The Ingrams had a prodigiously prolific garden. “The garden of unearthly delights,” Mr. Ingram called it and laughed. Freda guessed he was referring to something. He did that a lot. Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth, recited in a special performance voice—Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer or It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. He would pause for a few seconds, waiting to see if Freda had caught the reference, and when it was clear that (inevitably) she had not, he would then explain it. He was a teacher in a private boys’ school, where Freda supposed he must do this kind of thing all day long. It was incredibly boring, but it was the price that Freda had to pay in order to be included in Florence’s well-ordered home life.
Florence attended the Bar Convent school for girls because the Ingrams were Catholics. She had been adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Ingram when she was a baby. Freda had spent many years trying to make herself look equally adoptable in the Ingrams’ eyes, but they never took the bait.
The Ingrams had used a religious agency to find a baby and Florence had been delivered to them late one night, by a nun. She had been left on the doorstep of a Catholic convent in a snowstorm when she was just a few hours old. “It reminds one a little of Oliver Twist, does it not?” Mr. Ingram said. (“Mm-hm,” Freda said non-committally. She had heard of Oliver Twist but thought it was a kind of biscuit.)
“At least Florence’s mother might have been a Catholic,” Mrs. Ingram said, as if that mitigated the sin of abandonment. (Catholicism was “mumbo-jumbo,” according to Duncan, who said he was “lapsed,” which made Vanda snort with laughter and say, “Is that what you call it?”)
Florence found her mysterious nativity fascinating. Where had she come from? She liked to imagine that she was being kept safe in secret by the Ingrams until she could claim her rightful birthright. “A throne somewhere, perhaps,” she speculated. Freda didn’t like to dash Florence’s hopes by pointing out that it was more likely that she was simply an unfortunate mistake on the part of her real mother. (“Born out of wedlock,” Vanda said when Freda told them about her friend. “A bastard,” Duncan said more straightforwardly.)
Freda even taught Florence how to ride a bike. Florence’s parents had bought a really good Raleigh loop-frame for her birthday that Freda coveted, but they had never managed to get her up in the saddle. Florence took for ever to get the hang of it, wobbling and weaving all over the place, and she and Freda had to lie to her parents about how many times she fell off, but eventually they were able to go on long bike rides together, to Elvington and Bolton Percy and on one heroic occasion (there were hills, Florence wasn’t good at hills) all the way to Brandsby and back.
As the daughter of a Rowntree’s employee, even a dead one, Freda was able to enjoy all manner of advantages provided by his beneficent employers—Christmas parties, the Yearsley swimming pool, sports days, summer fêtes, amateur dramatics. Freda always managed to include Florence in these perks. You would think the Ingrams would be grateful, but “They think you lead me astray,” Florence said, contentedly sucking on a liquorice bootlace as they took a promenade around the city walls. Freda liked the view of York from the walls, it was as if they were backstage or behind the scenes of the city, quite different from being at ground level in the tightly knotted ancient streets.
Despite the Ingrams’ reservations about Freda, they nonetheless tolerated the companionship because, without her, Florence would have had no friends at all. “She’s a little slow, I’m afraid,” Freda had overheard Mrs. Ingram say to someone. It was true, Florence wasn’t the speediest of girls and she was pretty tardy at catching on to some things—playing cards, for example. Freda had tried to teach her Rummy, but to no avail. She enjoyed Snap because Freda always let her win, although sometimes the wait for Florence to recognize a pair and excitedly yell “Snap!” was tortuous.
“Cards?” Mr. Ingram said. “You’re not gambling, are you?” Of course they weren’t! Freda would have emptied Florence’s blue-glass piggy bank a long time ago if they had been playing for money.
“Hm,” Mr. Ingram said. He never seemed to believe anything Freda said, even though she made every attempt to be truthful with the Ingrams.
I am damned by the court of public opinion, Freda thought, which was one of Duncan’s sayings.
* * *
—
One day, Mr. Birdwhistle caught Freda off-guard, sneaking up behind her in the scullery when Gladys had popped to the butcher’s to comply with her paramour’s request for polony sausage to fill his lunchtime sandwich. Freda sensed a double entendre at work but was unclear on the details. Despite her appearance—the womanly bosom, the “cheek,” the aplomb—if you drilled deeply into Freda’s heart you would find only innocence.
This particular day, Freda had been charged with the task of washing the breakfast pots and, in an attempt to mitigate the dreariness of the task, was trying to do it while en pointe. She was concentrating so hard on staying on her toes while wielding the dishcloth on the porridge pot that she didn’t realize Mr. Birdwhistle was there until his bristly moustache was prickling her neck and his plump little hands were everywhere on her body, so that it felt as though he had taken a leaf from Zeus’s book and an octopus was sizing her up.
“Come on now, Freda, be a good girl for Uncle Lenny,” he panted, his breath hot against her ear.
He gave a gruff little gasp of ecstasy when one of his tentacles found the womanly bosom and then a less ecstatic gasp when Freda’s sharp little elbow found his ribs. She pirouetted professionally and brought a nimble knee up into his “dangles,” as Vanda called them. Vanda had explained the male anatomy to Freda when she was still a tender age but the words she used were more of a hindrance than a help to Freda’s understanding, already muddled by swans and ants. Duncan’s preferred term—fishing tackle—was even less helpful.
Mr. Birdwhistle, jackknifed with pain, hissed, “You little bitch” at Freda, just as Gladys made a timely entrance, announcing the arrival of the polony, like someone walking on stage in a poorly written farce. The octopus gave his side of the story—Freda had attacked him for no reason, like a mad cat with all claws out. Freda was not surprised when Gladys showed no interest in her own daughter’s version of events, but instead scolded her and told her to go to her room and think very hard about her “future in this house.”
As Freda lay on her bed, as tidily as one of the recumbent statues on tombs in the Minster that she had seen, gazing at the peeling whitewash on the ceiling, she wondered why her mother, usually so indolent, had not sent her to the butcher’s for the much discussed polony. Why had she left her alone with Mr. Birdwhistle? Had she been a lure, a temptation for his flagging appetite? Like a sweetmeat or a trifle, a misshapen orange cream plucked off Rowntree’s production line. A slow tear rolled from her eye. She dabbed at it with Vanda’s handkerchief. It smelt of Habanita and conjured the spirit of Vanda.
Freda sighed and sat up and took out Duncan’s cards from the drawer in her bedside table. Riffling the pack soothingly, she did, as instructed, consider her future in this house. She dealt from the bottom, a cheat’s trick Duncan had taught her. The Queen of Clubs flipped out of the pack and Freda slipped it back in. She didn’t regard it as a fortune-telling card. Cards were nothing beyond their face value.
As to her “future in this house,” Freda decided that perhaps she didn’t have one.
* * *
—