‘And the vicar’s only just paid Harvey Corey for the lambs,’ Mr Kennet said. ‘Took him six months. Hasn’t he, Dan? Paid your dad? Sit up, Dan, like a gentleman. These young boys, they do loll.’
Daniel ignored him, and if anything spread his long legs further. ‘Hold your horses, Lucy, and wait for the red. Mrs Horne, Ellen can eat her pie now, I’m sure.’
Underneath, the pastry was just firm enough to hold, breaking when your teeth closed on it to divulge meat and onion and juices. The lid crackled. ‘Nan does flaky like no one else,’ Lucy told me.
The gas lamp fizzed. The kettle purred and Lucy filled the pot. Sleepiness dragged at my eyelids but I ate on, cramming in progressively larger bites of pie. The people in the room sat, sipping tea and digesting. Finally my plate was empty. The pansies had flecks of gilt in their centres and the edge was gilded too. I licked a finger and dabbed at the remaining flakes of pastry and put them in my mouth. Only then did Lucy’s grandmother stand up and take the plate away from me. I rose slowly to my feet, and so did Daniel and Mr Kennet, who hooked his lone finger under the handle of the egg basket and lifted it off the table.
‘George. Betty,’ he said, sliding a brimmed hat onto the back of his head over a crown of hair the colour of bleached corn.
‘Goodnight, Bill.’ Lucy’s father and grandmother spoke together.
Then Lucy’s father suddenly addressed me. ‘He had a good seat, Master Edward.’
I’d seen Mr Horne before, of course I had. Knee-deep in the waving sterns of hounds on the edge of the crowds at the Boxing Day meet, impassive as the jouncing hindquarters of my father’s dock-tailed bay hunter wheeled in front of him, and Edward’s grey pony started and stamped. A bowler-hatted man in the corner of my eye, because my gaze was on Daddy and Edward.
‘You’re the kennelman!’ Hastily I tried to cover this gauche remark. ‘Thank you for the compliment, Mr Horne. The compliment to Edward. I’ll pass it on in my next letter.’
Daniel turned to me. ‘Mr Kennet and I will walk you home.’
‘Thank you so much for the pie, Mrs Horne.’ I stepped out into the night hearing my mother’s voice, in the sing-song tone of ‘so much’, and my face burned in the darkness.
In the morning I sniffed my fingers, for the smell of gravy.
When dinner-time came at school I began going straight to the lavatories, to keep well away from Lucy so that she wouldn’t feel obliged to ask me to her house. Then I sat with Amy and Airey, the fatherless twins from the cottages by the river who, I had learned, wrote one with her right hand, the other with her left, so that they could lace their free hands together. Now that it was colder they leaned their folded arms not on their desks but on the top of the iron cage that enclosed the hearth, and laid their heads down to sleep so that by the time the others came back they each had one cheek rosy and creased from their sleeves. I’d have stayed there all night if I could.
Winter came and, with it, my thirteenth birthday. Mother gave me a silk fan in a silk bag. The silk was the colour of a tea rose and the fan opened to show a sepia line-drawing of an oriental scene: pagodas, bridges, long-tailed birds in the sky. The birds looked fat and good to eat.
‘It’s beautiful, Mother. Thank you.’ I folded the fan and returned it to its bag.
That Christmas there was no duck from Miss Dawes, and Mother and I didn’t attempt to celebrate the feast. For a large part of the afternoon she paced up and down the lane. I lay on the bed and remembered last year, drowsing in the mild sunshine on Beacon Hill, the turf against my cheek and Edward lying beside me.
A letter had come from him recently, along with a pitiful amount of money, disbursed to the grocer, paying off half our mounting bill. We’ve all been taken with dysentery and I have had to buy quantities of kaolin and morphine. Extremely unfortunate but not without comic aspects. I became so thin that when I sneezed my trousers fell down around my ankles. Stouter now, however.
‘Is there something funny about a young man’s trousers falling down?’ my mother had asked when I laughed. ‘Both vulgar and flippant.’
She’d stared at me; she had a new way of staring, unblinking and oddly concentrated, as if she were trying to bore into my mind with her tiny black pupils.
On Boxing Day the pipe froze outside, and split to show a wink of granular ice. I climbed over the rickety fence at the end of the lane to a well half-hidden by the nettles. I hauled off the cover in stages, resting by leaning against the well. The bucket thudded down onto ice, so I pulled it up and threw half a dozen large stones down. Once the ice was broken up I lowered the bucket again. When I pulled it up for a second time, water streamed from a split in the side. I stood, panting, watching the water pour back down the shaft.
I heard a clang, and looked up to see someone closing the gate on the far side of the waste ground. It was a man in a wide-brimmed hat, moving slowly: as he raised the hat I saw that it was Mr Kennet.
He came and stood beside me and we peered into the now empty bucket.
‘Hello, Mr Kennet. I broke it when I threw it down on the ice.’
His maimed hand stretched into the bucket and inched crabwise over the split. Then he stepped away and stood for a moment, casting his eyes around. ‘Ah,’ he said, and went over to a fallen-down shack – a hen house, I thought – and tore a wide square of the tarred material off the roof. ‘Put this in and push it well down. No, the other way up. The underside is clean, look.’
I did what he said.
‘Now some string.’ He delved in his jacket pocket and handed me a bundle of twine. ‘Whip that around the outside, tight like a pudding. And then a stone in the bottom.’
I bound up the lining and let the bucket down and filled it. He took the rope from my hands and began to haul. Soon the bucket was standing on the edge of the well. Water slopped, but only from the top. The repair was sound. The sun danced on the water, and I realized what a beautiful day it was, clear and mild.
‘Where did you come from?’ I found myself asking.
‘I work for Lady Brock.’ He jerked his head to the north. ‘At Upton Hall. My job’s the kitchen garden, but sometimes I walk out this way.’
Beacon Hill lay high and quiet beyond the flat fields, the sheep-tracks on its sides sharply lit by low winter sunshine.
‘It was your pie, Mr Kennet.’ I realized it almost as I spoke.
‘Pardon?’
‘That evening at Mrs Horne’s house. It was your pie that I ate. You gave it to me.’
‘Oh yes.’ He nodded. ‘So I did.’
‘Thank you for that. It was extremely kind. Sometimes I feel faint, you see. It’s just because I’m growing so fast.’
He gave me a smile. ‘I was the same, your age.’
‘And thanks for mending the bucket.’
‘It won’t last long.’
‘Neither did the pie!’
‘Ha! Ha!’ His eyes went into slits when he laughed. I laughed as well, too wildly. I couldn’t remember the last time I had. Then we stood quiet again, but he continued to smile at me. He had such a nice smile, square at the edges like his face, showing good square teeth.
Someone far away started chopping wood, the axe blows carrying clear through the cold air.
Seeing that I had brought no container, he untied the bucket from its rope and walked with me to the fence. I had a sudden dread that he’d come to our door, perhaps see inside, how we lived. But he stopped as we reached the boundary. ‘Give my regards to your mother, miss.’
I climbed over the fence and took the bucket from him. ‘You know her?’ I was instantly ashamed at the surprise in my voice.
‘I pruned your apple trees, once upon a time, at your old house,’ he said. ‘I expect it was before you were born.’ Then he turned his back and set off again over the waste ground.
‘Who did you say?’ Mother tipped her head at the mirror, this way and that.
‘Mr Kennet. He said he used to work for you and Daddy.’
‘Oh, William Kennet. Yes. We used to know him … What about him?’
‘I just told you. He mended the bucket.’