now and didn’t have to learn everything fresh again. There was still a strange blank feeling of the war being over and no sense of

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return, just rebuilding, but work and school and ritual had begun to fill the gaps with normality and the foundations felt strong, and valuable for being hard-won.

The boys at Lewis’s prep school played rugby in deep snow in the spring term and the snow and mud mixed together. In the summer they played cricket on dry pitches, with short green grass that was rolled and cared for. Lewis captained the cricket team. His games master told him it wasn’t because he was the best, but to teach him team spirit; he had a tendency to daydream and wasn’t much concerned with beating the other boys at things. He was the sort of boy who was popular because he was easy to be around and not demanding particularly.You often had a sense with Lewis that the real business of his life was elsewhere and that was attractive to people, they didn’t feel the responsibility of his presence too much. Where he was, actually, was in his head, and in that he was like Elizabeth. He wrote long stories and poems about sea battles in classical settings or doomed cavalry charges – not to show to people – just because they were fun to do and he could travel in his mind when he wrote them, and make the world just.

When he came home for the summer he’d grown so tall Elizabeth had to take him up to London for new clothes.They went to Simpson’s of Piccadilly and then to a Corner House for tea. Lewis thought no day could be more appalling than a day spent shopping, but it was nice to see all the buses and cars.

There were building sites everywhere, or strange gaps in the streets that were about to be building sites, and Lewis wondered which of them were going to be built by Carmichael’s. He liked to think of it; his father’s mark on the city.

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Before coming home, Elizabeth said that as there were twenty minutes before the train left they should stop at the hotel by the station and she would have a drink.

She had a Martini and Lewis got the olive. He hadn’t had an olive before and the taste of it, salty and drenched in gin, stayed with him.They nearly missed the train and kept dropping their bags and shoeboxes, and Lewis jumped on first, helping his mother up after him and taking the packages from her. He felt grown-up to be helping a lady onto a train, and proud of his mother, who was so pretty.

At home his school report had arrived and that evening there was the usual ritual of his father reading it and discussing it with him, and Lewis was summoned into the drawing room for what his father called debriefing.

Gilbert was always surprised to see Lewis in the holidays and had to get used to him all over again. He knew that Elizabeth was happier when he was at home and that she got very bored all on her own. She was the first to admit her painting wasn’t very good and although she loved doing it, it’s hard to stick at a thing if you’re aware you’ve an unshakeable mediocrity. Often when Gilbert came home in the holidays, the house would be empty, and he’d walk in and see three places for dinner and wonder who on earth she had invited and then realise it was the holidays and Lewis was home.

On week nights Gilbert would come home a little after half-past six. The train got in just before twenty past; once he’d come down from the platform, got into his car and driven home it was half-past. If the weather was bad, Eliza- beth and Lewis would be in the house; Lewis usually upstairs reading and Elizabeth either in the drawing room with a book and a drink or in the kitchen talking to Jane. Jane left at seven

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and supper was at eight. In winter this meant it was rewarmed and not very nice, but in summer it was luncheon meat or, if they were lucky, ham, and Jane found it hard to spoil those.

It was a warm, muggy summer, and towards August the white skies and stickiness irritated the grown-ups. The chil- dren didn’t care about the mugginess, so long as it wasn’t raining and they could go out on their bikes. It didn’t rain. It didn’t rain for weeks, but nor was it hot. It was like waiting weather: blank skies, flat warmth and dry grass, and every day the sense of waiting grew greater, as it does in a drought or when there is no wind, and Elizabeth missed Gilbert.

When Lewis was out playing she often walked from room to room or out into the garden and then back again, just lost in her thoughts. She tried to have strict rules about her drinking, but the wait for her sherry at half-past twelve made the morning seem very long. She absolutely wasn’t allowed a drink after her coffee at lunch, so that meant fitting it all in and knowing she then had to wait till half-past six for her cocktail. She knew it shouldn’t mean so much and it was important to stay in control, but she often found it hard to remember why, when it seemed a perfectly good idea to carry on drinking and Lewis was fidgeting at the lunch table and wanting to go and play with his friends.

She loved it when they all knocked on the door, all those sweet faces, hands resting on their handlebars:Tom Greene and Ed Rawlins, Tamsin Carmichael, Joanna Napper, the Johnson boys and little Kit trailing behind.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Aldridge, is Lewis there?’ ‘He’s in the garden. I’ll call him.’

She would stand at the French doors in the drawing room

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and call. Lewis would be in the garden reading or on the cracked tennis court hitting a ball against the wall and he’d call back,‘Coming!’

Most days were good days and she found she could paint or read and live in her mind happily, but some days were bad and then it was the event of her day, the children coming round and her calling Lewis in from the garden. She would watch him cycle off with them, the bikes swerving and crossing each other under the blank white sky. Then she would go inside and read or listen to the wireless or have long and involved conversa- tions with Jane.

She and Jane had two topics. One was food – never the cooking of it, but rather the rationing of it; what she or Jane could get their hands on or where they’d heard about a supply of something, and arrangements for obtaining it. Their other topic was the various members of each other’s families and what part of the country they lived in.They would take one or both of these conversations as far as they could, and Elizabeth would listen to Jane talk, and picture Lewis and his friends and wonder how far they were going, and if they were having fun.

Lewis had got used to his bike and it was a better size every day. In the group of children, he and Ed and Tom were usually in front, Tamsin somewhere in the middle with whoever else was there that day, and little Kit always slogging along behind. She fell off all the time, she couldn’t manage the corners very well and one or other of them would have to stop and help her, which made her proud and angry. Lewis felt sorry for Kit, she was so quiet and intense and never seemed happy to be with them but just constantly striving. He thought it would be horrible to have a sister like Tamsin who was pretty and always seemed to be having such fun. She had the boys helping her

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carry her bike over ditches and unhooking her hem from wire from the age of ten, and there was never any doubt she was the best and most loved even amongst a group of children. Today was very still and there were flies so that the children had to go quickly to escape them.

‘Keep your mouth shut!’ shouted Ed,‘I just swallowed one!’ There were tiny black beetles that stuck to their clothes, which they called thunderbugs.You could crush them between

your nails if you wanted and they didn’t have any blood.

There was still no wind at all.They were going to the top of New Hill, which was a haul, but once you were up you could freewheel really fast down the other side and then buy toffees inTurville.The bikes wobbled from side to side up the hill.Their breath came in puffs and shunts like small steam trains. Lewis was counting in his head to get to the top and thinking about campfires.There was a metallic snapping sound and the familiar scrabbling scuffle of Kit falling off. They stopped in a ragged group and leaned on one foot or twisted round to look back.

‘Typical,’ said Tamsin, whose favourite word this was. ‘What is it, Kit?’ called Joanna, but she was stalling for time;

it was plain Kit’s chain had broken and Kit herself was bleeding

– if not dramatically, then at least quite noticeably from her elbow.

‘Are you all right?’ shouted Tamsin, and Kit, in some pain, nodded.

‘She’ll have to go back,’ said Ed.‘You’ll have to go back!’ ‘She can’t go back on her own,’ said Joanna,‘It’s miles.’ They all stared at Kit who glared back, guilty and defiant.

She bent down as if to mend the chain and picked up its dangling end.

‘Well, don’t do that, that’s just stupid, you’ll get covered and

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it can’t be helped.’ Tamsin wished just once she could go and have fun without Kit being everywhere all the time.