who gave you this one?’ he asked wearily.
‘Ma murrer,’ said Noddy.
‘To get messages?’ Mr Daunders suggested.
Noddy agreed in his usual way.
‘And she gave you the other one too?’ Mr Daunders prompted. ‘Not your uncle, your mother. Your mother gave you them both?’
Noddy nodded.
‘But she’d already given you one ten-shilling note to get messages. Why did she give you two?’
‘Case Ah loast wan,’ Noddy tried bravely.
‘No’, said Mr Daunders. ‘That won’t do, Nicholas. I’m not saying you stole this money. But I don’t think you’re telling me the truth.’
‘Please sir, si truth,’ Noddy wept.
The interrogation went on from six minutes past eleven till seventeen minutes past twelve. But Noddy wouldn’t say Savage’s name, or Percy’s, or mention the cellar. He was bound by his oath, and he was more afraid of the consequences of breaking it than of Mr Daunders. If his arms were paralysed and withered and shrivelled and dropped off like the leaves from the trees in autumn he would never be able to play the piano. He might as well be dead as have no arms. Nothing Mr Daunders could do would be as bad as losing his arms. He prayed to El to give him strength and he called out to Percy in the lonely darkness of his soul, and he gave nothing away. Mr Daunders tied him in knots, unravelled them, and tied new ones. Noddy didn’t care. It always surprised him how grown-ups dug into a story that wasn’t worth listening to. He said he had saved the money, he said he had found it, he said his mother had given him it, he said his uncle had given him it, he said his mother had given him one note and his uncle the other, he said he had saved one and found one, he said a big boy who had left school had given him them to keep for him, but he didn’t know the big boy’s name, didn’t know where he lived, where he worked, or what school he had gone to. He said he had just happened to put his hands in his jeans and found the two notes that morning in class and he had no idea how they got there.
‘Two ten-shilling notes, that’s one pound,’ said Mr Daunders thoughtfully, smoothing the notes on his desk. ‘Well, I still think it’s a lot of money for a boy like you to be carrying about. Especially when you’re not very sure how you come to have so much.’
He stared hard at the ragged dirty urchin and shook his head in defeat. A brief smile jerked at Noddy’s frog-like mouth. He was thinking of the daftness of all this fuss about a couple of half-notes when he had hundreds of pounds in fivers and singles stowed away safely to buy a piano when his mother got a new house in the scheme. It would be a rare surprise for her. But he couldn’t buy a piano so long as they were living in a single end. He kept his hoard in a waterproof bag inside the cistern in the stairhead lavatory, and his mother thought he was suffering from diarrhoea, he went to the closet so often, but he was only making sure his piano-money was still safe. He loved counting it.
Mr Daunders recognized that the twist in Noddy’s enormous mouth was a smile, and he frowned severely.
‘There’s nothing funny about it, you know,’ he said. ‘You were crying earlier on. I don’t see why you should be smiling now. I’m going to keep this money and I’m going to send for your mother, and I’ll get to the bottom of this yet.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mr Daunders called in Noddy’s mother right away. She was a cleaner in the school, so he had no trouble getting in touch with her. He waited on after four o’clock till she came in for her evening’s chores. But it didn’t get him anywhere. She stood in his little room, a timid foot and no more inside the door, with her working-overall on and scarf round her head in royal fashion, a big-bosomed, enormous-hipped, thick-ankled woman. That this hulk of womanhood should be the old block of a skelf like Noddy made Mr Daunders think of the mountain that gave birth to a mouse, and as he remembered the phrase he sighed at the destiny that had condemned him to be a headmaster in a small primary school in one of Glasgow’s wild-life reservations, a pocket of vandalism, a pool of iniquity. He had a painful stab of longing to have done with backward and delinquent children and be a retired headmaster living his own life, following his own interests. He had an elegant eighteenth century edition of Horace with the mad Christopher Smart’s prose translation facing the Latin. He always took it with him when he went on holiday, but somehow he never found time to open it. Now he couldn’t even remember where it was that Horace had spoken of the mountain in labour giving birth to a mouse. ‘I must read Horace again when I retire,’ he thought, even as he was talking severely to Mrs Mann.
Mrs Mann had her own distracting thoughts. According to the book of words only widows were supposed to be employed as cleaners in Corporation schools, and she wasn’t technically a widow though she passed for one in so far as she didn’t have the support of a husband. A husband in jail for robbery with violence wasn’t a resident head of the house. She felt entitled to her job, but she was afraid Mr Daunders was going to tell her she was sacked. When she understood he was talking about her son she felt quite happy and smiled encouragingly to the headmaster. Mr Daunders frowned at her. He knew quite well she was no widow, he knew where her husband was. He had hoped his knowledge might be used as a lever to extract information from her. But she had no information for him. Yet she was the only person who gained from the interview.
She challenged Noddy that night.
‘I was hearing you was found wi’ more money than you’re supposed to have,’ she said, slapping his face to begin the discussion on the proper terms. ‘Two ten-shilling notes, eh? Now where the hell did you get two ten- shilling notes?’
Noddy said he had found them in a midgie in Ossian Street. There was a bank at the close. The bank must have thrown them out by mistake. They were in an envelope.
‘Ha-ha, a likely story!’ said Mrs Mann her fingers splayed on her hips. She didn’t think of asking for the envelope as Mr Daunders would certainly have done. ‘And what did you never think of telling me you found them for if that was how you got them?’
‘Ah never goat a chance,’ Noddy mumbled, crouched in a corner of the kitchen near the sink, his right hand over his ear. Mrs Mann darted swiftly and smacked his left ear and Noddy changed guard.
‘Ye hid nae intentions o’ tellin’ me, ye little bugger!’ she screamed, and then smacked his right ear. Noddy put both hands up.
‘Ah hud,’ he said. ‘Ah’ve never saw you since Ah fun them. Ah only fun them this moarning.’
‘And whit wur ye gaun tae dae wi’ them?’ said Mrs Mann, pursuing her beloved seventh son as he edged round the kitchen past the dresser and the coal-bunker, along the valance of the recess-bed, up to the fireplace, and behind the ruptured armchair that flanked it.
‘Ah wis gaun tae gie ye hauf,’ said Noddy, willing to give up one of the bits of paper for the sake of peace.
‘Oh, ye wis, wis ye?’ said Mrs Mann sceptically. ‘Well, come on then! Let’s see ye hauf it!’
‘Ah canny, he’s goat them both,’ Noddy wept in vexation.
‘Oh, the bastard! So he hus!’ cried Mrs Mann, and shook her fists at the whitewashed ceiling above the pulley where her shift and a pair of bloomers were drying, her head thrown back and her bleary eyes staring wildly.
And just as Mr Daunders had waited for her at four o’clock
