When Marnie Was There

Anna saw a little room with white walls, a low sloping ceiling, and one small window, so low down in the wall that she had to bend down to see out of it. It looked out on to a small whitewashed yard and an outhouse with a long tin bath hanging on its wall. Beyond that there were fields.

There was a picture over the bed, a framed sampler in red and blue cross-stitch, with the words Hold fast that which is Good embroidered over a blue anchor. Anna looked at this with mistrust. It was the word “good”. Not that she herself was particularly naughty, in fact her school reports quite often gave her a “Good” for Conduct, but in some odd way the word seemed to leave her outside. She didn’t feel good…

Still, it was a nice room, she decided cautiously. Plain but nice. Best of all it had the same smell as she had noticed downstairs. A warm, sweet, old smell – quite different from the smell of polish at home or the smell of disinfectant at school.

She hung up her mackintosh on the peg behind the door, then stood for a moment in the middle of the room, holding her breath and listening. She did not want to go down again but there was no excuse for not. She counted six, gave a little cough, and went.

“Ah, so there you are, my biddy!” said Mr Pegg, peering up at her. “My word, but you’ve growed! Quite a big little-old-girl you’re getting to be. Ain’t she, Susan?”

Anna looked into Mr Pegg’s wrinkled, weatherbeaten face. The small pale blue eyes were almost hidden under shaggy eyebrows.

“How do you do?” she said gravely, holding out her hand.

“A-ah, that’s my biddy,” said Mr Pegg, taking her hand and patting it absent-mindedly. “And how’s your foster-ma keeping, eh?”

Anna looked at Mrs Pegg.

“Your mum, my duck,” said Mrs Pegg quickly. “Sam’s asking if she’s well.”

“My mother’s dead,” said Anna stiffly. “She died ages ago. I thought you knew.”

“Yes, yes, my maid. We knowed all about that,” said Sam, gruffly kind. “And your gran too, more’s the pity.” – Anna’s face stiffened even more – “That’s why I said your foster-ma – Mrs Preston. Nancy Piggott as she used to be. She’s your foster-ma, ain’t she? A good woman, Nancy Preston. Always had a kind heart. She’s a good ma to you, I’ll be bound. Keeping nicely, is she?”

“She’s very well, thank you,” said Anna primly.

“But you don’t like me calling her ‘ma,’ eh? Is that it?” said Sam, his eyes crinkling up at the corners.

“No, of course she don’t!” said Mrs Pegg. “Ma’s old fashioned these days. I expect you call her ‘Mum’, don’t you, love?”

“I call her ‘Auntie’,” said Anna, then mumbled as an afterthought, “sometimes.” It was difficult to know how to explain that she seldom called Mrs Preston by any name at all. There was no need, it wasn’t as if there was a crowd of them at home. Only Mr Preston, who called his wife Nan, and occasionally Raymond, who worked in a bank now he was grown up and always called his mother “Mims”, or occasionally “Ma” to be funny. Anna thought “Mims” was a silly name to call your own mother… She stood there now in front of Mr Pegg’s chair, her eyes troubled, wondering what to say next.

Mrs Pegg came to the rescue. “Any road, I’m sure she’s as good as a mother to you, whatever you call her,” she said in her downright, comfortable way. “And I’m sure when all’s said and done you love her almost as much as if she was your own mother, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes!” said Anna. “More,” and felt a sudden pricking behind the eyelids as she remembered her last sight of Mrs Preston running to keep up with the train and reminding her about the postcard.

“That’s right, then,” said Mrs Pegg.

“I’ve got a postcard to post,” said Anna, her voice coming out suddenly loud – she had been so afraid of it cracking – “will you show me where to post it when I’ve written it?”

Mrs Pegg said yes, of course she would. Anna could write it now in the front room while she got tea ready. “Come you here,” she said, “and I’ll show you.” She wiped her hands down the side of her dress and showed Anna to a room on the other side of the passage. “There’s a little table in here under the windie.”

The tiny room, over-full of furniture, was in half darkness. Mrs Pegg pulled back the curtains and moved a potted palm from the small bamboo table. Then she bent admiringly over a large white bowl full of pink and blue artificial flowers, which half filled the window.

“Wonderful, ain’t they?” she said, blowing the dust from the plastic petals. “Everlasting.”

She gazed at them for a moment, wiping the scalloped edges of the boat-shaped bowl with a corner of her dress, then smiled at Anna and went out, closing the door behind her.

This must be the best room, thought Anna, as she tiptoed carefully over the polished linoleum and slippery hearthrug; like the lounge at home, which was only used at weekends or when there were visitors. But very different.

She sat down at the bamboo table and brought out her postcard addressed to Mrs Stanley Preston, 25 Elmwood Terrace, London, and wrote on the other side, Arrived safely. It’s quite nice here. My room has a sloping ceiling and the window is on the floor. It smells different from home. I forgot to ask can I wear shorts every day unless I’m going somewhere special?

She paused, suddenly wanting to say something more affectionate than the conventional “love from Anna”, but not knowing how to say it.

From the kitchen came the low rumble of voices. Mrs Pegg was saying to Sam, “Poor little-old-thing, losing her mother when she was such a mite – and her granny. It’s a pity she’s so pale and scrawny, and a bit sober-sides as well, but I expect we’ll rub along together all right. She’s taking her time over that postcard, ain’t she? Had I better tell her tea’s ready?”

In the front room Anna was still sucking her pen. Outside, beyond the great boat-shaped bowl that nearly filled the window ledge, she could see glimpses of the tiny garden dreaming in the sunshine, bees still buzzing in and out of the bright flowers. Inside, as imprisoned as the bluebottles that crawled up and down inside the closed window, she sat staring at the plastic hydrangeas, wondering how to tell Mrs Preston that of course she loved her, without committing herself.

By the time Mrs Pegg had come to the front-room door and said, “Tea’s ready, lass!” she had decided on “tons of love” instead of just “love”, and added a P.S. The chocolate was lovely. I’ve saved some for tonight.

That, she knew, would please Mrs Preston without seeming to promise anything. After all, she still might not always feel loving when she got home again.

Chapter Three (#ulink_3cd99cfe-738a-5deb-8799-6d6e0331acc1)

ON THE STAITHE (#ulink_3cd99cfe-738a-5deb-8799-6d6e0331acc1)

“JUST UP THE lane and turn left at the crossroads,” said Mrs Pegg. “Post Office is only a little way up. And the road to the creek’s on the right. Go you and have a look round.” She nodded encouragingly and turned back indoors.

Anna found the Post Office – which to her surprise was a cobbled cottage like the Peggs’, with a flat letterbox in the wall – and posted her card. Then she walked back to the crossroads. She felt free now. Free and empty. No need to talk to anyone, or be polite, or bother about anything. There was hardly anyone about anyway. A farm worker passed her on a bicycle, said “Good afternoon,” and was gone before she even had time to show her surprise. She gave a little skip and turned down the short road to the staithe, and saw the creek lying ahead of her.

There was a salty smell in the air, and from the marsh on the far side of the water came the cries of seabirds. Several small boats were lying at anchor, bumping gently as the tide turned. In that short distance she seemed to have come on another world. A remote, quiet world where there were only boats and birds and water, and an enormous sky.

She jumped at the sudden sound of children’s voices. There was laughter, and shouts of, “Come on! They’re waiting!” and a group of children appeared round the corner of the staithe. Five or six boys and girls of different ages in navy blue jeans and jerseys. Immediately Anna drew herself up stiffly and put on her ‘ordinary’ face.

But it was all right, they were not coming her way. They ran, shouting and jostling each other to a car drawn up at the end of the road, and climbed in. Then the doors slammed, the car reversed, and as it drove past her up to the crossroads she had a glimpse of a man at the wheel, a woman beside him, and the children all bobbing about in the back, talking excitedly.

It was very quiet when they had gone.

“I’m glad,” she said to herself. “I’m glad they’ve gone.

I’ve met enough new people for one day.” But the feeling of freedom had changed imperceptibly to one of loneliness. She knew that even if she had met them they would never have been friends. They were children who were ‘inside’ – anyone could see that. Anyway, I don’t want to meet any more people today, she repeated to herself-hardly realising that Mr and Mrs Pegg were the only people she had spoken to since she left London.

And that had been only this morning! Already the turmoil of Liverpool Street Station, the hurry, the confusion, the nearness of parting – against which she had only been able to protect herself with her wooden face – seemed a hundred years ago, she thought.

She listened to the water lapping against the sides of the boats with a gentle slap-slapping sound, and wondered who the boats belonged to. Lucky people, she supposed. Families who came to Little Overton for their holidays year after year and weren’t just sent here to be got out of the way, or because of not-even-trying, or because people “didn’t quite know what they were going to do with them”… Boys and girls in navy blue jeans and jerseys, like that family…

She walked down to the water’s edge, took off her shoes and socks, and stood with her feet in the water, staring out across the marsh. On the horizon lay a line of sandhills, golden where the sun just caught them, and on either side the blue line of the sea. A small bird flew over the creek, quite close to her head, uttering a short plaintive cry four or five times running, all on one note. It sounded like “Pity me! Oh, pity me!”

She stood there looking and listening and thinking about nothing, drinking in the great quiet emptiness of marsh and water and sky, which now seemed to match her own small emptiness inside. Then she turned quickly and looked behind her. She had an odd feeling suddenly that she was being watched.

But there was no-one to be seen. There was no-one on the staithe, nor on the high grassy bank that ran along to the corner of the road. The one or two cottages appeared to be empty, and the door of the boathouse was shut. To the right the village straggled away into fields, and in the distance a windmill stood alone, silhouetted against the sky.

She turned and looked away to the left. Beyond the few cottages a long brick wall ran along the grassy bank, ending in a clump of dark trees.

And then she saw the house…

As soon as she saw it Anna knew that this was what she had been looking for. The house, which faced straight on to the creek, was large and old and square, its many small windows framed in faded blue woodwork. No wonder she had felt she was being watched with all those windows staring at her!

This was no ordinary house, in a long road, like the one she lived in at home. This house stood alone, and had a quiet, mellow, everlasting look, as if it had been there so long, watching the tide rise and fall, and rise and fall again, that it had forgotten the busyness of life going on ashore behind it, and had sunk into a quiet dream. A dream of summer holidays, and sandshoes littered about the ground-floor rooms, dried strips of seaweed still flapping from an upper window where some child had hung them as a weather indicator, and shrimping nets in the hall, and small buckets, a dried starfish swept into a corner, an old sun hat…