The Peppermint Pig (11 page)

It hurt Poll to talk. She croaked, ‘Go away, Lily. You’ll catch scarlet fever.’

‘I don’t care,’ Lily said nobly. She sat on the bed and took Poll’s hot, sticky hand. She was wearing a new blouse and a high, stiff Eton collar.

Poll said, ‘That’s a
boy’s
collar!’

‘Aunt Sarah made me wear it. She says it looks smart!
I
think it’s hateful but you know what she is, she likes us to look different from other people.’ She sighed; her cool hand stroked Poll’s. ‘Oh, Poll, I’ve just been to church and HE prayed for you.’

‘D’you mean the vicar?’

Lily nodded and blushed. ‘He did it so beautifully. Everyone cried.’ Tears filled her own eyes at the memory. She gazed into the distance, lips softly parted, and Poll knew she was dreaming that she was ill too, and the Vicar was praying for
her
. All the congregation down on their knees and his sad eyes lifted to Heaven! Poll thought, Lily wouldn’t mind dying if it made him take notice of her!

She wanted to laugh but it was too much of an
effort. She whispered, ‘Aunt Harry says he takes his wooden leg off when he goes to bed and stands it up in the corner. Is it really Sunday again?’

‘Yes. You’ve been ill a whole week. We’ve all been so frightened.’ Lily’s tears trembled like pearls at the end of her lashes; one fell and rolled down her cheek. ‘Please, Poll, don’t die. We all love you so much. Aunt Sarah’s promised to buy me a bicycle if I pass my exams in the summer and if you’re a good girl and get better, I’ll let you ride on it sometimes.’

Poll cried when she’d gone. Not because Lily believed she might die but because her legs felt so weak she was sure she would never be able to ride Lily’s bicycle. When Mother came in she saw her wet eyes and asked what was the matter but Poll couldn’t tell her; just turned her head away and wept bitterly.

Perhaps those tears did her good. She slept properly for the first time, without frightening dreams, and when she woke up the fever had left her. She felt limp and tired but her bones had stopped aching and her head was comfortable on the soft pillow.

The night was almost over. The window showed pearly grey and outside there was a gentle, squeaky, insistent sound like the sound of birds waking up in the morning. The sleepy dawn chorus. And yet it wasn’t quite that. She lay listening. Then said, ‘Mother!’

Her mother turned in her chair by the window. ‘Yes, my lamb?’

Poll said, ‘Listen.’

The noises continued: a delicate squealing and chirping; a hushed sighing like a calm sea washing pebbles; a rustling and scattering; a low, mysterious whistle; a sweet, musical bleating…

‘Sheep going by,’ Mother said. She wrapped Poll in a blanket and carried her to the window. Day was a pale lemon streak over the rooftops; below, in the Square, the flock and the shepherds passed in blue shadow, iron hurdle wheels squeaking, dainty hooves pattering, baby lambs baa-ing, the dog at their heels giving low-pitched little yelps as if he did not want to disturb the slumbering town.

‘I thought it was birds,’ Poll said, when they had gone out of sight. ‘It sounded like birds.’

Her mother put a hand on her forehead. She said, ‘You’re cool now. You’re better, aren’t you?’ Her voice was solemn but happy; full of a hushed, weeping joy. She put Poll back in her bed, smoothed her pillow, and smiled down at her. ‘Shall I make you some warm milk and honey?’

‘No thank you,’ Poll said. ‘I’m all right. You go to sleep. I want to listen to the morning.’

Poll had to stay in her room for six weeks until the infection had left her. The world shrank to four walls and a window and what went on outside was a story
she had no part in and could only listen to. Some of the things she heard were happy, some of them sad.

She heard the passing bell begin to toll. It would ring seven times for a man, six for a woman, three for a child. Poll lay in her bed, dreamily listening.
ONE
– a horse clattered by in the Square.
TWO
.
THREE
– and the deep sound trembled on the air as if the bell were sorry to stop so soon. Four, five, six, the voice of death sang, but these last peals were only echoes. Mother came into her room and told her the Dowsett baby was dead. Not little Tom, but his bouncing, three-year-old brother. Poll felt very strange: sad and excited at the same time. Poor Annie! She must feel so important, going to school and telling everyone her brother was dead! Archie, lying in his coffin, waxen face covered with flowers. Poll thought,
I might have died too
, and started to cry.

Mother said, ‘I must go to that poor woman. Shall I take your love to Annie? Do you think she’d like me to make her a dress?’

Most of the day now Mother’s treadle sewing machine whirred in the front room downstairs. She had plenty of customers but she found time to make a dress for Annie; a best dress with lace collar and cuffs and a tucked bodice. Poll said, ‘She’ll want new boots, too. No use having a new dress and old boots.’

‘I’ll see what I can manage,’ Mother said. ‘There’s
a pair Lily’s grown out of she’s hardly worn. They’d do for the summer.’

‘Is it summer already?’ Poll said.

The year had turned while she was ill. With the first of the really warm weather, Miss Mantripp hung Kruger’s cage in her cottage doorway and the thrush’s liquid song poured in at Poll’s window. She sat, propped up on pillows, cutting pictures out of magazines for her scrapbook. She stuck Father’s postcards in, too. He had left Uncle Edmund and the saloon in Colorado and found a job as valet to a rich Englishman who was travelling round America. Since he heard Poll was ill he had sent her a card almost every day, covered in such tiny writing it hurt her eyes to read it. The cards came from the Grand Canyon, from Niagara Falls, from San Francisco (Aunt Sarah said they would be useful for Geography and bought Poll an atlas) but the card Poll liked best was made of soft leather with a picture of a bear on it, and the message,
I CAN HARDLY BEAR TO LEAVE YOU
. Poll went to sleep with this card tucked under her cheek and the leather dye came off on her skin.

She wasn’t bored. She had her scrapbook, and Aunt Harriet’s collection of birds’ eggs to look at, and a huge pile of Chatterbox Annuals, and Aunt Sarah’s photograph album, a heavy, leather-bound volume with a brass clasp. ‘All your ancestors, dear, that
should interest you,’ Aunt Sarah said, and there they all were: whiskered gentlemen and crinolined ladies sitting beside potted palms. Granny Greengrass was there, in a lace cap and black dress, but Poll couldn’t tell if the picture was taken after the butcher had chopped off her finger because her hand was hidden in the folds of her skirt. There was one of her very much younger, with a baby Aunt Sarah sitting square and solemn-eyed on her lap and a tall man behind her, standing to attention like a soldier with his hand on her shoulder. ‘Is that Grandpa Greengrass?’ Poll asked. ‘No one ever says what happened to him!’ She hoped for a story but her mother, who was short-tempered that day because a customer was due for a fitting and her dress wasn’t ready, just said, ‘Don’t you mention that old rascal to me! He came to a bad end, that’s all you need to know!’

In the afternoon, when Theo and Lily and George came home from school, they took it in turns to sit on the other side of the carbolic sheet and read to her. It was very odd, she thought one day. Her sister and her brothers had become voices to her, reading
Christie’s Old Organ
or
Robbery Under Arms
. She said to Theo, ‘D’you know, I’ve forgotten what you look like!’

He was quiet for a minute. Then said, ‘You’ll get a surprise when you see me. I’m growing, like our peppermint pig. Not a peppermint boy any longer.’

‘Oh, I do wish I could see Johnnie,’ Poll said.

*

She heard him that afternoon. He made such a noise in the back garden, squealing and trumpeting, that the sound carried through to Poll’s little room in the front of the house. She sat up in bed, rigid and trembling. Something awful was happening – or going to happen! A dreadful thought pierced her mind and invaded her body: her heart and her stomach seemed to come loose inside her and lurch with foreboding. Annie had said,
Our pig didn’t half holler!
She pushed shaky legs out of bed and tottered, head swimming, past the carbolic curtain, through her mother’s room to the back bedroom. Johnnie’s wild protests continued, a shrill hooting and honking that sounded more like ten pigs than one as she struggled with the sash window. Then the noise stopped abruptly. Poll lay across the sill, faint with effort, the summer air cold on her forehead. She moaned, ‘Johnnie, oh Johnnie…’

Below, in the garden, her mother was standing at the fence talking to the woman next door. They looked up at Poll in a sudden, shocked silence that seemed, to her terrified mind, a guilty conspiracy.

She said, ‘Mother…’

‘What are you doing? You’ve no business up, you know that! Back to bed with you!’

She seemed to have no breath left. She whispered, ‘Where’s Johnnie?’

‘Shut up in the hen house.
Do as you’re told
.’

She crept back to bed and lay shaking all over.
Afraid, now she knew Johnnie was safe, of her mother’s anger. Suppose she told the doctor and he said, ‘Off to hospital!’

But when Mother came up, she was smiling. ‘That dratted pig! D’you know what he’s done? Pushed his way through the fence and ate next-door’s gooseberries. Picked them straight off the bushes, dainty as anything! The whole crop!
She
caught him at it and went after him with a spade and he led her a fine old dance, catch as catch can round the garden! Trouble was, I couldn’t stop laughing and that didn’t sweeten her temper – once I’d got him shut up, she went for me hammer and tongs, though it’s
her
fault he got through her fence, as I told her, and time it was mended! I said I was sorry, of course, all the same, but I couldn’t admit liability!’ She drew herself up as she said this, back very straight, head lifted proudly. ‘Then you looked out of the window and that softened her up. Your having been ill, you know. She said she’d forgive him this time, being as he was a special kind of a pig, and gave me an apple for him.’

Poll was weak with relief. ‘Oh, Mother, I thought…’ Tears choked her voice. Mother muttered something under her breath, sat down on the bed and held her hand while she had her cry out.

Then she said, ‘He won’t stay shut up in the hen house too long, so you needn’t fret about that. I’ll get George to mend the fence soon as he’s home. He might not do it for me but he’ll do it for Johnnie!
You’re not the only one soft-hearted about the old pig, you know!’

‘I expect when I get up I’ll find he’s forgotten me,’ Poll said mournfully.

But he hadn’t. The first day she came down, he trotted into the front room where she lay on the old leather sofa, put his soft twitching nose against the palm of her hand for a moment, then grunted twice and laid his heavy head in her lap.

She said, ‘Oh, he’s
huge
. He’s quite different!’

His eyes hadn’t changed, though. When she pushed back his ears, they seemed to smile up at her; dark blue eyes, with long, stiff, lint-pale lashes.

‘Too big for the house, really’ Mother said.

‘Let him stay. Please. He’s been lonely for me, you can see! He won’t get in your way while you’re sewing.’

‘Just a while then. Long as no one’s due for a fitting. Some of my ladies are a bit fussy!’

‘I should think they’d be glad to see Johnnie,’ Poll said, and the pig grunted as if in agreement, and settled comfortably down by the sofa.

Poll talked to him and scratched his back, dividing her attention between him and the Privet Hawk Moth Theo had brought home for her while she was still in bed.

She had had plenty of caterpillars before, kept in an old shoe box with holes in the lid, but she had
never cared for them much: their quick, looping walk and the way they waved backwards when she blew on them reminded her of Mrs Marigold Bugg. The Privet Hawk Moth caterpillar was different, more like a little locomotive, smooth-skinned and fat and slow-moving with a beautiful mauve stripe down his back. By the time Poll was down on the sofa, he had turned into a shining brown chrysalis and she liked to take him in her hand and watch the warmth make him kick up his tail.

One morning, when she opened the box, the chrysalis was gone and there in its place was a moth with grey and pink wings. Poll called, ‘Oh, Mother, come quickly,’ and Mother came running, drying her hands on her apron and looking alarmed. ‘I’m all right,’ Poll said. ‘Look!’

She edged the moth on to her finger. He seemed asleep but when Mother opened the window and Poll held him out in the sunshine, he opened and closed his wings once or twice and then spread them wide, nearly four inches across, and floated away on a soft little wind. They watched him drift up, high over the Square. ‘Time you were out in the air too,’ Mother said.

Her head spun at first. She managed to walk on Mother’s arm as far as Miss Mantripp’s cottage and then had to sit down on a chair the old lady put out in the sun for her. The thrush, Kruger, cocked his
head and looked down, bright-eyed. ‘You must get him some snails,’ Miss Mantripp said. ‘He’s very partial to snails.’

‘I will when I’m strong enough,’ Poll said, ‘I don’t think I could bend over to look for them just at the moment.’

But she was strong enough the next day. She collected snails from Aunt Sarah’s rock garden and gave them to Kruger and watched him dash them against the floor of his cage and break them open and eat them. When he had finished, he swelled his plump throat and sang. ‘He’s saying thank you,’ Miss Mantripp said, and brought her a glass of skim milk. She sat outside Miss Mantripp’s front door, drinking the milk, and everyone who passed, even people who were strangers to her, stopped and smiled and said they were glad she was better.

The whole Town, it seemed, had been worried about her. Shopping with Mother, they were met everywhere with kind, beaming faces, and when they went into Mullen’s General Store, Old Mullen himself came out of his office and said, ‘Glad to see you out and about, young woman, there was a time your Mother thought she might lose you.’