are we to know what’s rubbish and what’s not if we don’t look?’ Mrs Mann asked hoity-toitily over her shoulder. ‘That’s what wee Greeny’s paying us for. He wants to know what he can throw out and what he can’t. You’ve got to be nosey to do the job right.’
She plunged into the crate again and surfaced with the fairy wand. She flourished it towards Mrs Phinn and in the voice of a pantomime fairy she chanted. ‘And now I banish the wicked witch! Begone, bugger off, you ugly old bitch!’
‘Ach, that’s the school concert stuff,’ Mrs Quick cried with a wave of her broom.
Mrs Phinn’s scowl narrowed to a glare. It was the sorrow of her life that she had been the belle of the district between seventeen and nineteen, lost her good looks and her figure, and finished up, she well knew, an ugly old bitch. The worries of marriage, the strain of making ends meet and coping with a husband who kept bad company and drank too much, had ploughed her youth’s fair field with furrows of bitterness.
‘It’s an awful pity they stopped doing a concert every year,’ said Mrs Quick. ‘I used to enjoy them. They used to do some rare pantomimes and a kind of variety show. And they were good for the weans and a’. It learned them good to speak right.’
Mrs Mann put the wand across one of the broken desks and dived into another tea-chest, her broad bottom level with the edge of the chest as she delved deeper, her head and torso inside. She came up again and turned round with a top hat in her hand.
‘Oh, I remember that turn!’ Mrs Quick squealed in delight. ‘There was wan o’ the girls came on dressed like a man and she wore that tile hat. Oh, she was a rare wee dancer!’
Mrs Mann crowned herself with the top hat, picked up the fairy wand again as a walking stick and swayed to the swept centre of the stone floor singing in a broad Glasgow voice.
I’m Burrlington Berrtie,
I rrise at ten therrty,
An’ go furr a strroll in the Parrk!
She did a little jig with an ease and lightness surprising in a woman of her colossal bulk, but she was used to it. She performed those steps every year when she marched behind the flute band in the Orange Walk on the Twelfth of July.
‘You’re going back some!’ Mrs Phinn commented coldly.
‘I used to hear ma maw sing that song,’ Mrs Mann explained amiably. ‘She’d be about your age.’
‘Ach, yer granny’s mutch!’ Mrs Phinn retorted contemptuously. ‘You stand there and do a song and dance act but it’s me that’s doing all the work and getting nothing for it and you’re doing nothing and getting paid for it. It’s no’ fair.’
Encouraged by Mrs Mann’s entertainment Mrs Quick delved into the third of the chests and dragged out a brocade jacket.
‘That’s what the Baron wore the year they did Cinderella,’ she screeched, and tried it on.
‘Baron Figtree!’ Mrs Mann howled, clapped her hands, took a front-stage pose and declaimed a couplet from an old Glasgow pantomime.
Tomorrow’s my grandmother’s wedding day.
Ten thousand pounds will I give away.
‘Hooray, hooray, hooray!’ Mrs Quick took the cue, with a triple change of voice to suggest the discordant applause of the lads and lasses of the village. Mrs Mann bowed and went on.
On second thought I think it best
To stow it away in the old oak chest.
‘Boo, boo, boo!’ Mrs Quick responded as before.
‘When yous two has stopped acting the goat,’ Mrs Phinn cut in with clearly enunciated superiority.
Her two helpers leaned over the tea-chests, laughing as only fat women can. That Mrs Phinn had no joy in their turn increased theirs. Mrs Quick wiped her eyes with her duster.
‘Well, come on, Jessie,’ she wheezed. ‘We can tell him this is a’ the old concert costumes and he can burn it or date whit he likes wi’ it.’
‘Shove them up against the wa’, Maggie,’ said Mrs Mann. ‘The three o’ them. Then we can tell him they’re a’ the gither.’
Mrs Mann kept the top hat. If she couldn’t pawn it Noddy might be able to use it when he dressed up for Hallowe’en. It would maybe earn him a few extra coppers round the doors or on the street. She was always thinking about money.
‘We could tell some o’ the weans there’s a lot of good stuff down here for when it’s Hallowe’en.’
‘Aye, they could get some rare fancy clobber here,’ Mrs Quick agreed, thrusting the top layers of the chests down hard to make them look tidy.
‘I don’t suppose it matters there’s no false-faces,’ Mrs Phinn muttered. ‘Your Nicky wouldny need one.’
‘Ho, ho,’ Mrs Mann replied, pushing the third of the chests alongside its mates. ‘Very clever, I must say.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Percy was the first to see the cellar had been entered. He came down by the chute on Sunday night, making his usual visit to what had become a sanctuary to him, and stopped at once when he reached the floor. He thought he was going to faint. For the first time in his life he understood what it meant to get a shock. Something seemed to have hit him in the midriff, his heart went vaulting and then tumbled, his legs were paralysed, his head was a clamour of alarm bells, his eyes were in a mist one moment and as sharp as an eagle’s the next, his palate was parched and his tongue was stuck to it, his brow felt chilled, and he nearly wet himself.
When he recovered from the seizure he galloped over to the chests, almost tripping himself on his splay feet in his excitement. His torso was so far ahead of his legs that he seemed to mean to get there by bodily extension rather than by running. He saw the concert props and costumes weren’t quite as they had been left. Some that had been in different chests were now in the same chest, some that had been underneath were now on top. He leaned over the first chest, pulled out skirts, hats, jackets, trousers, cardboard capstans and festoons of coloured paper, and delved to the bottom. The money was still there. And so with the other chests. Whoever had been in the cellar and swept it out and moved the chests hadn’t disturbed more than the top layers. The transistor, the tape-recorder and record- player, the TV and the uke and the guitar were still safe against the farthest and darkest wall of the cellar, the rats’ wall, behind a faç ade of planks, pails and the barrel of washing-soda. So much for the thoroughness of the cleaners’ cleaning. He knelt beside one of the chests with his hands clasped and said a sincere prayer of thanks.
‘Oh, blessed El, I thank thee for not allowing thyself to fall into the hands of the ungodly,’ he panted, his mouth against his finger-tips.
He thought of moving the money, but he didn’t know where else he could put it. If it had survived one attack in the cellar it could survive another. The cellar still seemed the safest place for it, and the proper place too, since it had been found in the cellar. He was unwilling to find a new site for what had always been safe in the place where it was discovered. The cellar seemed its natural and even sacred place because that was where El had
