The Wolf in the Attic (20 page)

I look around at the empty campsite as the light grows. The twig-stars hang forlorn and forgotten and where the earth is bare it is packed hard and tight as linoleum in the cold. There is nothing for me here. In the unforgiving grey of the winter morning, I begin to see my own foolishness. Perhaps the grown-ups are right. Perhaps I should simply do as I am told, buckle down, and get on with whatever life still has in store for me.

I am thirsty, but the water in my bottle is half frozen. I suck back shards of slush from it, and my teeth tingle with pain. I am hungry, but the thought of the biscuits I have in my bag makes me strangely queasy.

Luca spoke of a place the Romani gathered on the Old Chalk Road. He spoke of the White Horse on the downs to the south. I remember it as clear as if he were uttering the words here and now. I’m sure I have heard of this place; I may even be able to give it a name, if I think hard enough.

Then that is what I will do. I must go south, to the high downs, to the castle he spoke of. I cannot just give up, not so close from where I started.

I stand up and stretch, then almost at once I bend low again to peer at the ground on the other side of the fire.

I was not alone in the dark. It looks as though the deer were wandering about the campsite as I slept, for dug into the hard cold earth by the embers are their cloven footprints, as though they had watched me with the dying of the fire in the night.

14

I
KNOW WHERE
south is. Perhaps it has to do with Pa showing me the North Star when I was very young, but I have always had a good head for directions. As I leave the dimness of the wood on the first day of the New Year I know that I am North West of Oxford, and the way I must go is to my right. I wonder if it is very far. Though I slept longer than I ever thought I would, there seems to have been little good in it, and the bad taste of the dreams I had takes a long time to wear away.

The white face, hanging above the fire with shilling-bright eyes. It is all I can recall, but it is enough to make me decide I shall never sleep in Wytham Wood again.

I tramp south, and the sun rises slow and stubborn from out of a great bank of brown cloud over Oxford, and the spires of the city are black against it, like something from a far-off past. I have no idea what time it is, but the world seems so quiet that it might be another century I have woken up in instead of another decade. The quiet road which leads to Botley is deserted, but I would not be surprised if a knight in armour came trotting down it.

Something is moving on it though. As the sun rises higher I see the long straight track more clearly, and up ahead there is a black shape walking along it towards me. In the dim winter light I cannot make out much more, but even as I watch, it goes off the road and disappears into the hedge.

For some reason that unnerves me. I clutch Pie tightly, and my steps slow. I do not want to draw even with the place where the shape disappeared, and I am half ready to take out across the fields myself, straight towards Port Meadow and the Thames again.

And then there is something behind me too. The clopping of a horse’s hooves on the road, clear and loud, and the rattling of a cart. I stand there at the side of the road, feeling trapped, and cannot decide whether to go on, to go back, or to plunge into the hedge and hide.

‘Whoa there!’

Too late to do anything but stand fast and see what comes. The horse and cart walk slowly up to me. An old grey horse with a white face, and blinkers and a big collar, drawing a two-wheeled wooden cart – and upon it there is a man in a flat cap smoking a pipe. He clicks his tongue a little, the cart trundles past, and he nods at me. He is an oldish man with a drawn face which has been outdoors all its life, and he wears leather leggings and a raggedy corduroy jacket with the elbows out.

He leans back on the reins.

‘Have you far to go lass?’ he asks me, over his shoulder.

‘Botley,’ I say.

He looks down the long and empty road with the dark hedges hemming it in, and speaks around the stem of his pipe.

‘Hop on then. I’ll save you a step.’

I look at him, unsure, and he turns in his seat and smiles. ‘I got me a parcel to pick up at the station. Happen that’s where you are headed?’

‘It is,’ I find myself saying, though I had not thought of it until that moment.

‘Well, climb up then. Morning’s going by.’

I clamber up beside him without thinking more about it.

‘Walk on.’ The horse leans into the traces, shakes her head, and we are off. It is much more agreeable sitting up here off the road, and I can see over the hedges now.

‘A Happy New Year to thee,’ the man says, puffing on his pipe. ‘Though it be a cold ’un.’

I say nothing. We pass the point where the black shape disappeared, and there is no gap in the hedge, just the thicket of hawthorn and stumpy ash. I wonder if I imagined it.

‘G’won now,’ the man says, and slaps the reins on the horse’s back. The mare breaks into a trot. The houses of Botley and west Oxford are not much more than a mile ahead.

‘Off travellin’ are we?’ the man asks.

‘I’m going to see my aunt in… in’ – the name comes to me out of nowhere – ‘Uffington.’

‘Ah. That’s a tidy step for a little lass on her own. But I see you have all with you.’ He nods at my knapsack. ‘I hopes your mother knows what you’re at, out alone at this hour.’

‘She knows.’

The man grunts, and leans forward on his knees. ‘There’s gypsies in them there woods behind ’ee girl. You needs to watch yourself on the road, these days. They had themselves some eggs of mine, not that I begrudge a morsel to hungry folk, but you can’t watch ’em close enough.’

We are back in the town now, and the streets are very quiet, but I hear the whistle of a train in the distance.

‘They’re all nursing a sore head this morning, the city folk,’ the man says. ‘Last night was the end of a long ten year, and today begins another one.’ We sit in silence for a while. A motor car passes us with its headlights burning, but the old mare does not even glance at it.

‘Uffington. ’Tis at the foot of the Downs. You’ll be taking a train to Swindon then,’ the man says.

‘Yes.’ I had not thought of that before now, but when the man says this, it sounds right.

‘I was on a train once. Nasty, smelly things, and noisy too. Easy there you damned fool –’ This to the horse, which had snuffled and capered a little as we passed a side-street. I look down it, and there is a man standing there, a tramp wrapped in rags with two eyes bright as marbles in a bearded face. He stands stock still and watches us go by, and I shiver.

We are in Oxford proper again, and there are more motor cars, and people walking up and down muffled against the cold. Normal life seems to have started again, and I can hear the shriek and puff of the trains and see the pale smoke of one hanging over the station. The man steers the horse with clicks of his mouth and little tugs of the reins, and finally brings the cart to a halt in front of the doors. Streams of people pass by.

‘Here we are. Safe and sound. I wish thee well lass.’

I hop down from the cart and look up at him. ‘Thank you.’

He bends over and offers me his hand. It is huge, and the palm is as hard as wood.

‘I’m Gabriel,’ he says with a smile. ‘I see the train a huffing and a puffing for you, girl. Get thee on it, and don’t look back.’

I don’t know what to say to him, but nod, and walk away, towards the growing crowd of people which are going in and out of the station doors. When I look back, I see him sat on the cart smoking his pipe, the pale horse standing as still as a figure in a painting. Then I walk through to the ticket office, and he is gone.

T
HE TRAIN GOES
south, and the carriage is half full. People in caps and people in hats and people with parcels on their knees and people yawning and people nodding with sleep, and the sun rising higher beyond the windows and the country going past outside and the taste of acrid coal smoke in my mouth. I cannot remember the last time I was this far from Oxford, and I have Pie and my knapsack on my knee and my ticket in one fist, and my other hand is in my pocket counting out the shillings and pennies I have left.

I half expect to see the black shape of a policemen make his way down the corridor of the compartment. Will they look for me? Do they even know that I have gone? I wonder if the inspector in the trench-coat will think a runaway orphan worth chasing after.

For a few minutes I sit there with my face turned to the window and stare out at England passing by, and think of Pa, and let the tears come while no-one can see them.

I wonder if Miss Hawcross is relieved that I am gone. Sometimes I think that she seems as lost as I am in the world. And I feel sorry for all the times I thought mocking things of her and did not attend to her lessons, but sat all sullen and slow while she whacked me with her ruler and tried to make me learn French and algebra, and which queen lost her head. That is all gone now, and I have no need to learn those things anymore, but I do wish I had made more of an effort for her sake.

I wake up from a doze and we are in Swindon already it seems, and I am barely able to leap out of the carriage behind a fat woman with a lot of cases before the whistle is blown and the train is off again in a cloud and a shriek and a volley of puffs. It would all be so much more jolly, this stealing away and traveling the country, if only there was someone to share it with. As it is, there is only Pie and me, and we are getting wry looks from people on the platform.

I walk out of their stares and in the waiting room there is a map on the wall, and lines of roads and railways all over England like the veins in a leaf. I see names there I have heard before, but they are only names with no memory to paint them.

I was on a battleship once, which traveled the high seas all the way from Greece, but the thought of getting across a single English county leaves me bewildered. I feel very small and alone and lost, and I know that I smell as though I have stepped out of a bonfire, and cramps are knuckling at my tummy, hunger I suppose.

Perhaps the people jostling by think I am a gypsy, for I am all smoke-smudged and ragged, and there are still bits of briar in my hair which I try to tease out when I think no-one is looking.

I had begun to think of myself as English, my Greekness quite gone, but I realize now as the people look at me that I am not and I never was. My very face is different from theirs. No matter how much French I learned or how many kings and queens I memorized, that was always going to be true.

Well, hang them. I have to go east now, out of the towns again and into the open country, the blank spaces on the map that the roads avoid. That is my place now. It will be woods and firelight from here on in, and sleeping on the ground and smelling of woodsmoke.

So I begin walking. As much to get away from things as to get towards them. And it is easier, in a way, to do that, for it means that every step is progress. ‘If you do not greatly care where you are going, then it is impossible to be lost,’ I tell Pie.

But I am brought up short outside the station all the same, wondering which way to go. As I stand there a well-dressed man goes by, and as he passes he gives me a quick glance, frowns, and then flips a sixpence down on the pavement in front of me before walking on.

I pick it up. So this is what it is to be a beggar.

Well, sixpence is sixpence. I pocket it and walk on.

W
HAT A DREARY
place. I pass lines of red-brick houses all crammed together, and people hurrying without a word for one another. An omnibus goes past, crowded and bright with an advertisement for Bovril.

Guinness makes you strong. Camp Coffee, drunk by men in kilts. Craven A cigarettes. Pond’s cream for a glowing complexion. The world is brown and grey except for the colours on the hoardings. I wonder if Louise Brooks uses Pond’s cream. I wonder if she has ever slept on the ground and watched a fire in the night.

The cramps spike up in my middle and make me pause and gasp a little. I wonder if it is something I ate yesterday, but all I remember is nibbling on a biscuit. The mere thought of food makes me feel sick now.

There is coal smoke in the air here, rising from the chimneys in yellow streams. On one wall an ancient ragged poster has a soldier with a huge moustache who is pointing at me. You, it says beneath his glowering face, as though he is accusing me of something.

East is where the sun rises, and while there is no sun to be seen here I know by the sky where it is hidden, and I tramp along with that lighter cloud in my face. I pass factories as I go, waste ground and broken glass and tall chimneys, lorries with flapping canvas tilts, pubs still closed with their windows like blank painted eyes.

A little brown and white dog goes snuffling past me in the gutter, raises his head as I go by and looks at me with the sweetest, most hopeful face; but as I slow he twitches away as if expecting a blow and runs off with his tail down. Another orphan, I suppose. I wonder if I will ever look as frightened and hungry as he does. And I feel a sudden blast of hatred for all the people who walk past him without so much as a glance or a kind word. What a horrible place. How horrible the people. And the pain in my stomach comes and goes in stabbing waves.