She was always full of his praises, so we knew we had to be careful. We said we’d caught our rabbits in the orchard and the fish from the village brook. The trout you could catch there were only small, but they didn’t know that. Charlie told them that the salmon must have come up the brook to spawn, which they did do of course. Charlie always lied well, and they believed him. Thank God.
Molly and I would keep watch while Charlie set the traps or put out his nets. Lambert, the Colonel’s bailiff, may have been old, but he was clever, and we knew he’d let his dog loose on us if he ever caught us at it. Late one evening, sitting by the bridge with Charlie busy at his nets downstream, Molly took my hand in hers and held it tight. “I don’t like the dark,” she whispered. I had never been so happy.
When the Colonel turned up at the house the next day, we thought it must be either because we’d been found out somehow or because he was going to evict us. It was neither. Grandma Wolf seemed to be expecting him, and that was strange. She went to the door and invited him in. He nodded at Mother and then frowned at us. Grandma Wolf waved us outside as she asked the Colonel to sit down. We tried eavesdropping but Big Joe was no good at keeping quiet, so we had to wait until later to hear the worst. As it turned out, the worst was not the worst at all, but the best.
After the Colonel had gone, Grandma Wolf called us in. I could see she was puffed up with self-importance, aglow with it. “Your mother will explain,” she declared grandly, putting on her bonnet. “I have to get up to the Big House right away I’ve work to do.”
Mother waited until she’d gone and could not help smiling as she told us, “Well,” she began, “you know some time ago your great aunt used to work as housekeeper up at the Big House?”
“And then she got kicked out by the Colonel’s wife,” said Charlie.
“She lost her job, yes,” Mother went on. “Well, now the Colonel’s wife has passed away it seems the Colonel wants her back as live-in housekeeper. She’ll be moving up to the Big House as soon as possible.”
I didn’t cheer, but I certainly felt like it.
“What about the cottage?” Charlie asked. “Is the old duffer putting us out then?”
“No, dear. We’re staying put,” Mother replied. “He said his wife had liked me and made him promise to look after me if ever anything happened to her. So he’s keeping that promise. Say what you like about the Colonel, he’s a man of his word. I’ve agreed I’ll do all his linen for him and his sewing work. Most of it I can bring home. So we’ll have some money coming in. We’ll manage. Well, are you happy? We’re staying put!”
Then we did cheer and Big Joe cheered too, louder than any of us. So we stayed on in our cottage and Grandma Wolf moved out. We were liberated, and all was right with the world again. For a while at least.
Both of them being older than me, Molly by two years, Charlie by three, they always ran faster than I did. I seem to have spent much of my life watching them racing ahead of me, leaping the high meadow grass, Molly’s plaits whirling about her head, their laughter mingling. When they got too far ahead I sometimes felt they wanted to be without me. I would whine at them then to let them know I was feeling all miserable and abandoned, and they’d wait for me to catch up. Best of all Molly would sometimes come running back and take my hand.
When we weren’t poaching the Colonel’s fish or scrumping his apples — more than anything we all loved the danger of it, I think — we would be roaming wild in the countryside. Molly could shin up a tree like a cat, faster than either of us. Sometimes we’d go down to the river bank and watch the kingfishers flash by, or we’d go swimming in Okement Pool hung all around by willows, where the water was dark and deep and mysterious, and where no one ever came.
I remember the day Molly dared Charlie to take off all his clothes, and to my amazement he did. Then she did, and they ran shrieking and bare-bottomed into the water. When they called me in after them, I wouldn’t do it, not in front of Molly. So I sat and sulked on the bank and watched them splashing and giggling, and all the while I was wishing I had the courage to do what Charlie had done, wishing I was with them. Molly got dressed afterwards behind a bush and told us not to watch. But we did. That was the first time I ever saw a girl with no clothes on. She was very thin and white, and she wrung her plaits out like a wet cloth.
It was several days before they managed to entice me in. Molly stood waist-deep in the river and put her hands over her eyes. “Come on, Tommo,” she cried. “I won’t watch. Promise.” And not wanting to be left out yet again, I stripped off and made a dash for the river, covering myself as I went just in case Molly was watching through her fingers. After I’d done it that first time, it never seemed to bother me again.
Sometimes when we tired of all the frolicking we’d lie and talk in the shallows, letting the river ripple over us. How we talked. Molly told us once that she wanted to die right there and then, that she never wanted tomorrow to come because no tomorrow could ever be as good as today. “I know,” she said, and she sat up in the river then and collected a handful of small pebbles. “I’m going to tell our future. I’ve seen the gypsies do it.” She shook the pebbles around in her cupped hands, closed her eyes and then scattered them out on to the muddy shore. Kneeling over them she spoke very seriously and slowly as if she were reading them. “They say we’ll always be together, the three of us, for ever and ever. They say that as long as we stick together we’ll be lucky and happy.” Then she smiled at us. “And the stones never lie,” she said. “So you’re stuck with me.”
For a year or two Molly’s stones proved right. But then Molly got ill. She wasn’t at school one day. It was the scarlet fever, Mr Munnings told us, and very serious. Charlie and I went up to her cottage that evening after tea with some sweetpeas Mother had picked for her — because they smell sweeter than any flower she knew, she said. We knew we wouldn’t be allowed in to see her because scarlet fever was very catching, but Molly’s mother did not look at all pleased to see us. She always looked grey and grim, but that day she was angry as well. She took the flowers with scarcely a glance at them, and told us it would be better if we didn’t come again. Then Molly’s father appeared from behind her, looking gruff and unkempt, and told us to be off, that we were disturbing Molly’s sleep. As I walked away, all I could think of was how unhappy Molly must be living in that dingy little cottage with a mother and father like that, and how trees fall on the wrong fathers. We stopped at the end of the path and looked up at Molly’s window, hoping she would come and wave at us. When she didn’t we knew she must be really ill.
Charlie and I never said our prayers at all any more, not since Sunday school, but we did now. Kneeling side by side with Big Joe we prayed each night that Molly would not die. Joe sang Oranges and Lemons and we said Amen afterwards. We had our fingers crossed too, just for good measure.
I‘m not sure I ever really believed in God, even in Sunday school. In church I’d gaze up at Jesus hanging on the cross in the stained-glass window, and feel sorry for him because I could see how cruel it was and how much it must be hurting him. I knew he was a good and kind man. But I never really understood why God, who was supposed to be his father, and almighty and powerful, would let them do that to him, would let him suffer so much. I believed then, as I believe now, that crossed fingers and Molly’s stones are every bit as reliable or unreliable as praying to God. I shouldn’t think like that because if there’s no God, then there can be no heaven. Tonight I want very much to believe there’s a heaven, that, as Father said, there is a new life after death, that death is not a full stop, and that we will all see one another again.
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