3
In Edward’s house, and with Edward’s bored approval—for he was busy at the time on a scathing history of the Jesuits—Stephen’s child was born. And, in the triumph that followed agony, the spirit of Sheila rose from the dead. Four years later, determined to purge herself of bitterness, she visited the scene of her love. When she entered the paddock again, her silent but excited child at her side, her eyes filled with tears at the sight of the old romantic disorder that had once so charmed her. ‘These poppies,’ her heart said, ‘are children of flowers that witnessed our love.’ The paddock was shut in on three sides by a hedge of briar. In the long rank grass numberless weeds had rioted unchecked for many years, and the hand of the picnicker lay heavy on the land. A medley of docks, nettles, thistles, poppies, empty cigarette packets, paper bags, ginger-beer bottles, and corks, greeted Sheila’s eyes. ‘What a pickle!’ she said.
‘What a lovely pickle, Sheila,’ the little girl echoed. She began collecting corks with the solemnity of an elderly spinster gathering a cautionary nosegay for a drunkard’s grave. This was a simile that Sheila, gravely nonsensical, suggested to Rosemary, who with perfect dignity assented. ‘How fortunate that Edward isn’t here to be shocked by my vulgarity,’ Sheila thought.
Entering the house she found there matter for surprise: a greasy plate, a crust of bread, and a breakfast cup, caked with tannin, standing ankle-deep in a saucer half-full of spilt tea. The next moment Mrs. Boddy arrived, a little red berry of humanity to whom had been entrusted a duplicate key and the duty of preparing the place for habitation.
‘Oh, ma’am!’ said Mrs. Boddy. ‘To think that you should have got ’ere before me, without a bit of tea ready or nothing.’ The sight of those inglorious festal remains was the culminating assault on her feelings. ‘There! Just look at that.’
Sheila nodded, smiling. ‘Some one’s been here evidently. The question is, Who?’
‘And how?’ added Mrs. Boddy. ‘’Ow?’ she repeated, by way of emphasis. ‘And oh,’ she cried, enveloping Rosemary, ‘here’s the dear little ducky duck. Hasn’t she got a kiss for the wicked old woman that didn’t get her mother’s tea ready?’
Having released Rosemary, Mrs. Boddy stood brooding. ‘There’s been a man here. One of those persons of the tramp class.’
After a moment’s contemplation of this hypothetical tramp, ‘It’s not at all nice,’ she added, and drew away from the polluted table. ‘You might be murdered in your beds.’
‘Well, if one must be murdered, one could hardly choose a more comfortable place,’ said Sheila. ‘Let’s try to make a fire to boil the kettle on, shall we? I’m longing for my tea.’
Mrs. Boddy became the embodiment of bustle. She shot out of the house in search of dry sticks for the fire.
‘And do you know what I would do if I were you, ma’am?’ she enquired, reappearing after a brief and successful forage. ‘I’d have my tea and go straight back to town. Straight back. I wouldn’t stay another minute.’
‘Not stay!’ echoed Sheila in weak astonishment. ‘Not stay for a holiday?’
‘Not to be murdered, I wouldn’t.’
‘After coming all this way?’
‘Not to be murdered,’ repeated Mrs. Boddy firmly.
‘But perhaps we shan’t be murdered.’
‘You mark my words,’ Mrs. Boddy admonished her.
Sheila laughed. ‘I’m not going to be frightened away by a dirty cup and saucer.’
‘Well, let’s hope for the best,’ said Mrs. Boddy, with an unexpected access of cheerfulness. ‘And after all, if anything nasty does happen, I’m not above half a mile away, am I?’
She emerged, goggle-eyed, from the pantry.
‘And blest if me lord haven’t helped himself to the stores I got in for you!’ she exclaimed, shrilly indignant; and then, with lingering pathos: ‘Oh, ma’am!’
After tea Mrs. Boddy went home, and Sheila took her child into the belittered paddock, and sat in a deck-chair, crocheting, and watching the shadows lengthen, while Rosemary in her busily silent fashion wandered in the long grasses. From time to time the little girl took an occasional bite out of an apple with which Mrs. Boddy had sought to win her regard, until she made a discovery that sent her running to her mother, somewhat sternly demanding why she had been given an apple from which the cork had not been removed. Later, the paddock was invaded by a sleek brown dog with melancholy eyes, velvet ears, and a general air of unctuous virtue, with whom Rosemary instantly made friends.
‘What a dear dog,’ she said, returning to Sheila’s chair after spending twenty minutes in the company of this engaging creature.
‘Yes. He seems at home here,’ replied Sheila, thinking of Mrs. Boddy’s tramp.
‘Of course he’s at home,’ said the child with magisterial emphasis. ‘I asked him to make himself at home. And he did.’
‘How friendly of him.’ Sheila’s eyes drank in eagerly the absurd delicious gravity of Rosemary’s thought-puckered face. ‘I wonder what his name is.’
‘His name,’ answered the child casually, ‘is Poker.’ After a pause she added: ‘Poker Morgan his name is. He’s just come home from school.’ Sheila waited with becoming seriousness for further details of Poker Morgan’s eventful life. ‘He goes to school every day,’ Rosemary went on. ‘Every day except Sunday. On Sunday he doesn’t go to school, he doesn’t. He stays at home with his mother.’
‘How nice for Mrs. Morgan,’ said Sheila. ‘And what does Poker learn at school?’
‘Oh, just lessons; that’s all.’ Rosemary dismissed the question with the air of having sufficiently explained everything. ‘May I have another sponge finger, please, Sheila?’
Irresponsibly light-hearted, Sheila retired to bed, joining Rosemary in the little attic room with the homicidal slanting roof. She stood for some time at the east window, bathing in the moonlight, and looking towards the sea which broke within twenty yards of the crumbling wall. The wind fluttered her night-dress.
Nocturnal calm was abruptly shattered by a beer-thickened voice uttering a passionate demand for admittance. Sheila stepped quickly across the room to the western window.
‘You let me in before yourrurt,’ urged the voice. And Sheila, leaning out of the window, saw a gentleman in baggy corduroys that were tied with string at the knees peering up at her malevolently from under a huge cloth cap. The moon focussed her light upon his impressive figure.
‘Mrs. Boddy’s tramp,’ murmured Sheila, secure in the knowledge of having made fast all doors and windows.
‘I’ll soon show you whose ’ouse it is,’ promised the gentleman in the garden.
‘Please go away,’ Sheila advised him. ‘I’m sure you must be ready for your bed.’
Mrs. Boddy’s tramp found this well-meant counsel literally staggering. He executed a series of curious plunges, and having described a complete circle resumed his original stance.
‘Oh, it’s go away, is it?’
‘It really is,’ Sheila assured him. ‘I’m too tired to entertain a strayed reveller. Please go away. I’m going to shut the window.’
‘Oh, it’s shut the window, is it?...’ enquired the strange gentleman, in a slightly more conciliatory tone. ‘’Oose window? Answer me that.’
But the spirit of nonsense in Sheila had tired itself out. She withdrew into the room, and when the voice broke loose again from its owner’s control, she began to feel impatient. Presently this nuisance would waken Rosemary, and perhaps even frighten her. This fear sent her quickly back to the window.
‘If you don’t go away at once my husband will fetch a policeman.’
‘I’m a Nopper by trade,’ continued the visitor, unaccountably and savagely hurling his cap on the ground. ‘Can’t I turn me head a minute without a mob like you stealing the ’ouse off me back? Answer me that.’
The serene little figure of Rosemary sat up suddenly in bed.
‘Who’s that shouting to you, Sheila?’
‘The gentleman’s a hopper, dear. Go to sleep again, like a good girl.’
‘I don’t like him,’ said Rosemary. ‘Tell Mr. Hopper to go away.’
Sheila shut the window; and after a while the visitor withdrew, leaving behind him a dirty cloth cap and the germ of a new mythology.
In the morning Rosemary found inscrutable but sufficient cause to reverse her condemnation of Mr. Hopper. She spent the odd moments of the next day embellishing the ideal portrait that her surprising young fancy had drawn. At breakfast Mr. Hopper was a nice large gentleman; by lunchtime he was wearing blue spectacles, had developed a taste for sponge fingers, and was clad in a velvet jacket, like Edward’s, with cavernous pockets containing a clockwork train and a woolly-pated black doll. The next day he mysteriously acquired a brown beard and a pair of spotty trousers similar to those of a certain harlequin prominent among Rosemary’s cherished memories, and before the week was out he was provided with a Botticelli halo that added sanctity to an already distinguished appearance. Stories of his wonderful doings began to circulate: how he had travelled in a train to the City to buy feeding-bottles for Rosemary’s children; how his several mothers (a generic term that included wives) had had to physic his cough; and how bravely he could ride elephants. Mr. Hopper had various secondary designations: sometimes he was known as the man with a lot of mothers (a distinction he perhaps derived from Bluebeard); sometimes, more tersely, as ‘my friend’; and sometimes as Poker Morgan’s father. In short Mr. Hopper was canonized; Mr. Hopper became a legend. He went triumphantly upon his swaggering, nonsensical, polygamous, but none the less kindly way in Rosemary’s mind, a figure of flaming glory and infinite adaptability; until abruptly, and without pity, she tired of him and turned to other joys.
On Sunday morning she was taken, for the first time, to church; whence she returned consumingly curious. To Sheila, who had hoped for no more than a vague æsthetic enjoyment, the ceremony had been disappointing. She felt unequal to explaining why Rosemary must on no account bestow the big pockets and spotty trousers of her generous imagination upon members of the Holy Trinity, whose names the little girl had fatally remembered. But blasphemy being so clearly imminent, Sheila addressed herself with a sigh to the task of averting it.
‘Jesus, dear, was the name of a real person, someone who really lived. Not like Mr. Hopper.’
Rosemary’s intense dark eyes grew profoundly reproachful. This lapse from poetic faith on the part of so skilled a fellow-artist as Sheila was terrible. It was as though the whole beautiful city of pretence was threatened with hostile invasion.
‘But Mr. Hopper is real too,’ Rosemary said, with quivering lip.
‘Of course he is,’ agreed Sheila hastily. ‘How silly of me! But he is different. You mustn’t mix him up with these others.’
When some working agreement in this delicate matter had been reached, they went to the beach together to dig sand castles and tell each other stories: an idyllic experience, type of many shared during this magical holiday.