Bread and Chocolate Read online

  He nodded. ‘It’s twelfth night and I am finished here,’ he said. ‘Maybe another year.’

  He walked out into the little hall and grasped the tree like a dancer, around its supple waist. A shower of needles pattered down, but neither Eleanor nor Robin minded.

  ‘We’ve got so accustomed to you being here …’ Robin began.

  ‘You know how to cook now,’ Uncle Nicholas observed.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And you have a proper fire …’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘And you are starting to sculpt again, and you …’ Uncle Nicholas turned with a sweet smile to Eleanor. ‘You’re going to find you have plenty to do.’

  ‘You needn’t go,’ Eleanor said. ‘Robin’s mother comes back to England this week, why not stay with us till then?’

  The tree swayed as he lifted it from the pot. Robin held the door. ‘Happy New Year!’ the voice came from the centre of the tree. ‘A Happy New Year to all of you, dear children.’

  The tree brushed through the doorway, and they watched him carry it down the stairs, shedding a scented trail of green. Then the door below banged, and he was gone.

  The telephone in the flat was ringing. It was Robin’s mother, she had come home early.

  ‘Oh, you’ve just missed him!’ Eleanor exclaimed in disappointment. ‘And we have had such a strange time. Robin is sculpting again, and we think we may have to move house to find a studio for him, perhaps in the country … we have an open fire, and it has been so lovely! Robin has learned to cook, we had turkey this Christmas! Think of that! And I … I …’ She broke off, she could not think of words to describe the odd sensations she was feeling: a queasiness like travel sickness, a tenderness at her breasts, a tendency to weep, a soaring inexplicable joy …

  ‘Missed who?’ Robin’s mother demanded.

  ‘Uncle Nicholas!’ Eleanor said. ‘Your cousin. He was here for Christmas.’

  ‘I don’t have a cousin Nicholas,’ Robin’s mother said.

  Catching the Bus

  Jim was going to go to the Grammar. My mum had set her heart on it even though Dad warned her that Jim wasn’t all that bright. She started saving for the uniform when he was nine, she said he’d need books and a satchel and a table and chair in his room to do his homework, and Stuart would have to go out and play while the homework was being done, and changes would have to be made. And my dad said: ‘Don’t set your heart on it, Maggs.’ And my dad was right.

  Jim failed his eleven plus, but all he wanted to do anyway was to go as an apprentice at Filton and build aeroplanes, and they would take him with a good report from the Secondary Modern; so he was happy. But then Mum kept the Uniform Savings Fund going because she had hopes that Stuart might suddenly change and not be football-mad and darts-mad any more, but be the one to put on the dark grey trousers and dark green blazer and go the other way to school – across the park and down the hill and all the way down to the Colston Road to catch the bus up to the Grammar instead of the Secondary Modern where everyone else went.

  Stu didn’t change and Dad said: ‘That little nest egg of yours could put a new roof on the kitchen, Maggs. Shame to let it sit there.’

  We had a kitchen which was just a little room out the back. It leaned against the house almost like a shed, and you went down a step to it and then from the kitchen into the back yard. It had a corrugated iron roof and when it rained it sounded like a marching band drumming. It leaked. That was why Dad wanted the Uniform Savings Fund for a new roof. When the rain came from the east it blew in, and set a little trickle of rusty red water running down the kitchen wall.

  But Mum said: ‘There’s still our Lizzie.’ And Dad said: ‘What does a girl want to go to the Grammar for?’ and Stu and Jim snorted with laughter and Mum said nothing.

  But she didn’t use the Uniform Fund for a new roof.

  I was ten then; and I was bright. ‘There’s no point sending a girl to the Grammar,’ Dad said to Mum very reasonably as he bolted the front door and she started slowly climbing the stairs to bed. I was in my room, torch quickly switched off, book hidden, pretending to be asleep. I was reading Great Expectations, which is about someone called Pip who is actually a boy, though I thought it was a girl’s name.

  ‘She’ll get married and then it’s all wasted,’ Dad said as they went past my door. ‘It’s not as if she’s going to do anything with it.’

  Their bedroom door closed and I heard him moving around: the groan of the wooden wardrobe door opening and the jangle of the coathangers. Mum didn’t reply. I heard the bed creak as they got in, and then the click of their light going off, plunging the house into comfortable dark. Then I switched on my torch again and turned the page.

  Dad worked as a mechanic in a small garage on the main road. Mum did ironing. She said she’d never take in washing, she’d be ashamed to take in washing; but she could do ironing with her head held high. She said she liked it; but I saw her face when a washbasket piled high with shirts was waiting and she would bang the ironing board down on its legs and then heave it up to make it click into place at the right height. She had an electric iron with a green light in the black Bakelite handle which glowed as the iron warmed up, like an evil eye, keeping her on her feet when she was tired, making her bend over the board until late at night. The Bakelite was shiny and glossy on the back, black like the main road when it is wet. But around the green eye it was cracked and pale.

  She had a special jug that I had made her in Art, and she filled it with cold water and dipped her fingertips in it and flicked them out over the white linens and creased cottons, and when the iron went over a fat resilient drop it hissed like a snake. The house was always filled with the warm scent of hot clean cloth, and one or other of Mum’s hands was always stained with a little stripe of red where she had brushed against the iron and burned herself.

  When I was tall enough to reach the board at its lowest setting I was allowed to do the handkerchiefs. First you went round the edges, the iron nosing its way round like a blunt-nosed explorer. Then you did the broad sweep of the middle, that was the best bit. Then you folded it in half and pressed the crease in the middle, then in a quarter and pressed down the quarter line. Big men’s handkerchiefs went into three folds before they were halved.

  ‘I love ironing,’ I said to my mum.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if it was all you could do,’ she said.

  I passed my eleven plus. ‘I don’t see that it makes any difference,’ my dad said. ‘What’s she going to do with GCEs when she’s married and with a baby on the way?’

  ‘We’d have sent the boys,’ Mum said.

  ‘Boys need exams,’ my dad replied inarguably. ‘What does she want French for?’

  My mum put down her iron, sitting it on its back on the board. The little green eye winked on as she looked across the room at my dad, eating his tea at the table. ‘I’ve set my heart on it, Arthur,’ she said. ‘I’ve set my heart on it.’

  Nobody asked me. They told me at school that I was a lucky lucky girl. But I didn’t feel very lucky at home. When we had Sunday’s roast beef in mince on Monday and then in sandwiches on Tuesday and then the bone boiled up for soup on Wednesday it was my fault, because I was going to the Grammar and shoes had to be paid for. The Uniform Savings Fund bought the blazer and the tie from the school’s own second-hand stall, but there was still the PE kit and a special shoe bag to buy, and I needed a satchel and a felt hat with an elastic strap, and a hat badge in dark green enamel with the school crest on it.

  Dad started to come home early on Friday nights and didn’t have his pint any more. And then one day a big canvas holdall appeared in the hall, filled with a stranger’s dirty laundry, and I knew my mum was taking in washing.

  She bought a twin tub on the Never Never and it lived in the middle of the kitchen with one hose pipe attached to the tap pouring cold water in, and the waste pipe looped out over the sink pouring dirty water out. If you opened the lid when the