White Boots (3 page)

Harriet wriggled.

“Don't laugh, Daddy, it tickles.”

But when she got back to bed Harriet found that either
the laughing or the thought of skating next day had done her good. Her legs were still cotton-woolish but not quite as cotton-woolish as they had been before her father had fetched her downstairs. Queen of the Ice! She giggled. The giggle turned into a gurgle. Harriet was asleep.

ALEC CALLED ON Mr Pulton after supper. Mr Pulton had been born over the newspaper shop and so had his father before him, and likely enough rows of grandfathers before that. Nobody could imagine a time when Pulton's newsagents had not been a landmark in the High Street. By luck, or because Pulton's did not hold with meddling, the shop looked as if it had been there a long time. It was a little, low shop with a bow-fronted window, and there were the remains of some old bottle glass in one pane. Nobody knew Mr Pulton's Christian name, he had always been just Mr Pulton to speak to, and C. Pulton when he signed his name. There was a lot of guessing as to what the C. stood for; local rumour had decided it was Carabas, like the marquess who was looked after by Puss in Boots. There were old men who were at school with Mr Pulton, who ought to
have known his name, but they only remembered he had been called Pip Pulton. This was so unlikely a name for Mr C. Pulton that nobody believed the old men, and said they were getting on and had forgotten. It was true they were getting on, for anyone who had been at school with Mr Pulton was rising eighty.

Alec went to Mr Pulton's back door for the shop was closed. He knocked loudly for Mr Pulton was a little deaf. After a moment there was a shuffling, grunting, wheezing sound, and Mr Pulton opened the door. He was a very thin, very pale man. His hair was white, and so was his face, which looked as if it had been a face for so long that the colour had been washed out of it, and it had been battered around until it creased and was full of wrinkles. His hands were pale too, long and thin and spidery; he wore clothes that nobody had ever seen anyone else wear; a little round brown velvet cap with a tassel hanging down on one side and a brown velvet coat and slippers embroidered with gold and silver thread. His paleness and thinness sticking out of the brown skull cap and brown velvet coat made him look like a delicate white moth, caught in a rough brown hand. There was, however, nothing delicate or mothlike about Mr Pulton's mind; that was as quick and as tough as a lizard. This showed in his extraordinarily blue, interested, shrewd eyes. His voice was misleading for it matched his body and not his mind. It was a tired voice, which sounded as if it had been used such a lot that it was wearing away. Mr Pulton looked at Alec and his eyes
showed he was remembering who he was, and anything that he knew about him.

“What can I do for you, young man?” Alec explained that he had come about the paper round. There was a long pause, not a pause of tiredness but a pause in which Alec could feel Mr Pulton was considering his paper round, and whether he was the sort of boy who could be trusted to deliver papers without bringing dishonour to Pulton's Newsagents. Evidently his thoughts about Alec were nice, for suddenly he said a very surprising thing. “Come inside.”

Alec had never been inside Mr Pulton's house before, and neither, as far as he knew, had anybody else. He had often wanted to go inside, because leaning across the counter waiting for his father's paper he had sometimes seen glimpses of a back room, which seemed to be full of interesting things. Now he was inside the room and he found it even more interesting than he had thought it might be. It was a brownish kind of room, so evidently Mr Pulton was fond of brown. There were brownish curtains, and brownish chair covers, and brownish walls. There was a gay fire burning, but in spite of it the room was dark because Mr Pulton had not yet got around to electric light, and could not be bothered with lamps, so he lit his home with candles, which gave a queer, dim, flickering light. In spite of the dimness Alec could see the room was full of pictures, and the pictures were all of horses, which was amazing, for nobody had ever thought of Mr Pulton as being interested in horses. There
were dozens of portraits of horses: race-horses, hunters, shire horses, almost every sort of horse. As well on the top of a bookcase, on brackets and on tables there were bronze models of horses. It seemed such a very horse sort of room that Alec thought it would not be rude to mention it.

“I say, what a lot of horses, sir.”

Mr Pulton picked up a candle. He walked slowly round his walls, his voice took on a proud, affectionate tone, though it still kept its frail, reed-like quality.

“Old Jenny, foaled a Grand National winner, she did. There he is, his portrait was painted the day after, so my father heard, you can see he was proud; look at him, knows he's won the greatest test of horse and rider ever thought of. That's Vinegar, beautiful grey, went to a circus, wonderfully matched greys they were. Now there's a fine creature, you wouldn't know what he was – Suffolk Punch. It takes all sorts to make up a horse's world, just as it takes all sorts to make our world; Suffolk Punches are country folk, simple in their ways, not asking much nor wanting changes. Now there's a smart fellow: Haute École they call that, see his feet? That's fine work, that is, takes a clever horse for High School.” He paused by a bronze cast of a horse which was standing on a small table. He ran his hand over the back of the cast as if it were alive. “You were a grand horse, weren't you, old fellow? My grandfather's he was; used to hunt him, he did. My father used to say you were almost human, didn't he? Whisky his name was; clever, couldn't put a foot
wrong. And how he loved it. Why, there's mornings now, especially at this time of year, when there's a nip of frost in the air, and the smell of dropped leaves, I can fancy old Whisky here raising his head, and I can see a look in his eye as if he were saying ‘What's keeping us? Wonderful morning for a hunt, let's be off.'”

Alec was so interested in the horses and the little bits of their history that Mr Pulton let drop, that he forgot the paper round, and it was quite a surprise to him when Mr Pulton, holding up his candle so that he could see Alec's face clearly, said:

“Why do you want my paper round? Not the type.”

“Why not? I'm honest, sober and industrious.”

Mr Pulton chuckled.

“Maybe, but you haven't answered my question. Why do you want my paper round?”

Alec, though privately he thought Mr Pulton was a bit inquisitive, decided he had better explain.

“Well, sir, it's to hire boots and skates for my sister Harriet, who's been ill and…”

Mr Pulton held up a finger to stop Alec.

“Sit down, boy, sit down. At my age you feel your legs, can't keep standing all the time. Besides, I've got my toddy waiting in the fireplace. You like toddy?… No, course you wouldn't. If you go through that door into my kitchen, and open the cupboard, you'll see in the left-hand corner a bottle marked ‘Ginger wine'. Nothing like ginger wine for keeping out the cold.”

Alec went into the kitchen; it was a very neat, tidy kitchen, evidently whoever looked after Mr Pulton did it nicely. He found the cupboard easily, and he brought the bottle of ginger wine and a glass back to the sitting room. Mr Pulton nodded in a pleased way, and pointed to the chair opposite his own.

“Sit down, boy… sit down… help yourself. Now tell me about your sister Harriet.”

Mr Pulton was an easy man to talk to; he sat sipping his toddy, now and again nodding his head, and all the time his interested blue eyes were fixed on Alec. When Alec had told him everything, including how difficult it was to make the shop pay because of Uncle William eating so much, and how Dr Phillipson thought he could get Harriet into the rink for nothing, he put down his glass of toddy, folded his hands, and put on the business face he wore in his paper shop.

“How much does it cost to hire boots and skates?”

“Two shillings a session.”

Mr Pulton gave an approving grunt, and shook himself a little as if he was pleased about something.

“Morning and evening rounds. Good. The last boy I had would only do mornings, no good in that, never get into my ways. I pay ten shillings a week for the morning round, and four shillings for the evening round; there's not so much work in the evenings, mostly they buy their papers from a newsboy on the street, nasty, dirty habit. Never buy papers from newsboys. You can have the job.”

Alec was reckoning the money in his head. Harriet would only go to one session of skating a day, that meant for six days, for there would be no skating on Sunday, which would cost twelve shillings. That would give him two shillings over for himself. Two shillings a week! Because of Uncle William's mixed and irregular supplies to the shop, it was scarcely ever that he had any pocket money, and the thought of having two whole shillings a week made his eyes shine far brighter than Mr Pulton's candles.

“Thank you, sir. When can I start?”

“Tomorrow. You said your sister was starting skating tomorrow. You'll be here at seven and you'll meet my present paper boy, he'll show you round. You look pleased. Think you'll like delivering papers?”

Alec felt warm inside from ginger wine, and outside from the fire, and being warm inside and out gives a talkative feeling.

“It's the two shillings. You see, Harriet will only need twelve shillings for her skates, and you said fourteen.”

Mr Pulton had picked up his hot toddy again.

“That's right. What are you going to do with the other two shillings?”

In the ordinary way Alec would not have discussed his secret plan, the only person who knew it was Toby; but telling things to Mr Pulton was like telling things to a person in a dream; besides, nobody had ever heard Mr Pulton discuss somebody else's affairs, indeed it was most unlikely that he
was interested in anybody's affairs.

“I've no brains. Toby has those, but Dad and Mother think I'll go on at school until I'm eighteen, but I won't, it's a waste of time for me, at least that's what I think. I'd meant to leave school when I was sixteen, and go into something in Dad's line of business. You see, it's absolutely idiotic our depending on Uncle William. Dad doesn't see that, but of course he wouldn't for he's his brother, but you can't really make a place pay when for days on end you get nothing but rhubarb and perhaps a couple of rabbits, and one boiling hen, and then suddenly thousands of old potatoes. You see, Uncle William just rushes out and sends off things he doesn't like the look of, or has got too many of. Now what I want to do is to get a proper set-up. I'd like a pony and cart to go to market and buy the sorts of things customers want to eat. What we sell now, and everybody knows it, isn't what customers want but what Uncle William doesn't want. I think knowing that puts people off from buying from Dad.”

Mr Pulton leant back in his chair.

“It'd take a lot of two shillings to buy a pony and trap.”

“I know, but I might be able to do something as a start. You see, if I put all the two shillings together, by next spring I'd have a little capital and I could at least try stocking Dad with early potatoes or something of that sort. We never sell new potatoes, Uncle William likes those, so we only get the old ones. If the potatoes went well I might be able to buy peas, beans, strawberries and raspberries in the summer.”

“You never have those either?”

“Of course not, Uncle William hogs the lot.”

“You'd like to own a provision store some day?”

“Glory no! I'd hate it. What I want is to be at the growing end; I'd give anything to have the sort of set-up Uncle William's got. There's a decent-sized walled fruit and vegetable garden, where you could do pretty well if you went in for cloches, and there's a nice bit of river and there's some rough shooting.”

“How does your Uncle William send his produce to your father?”

Alec looked as exasperated as he felt.

“That's another idiotic thing, we never know how it's coming. Sometimes he has a friend with a car, and we get a telephone message, and Dad has to hare up to somebody's flat to fetch it; mostly it comes by train, but sometimes Uncle William gets a bargee to bring it down; that's simply awful because the stuff arrives bad, and Uncle William can't understand that it arrived bad.”

Mr Pulton had finished his toddy, and he got up.

“I am going to bed. Don't forget now, seven o'clock in the morning. Not a minute late. I can't abide boys who come late.” He was turning to go when evidently a thought struck him. He nodded in a pleased sort of way. “Stick to your dreams, don't let anyone put you off what you want to do. All these…” he swept his hand round the horses, “were my grandfather's and my great grandfather's, just that hunter
belonged to my father. When I was your age I dreamed of horses, but there was this newsagency, there's always been a Pulton in this shop. Where are my dreams now? Goodnight, boy.”