The Peppermint Pig (2 page)

Poll was awake at once. Father usually said ‘Mother’. But perhaps what startled her most was the tone of his voice, which was hoarse and slow as if some of the gritty fog had got into his throat and stayed there.

He said, ‘Whoever took the money, I was in charge and must be responsible. I should have locked the safe up before I left the office to speak to my father.’

‘Oh, I knew he’d bring us all down one day,’
Mother said, and Poll wondered who she was talking about. Dad had said,
my father.
But Grandpa Greengrass was dead…

She listened, puzzled and yawning.

Father said, ‘It’s not his fault, Emily. Poor old fellow, if you could see him…’

There was a question in his voice. Mother said, ‘No thank you, we can’t afford two soft hearts in this family! Did young Rowland know he’d been hanging about?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘And accused him, I suppose? Is that it, James? You were afraid he’d send for the police?’

Father said, very slowly and reluctantly, ‘Yes. Yes, I’ll admit I was afraid of that. Even though I was fairly sure young Rowland was just covering up for himself. He was the only one who was ever alone in the office with the safe open. But it was his word against mine, wasn’t it?’

‘Old Rowland would take
your
word, James,’ Mother said.

‘Perhaps. In a way, that’s the point. The lad’s future was in my hands and he knew it. He stood there, denying what we both knew he’d done, blaming the old man and threatening to send for the police – but with such a look in his eyes! Begging me not to give him away to his father. And I couldn’t, Emily! A boy, barely nineteen, with his whole life before him!’

‘And yours is behind you, I suppose?’

Poll had never heard her mother speak like that to her father before. Until this moment she had been no more than sleepily interested in what they were saying, as if this were a play going on over her head or a story her father was reading to Lily and George that she didn’t quite understand but enjoyed listening to, but now the ice in her mother’s voice froze her still under the table.

‘Well…’ Father’s boots creaked as he shifted his feet. One of them almost trod on Poll’s hand but she was frightened to move. He said, ‘Well,’ again. Then, ‘I can start afresh, Emily. Young Rowland can’t. It’s his family’s firm and he’ll have to take over one day. He can’t just walk out and get another job somewhere else as I can. And there’s his father to consider. Old Rowland. It would break his heart if he knew. His only child.’

‘You have four children, James.’ Mother’s voice was still cold as winter. ‘Shouldn’t you consider them, too?’

Father cleared his throat. Not, it seemed, to get the fog out of it, but in the way George did when he was hurt and embarrassed. He didn’t reply and for a moment there was no sound in the room apart from the hiss of the gaslight over the table and the slow, fat tick of the old grandfather clock in the corner. At last Mother said, ‘I’m sorry I said that. Of course I know that you think of them always.’

Father said, ‘It would be terrible for them to have a
father they couldn’t look up to. One who had done somethink he believed to be wrong.’

‘Yes,’ Mother said. ‘Yes, I suppose it might be.’ She sounded as if she did not altogether believe this but saw no point in arguing further and added, as if changing the subject entirely, ‘What will you do, James?’

‘Something different, I think. Not coach building – that’s had its day. In twenty years, Emily, there will be hardly any horse-drawn traffic left on the roads. Everyone will have motor cars.’

‘I’ll believe
that
when I see it,’ Mother said, and gave one of her sniffs.

Father laughed. ‘I think you will, and in our lifetime, my dear! What I thought I might do –’ his voice lifted suddenly and he sounded young as a boy, young as George – ‘I thought I might go to America.’

Mother said, ‘James!’ and Poll cried out under the table. ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘
Dad
…’ fighting her way through the stiff folds of the starched cloth that covered her head, blinding her. Father lifted the cloth, scooped her up, and held her against him. Safe in the shelter of his arm, she said quickly and angrily before her mother could be angry with her for hearing something she shouldn’t have heard, ‘It’s all your fault, Mother. You forgot me. You never said I could come out and I went to sleep under there.’

Mother’s face was white under her short, red-brown curls and her pretty mouth was buttoned up
tight like her tight, buttoned bodice. She was sitting poker-straight and staring at Poll.

Poll looked at her, then at her father, who was stroking his dark, silky moustache and watching her gravely. She said, ‘Why is Dad going away?’

Neither of them spoke. Poll thought they looked scared – scared of
her
! That shocked her; then made her angry. ‘What’s happened?’ she shouted, stamping her foot. ‘Tell me this minute!’

Perhaps most grown-ups would not have answered her – children were supposed to be seen and not heard and were rarely told what their parents were up to – but Emily Greengrass was different. She was a quick, direct person, used to speaking her mind and not mincing her words to make them digestible. She said, ‘Your father has left his job because there has been trouble in the firm. Money stolen. Not by him, that goes without saying, but for his own, no doubt very good reasons, he has taken the blame for it.’

Poll guessed that her mother did not think the reasons particularly good ones but knew better than to ask more. She turned to her father. ‘Are you really going away to America?’ Even as she asked this she knew it couldn’t be true and started to smile.

But she was wrong: it was true. He shook his head and said gently, ‘I think so, my little love. Your Uncle Edmund is there as you know, working on his fruit farm in California. I shall join him to start with. After
that – who knows? America is a land of great opportunities. I may make a fortune!’ He pressed her hand and gazed beyond her, his eyes bright with dreams in the firelight.

Poll heard her mother sigh, a small, cut-off sound. She tugged at her father’s sleeve to bring him back out of his dream and said, feeling hollow inside, ‘If you go away, what will happen to us?’

He looked at her, frowning slightly. ‘Nothing, my Pretty-Poll. I’ll send for you when I’m established, of course. Until then, you will go to my sisters, your Aunt Sarah and your Aunt Harriet, in Norfolk.’

Mother stirred and the silk of her dress rustled. She said, drily and politely as if speaking to a stranger, ‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you, James?’ And then, to Poll, ‘Go upstairs now, it’s time. Tell George and Lily to come in here, please, because we must talk to them. And tell Theo to get into bed. I’ll explain to him in the morning. I don’t want him lying awake all night worrying. You know what an old worry-box he can be!’ She gave a light, breathless laugh, although there was nothing to laugh at, as far as Poll could see, and went on, ‘Not that there is anything to worry about, your father knows what is best for us all, you must not forget that. But be a good girl and do as you’re told just for once. Into bed and to sleep and not one word to Theo.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ Poll said. But she crossed her fingers behind her back as she spoke and kept them crossed
while she kissed her parents goodnight and ran down the passage to tell George and Lily, doing their homework by the range in the kitchen, that they were wanted at once in the parlour. Then she went straight upstairs to tell Theo.

He had hitched his nightshirt over the big solid knob of the brass bed he and George shared, and was swinging dreamily backwards and forwards. Poll had been forbidden to do this because she was too heavy now and might tear her gown, but Theo was lighter than she was. He went on swinging, though more slowly, while she told him what had happened downstairs. His bare legs dangled like pale, peeled willow wands and his thin feet were blue.

‘Get into bed,’ Poll said. ‘You’ll catch your death. It’s like ice in this room.’

He unhitched his nightshirt and climbed on to the high bed, rubbing his feet back to life. His huge eyes shone in the light of the candle like pools of blue water. He said, ‘Who stole
what
?’

Poll perched beside him, shivering, plumping the soft feather bolster up round her. ‘Mother said money. Dad didn’t say. Only that it was the old man’s only son and it would break his heart if he knew. Old Rowland’s heart.’

She stopped. Old Rowland owned the firm Father worked for. Poll had seen him once. He was a short, stout man with a barrel-shaped belly and a red jolly face. He had said, ‘So this is your little maid, James.
Pretty-Poll,’ pinched her cheek, rather hard, and given her sixpence. Poll thought of his heart breaking and saw it, in her mind’s eye, like the cracked white pudding basin that had fallen in two halves when Mother dropped it on the stone floor of the scullery

Theo said, ‘Is that all?’

‘Dad took the blame. Owned up…’

‘To something he hadn’t done? That someone else had?’

‘I think so.’

She wasn’t certain. She could barely remember. Dad going away had seemed so much more important.

‘Hmmm,’ Theo said in a funny voice.

‘What do you mean,
Hmmm
?’

He shook the hair out of his eyes and blinked at her. Then whispered, ‘Suppose it wasn’t ordinary money that was stolen, but gold?’ Poll stared, bewildered, and he went on, ‘Gold
leaf
, anyway Those shavings he brought home last week for the Christmas cards. In the tin. They’re valuable, aren’t they? Real gold, he said so.’

‘Just shavings,’ Poll said. ‘What was left over after they’d finished painting the carriages. Like – like gleanings in a corn field.’

Poll had never lived in the country but her mother had told her that when she was young she had gone gleaning after the harvest was finished, picking up the
fat ears of corn that the farmer’s horse-rake had missed and left in the stubble.

Theo said, ‘There was an awful lot, though. Pounds and pounds worth, I’d think. A fortune. If all those scraps were put together and melted down.’

He bounced up and down, very excited, squeaking the bed springs.

‘Theo! Dad’s not a thief!’

He rolled his eyes upwards as if he thought she was too stupid for words. ‘I didn’t quite mean that. Just that perhaps he thought he could take it, like gleanings, and then, later on, someone said,
Where’s all that gold gone?’
He grinned at Poll shyly as if wondering if this really made sense (or if it didn’t, if he could make her believe that it did), then sighed and said, ‘He might be scared to say
then
, mightn’t he?’

‘You’re just making a story up. Dad’s never frightened of anything. Besides, it was money stolen, Mother said.’ But Poll was less sure than she sounded. Like Mother, Theo enjoyed telling stories and his were not always true. This one sounded plain silly, Poll thought. On the other hand, Theo was older than she was and everyone said he was clever.

He was thinking now, huddled up in the feather bed, chin on his thin, pointed knees. He said, after a bit, ‘There could be two things, couldn’t there? Not connected. I mean this money gone that Dad didn’t take and the gold that he
did.
Not meaning to steal at
the time, but it would look bad if it came out, as things are.’

‘I think you’re horrible,’ Poll said. ‘A horrible, mean, skinny beast.’

Theo giggled. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.’

Poll felt as if she would burst with rage. ‘I’ll tell Dad what you said. I will!’

Theo shook his head solemnly. ‘You mustn’t do that. He’d be upset, thinking you thought he’d really done something wrong.’

‘It wasn’t
me
thought that, it was
you
.’

‘He won’t know that, will he? Not if you
say
it!’

Poll was muddled by this. She was often muddled by Theo who had a tortuous mind. Listening to him was like being trapped in the maze at Hampton Court, she thought suddenly: all those paths twisting and turning and no clear way out. She remembered how furious she had been with him earlier when she came in cold and unhappy from school and found Mother cuddling him. She longed to give him a good punch to relieve her feelings but he always yelled when she hit him – sometimes he even yelled when he just thought she was going to – and that would bring Mother up in a temper.

He was looking at her with a nervous expression as if he knew what she was thinking. Or perhaps he was ashamed of the things he had said and was afraid that she might, after all, tell their father.

He said, ‘Really, Poll, I think we’d best just keep quiet about it. Not a word to anyone, not even to Lily and George. Dad may have forgotten he brought home that gold. And if you remind him, he might feel he’s got to own up to that too – you know how he likes to set us a good example! And stealing gold is worse than stealing money.’ He was watching her. She stared back until his eyes fell. He said in a hushed voice, ‘He might go to prison!’

‘I’d rather he went to prison than to America. We could visit him and take pies,’ Poll said stoutly. She had a story book about a little girl whose father had been sent to prison for debt. There was a picture of the girl carrying a basket full of pies into her father’s cell, and the poor thin father leaping up, holding out his arms and calling her his little angel. Thinking of this picture, and then of her father going to America and being lonely and sad without her, made Poll start to cry. Her throat and eyes burned and fat, warm, salt tears rolled down her face.

‘
Dad
wouldn’t rather go to prison, you juggins!’ Theo put an arm round Poll and dabbed at her cheeks with his other hand and an edge of the sheet. ‘Don’t cry, you’re not Lily! Dad wants to go to America, you fool. He’s wanted to for ages and ages, ever since Uncle Edmund went and started writing back letters. It’s an
adventure
for him, don’t you see?’

‘Old people don’t have adventures, it’s you that’s the fool! And he’s going without us, that’s what’s
awful!’ Poll felt she would never be able to bear this, she would die rather! ‘I’ll die, I’ll
die
if he does, I
won’t
go to horrible Norfolk,’ she cried, banging her fists up and down on the bolster until feathers and dust came out of the seams, making her sneeze.