Page 30 of Little Wing
‘Jimmy and I won’t have babies for at least five years,’ she announced, and she’s so absolutely beautiful when she smiles like that.
‘I’ll speak to the church. Oh dear,’ my mother was weeping. ‘Oh, but I can’t. The shame! The shame!’
‘We will not need to speak to the church,’ said George. ‘My brother – in Harris. She can go there. There she can stay.’
Everyone was quiet.
‘No one need know,’ he told my mother.
‘Where is Harris?’ I asked.
‘It’s far away,’ George’s back said. ‘It’s a long long way away from here. From all of this.’
And again I felt you flutter. Like you couldn’t wait to get there.
Nell
‘What are you chuckling about?’
Debbie and Nell were at the Chaffinch early to bake the overnight bread they’d prepared yesterday.
‘I was just remembering something,’ Nell said. ‘About my mum.’
Debbie waited. It was rare for Nell’s mum to be the cause of much mirth.
‘When I was in Costa this morning,’ Nell said. ‘It popped into my head. Is the oven hot enough?’
‘Yes. Slash the tops.’
Nell used scissors to cut into the tops of the rounds of dough so that they would rise perfectly. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how at the time we cringe then later, we laugh.’
‘Ah,’ said Debbie, ‘the kindness of years.’
‘She’d often do it. Very politely – she’d sayexcuse me, can you help me?If we were out – in a shop, a library, the supermarket, a café – wherever. And it didn’t matter to her who they were – old, young, male, female, whether they could even speak English – but invariably they were never staff.’
They placed the loaves into lidded pots and Debbie opened the oven door. ‘Half an hour,’ Debbie said, ‘then we’ll give them fifteen minutes uncovered.’ She was silently willing Nell to keep talking.
‘Excuse me, can you help me, she’d say. And more often than not they’d say oh sorry, I don’t work here. And that didn’t bother my mother one bit. She’d just carry on.Yes, she’d say,but I need – I’m looking for – I want—’ Nell paused and giggled. ‘She didn’t care if they worked there or not – she needed assistance and she chose people whose faces she liked. Sometimes she’d even take their arm.’
Debbie laughed. ‘Did they offer help?’
‘Always!’
‘Wow. I think I’ll try it.’
Nell’s eyes were lingering in the middle distance.
‘I remember being in a café – and she asked someone on their way out to order her another cup of tea and a Fanta for me. They said sorry, love, don’t work here. She said oh I know, I know – but could you order me another tea – and a Fanta for Nell here.’ Nell shook her head. ‘And they did. Bonkers,’ she said. She was running the water hot to put the bowls in to soak. They still had half an hour before the troops arrived with Siobhán and another hour before they opened. She and Debbie sat with coffee. ‘We were in Safeway’s once and Mum was on the hunt for pillow rice – we’d only just arrived at the shop and she made a bee-line for this elderly chap who so obviously didn’t work there. I can see him now.Excuse me, can you help me, I want pillow rice. Anyway, he hardly spoke English – but that didn’t bother her at all. The two of them – speaking louder and louder at each other. Babel right there in Essex. Then Mum starts acting it out, like charades, pretending to go to sleep, puffing up the imaginary pillow, doing tiny things between her fingers to signify rice. That poor man. He had such a lovely grandfatherly face. I mean – what the fuck is pillow rice? She had an audience by the end.’
Nell’s laugh was contagious and soon enough she and Debbie were bent double for the ache. They snorted and sighed and then started laughing all over again.
‘But Nell – did you even get it?’
‘Get what?’
‘The pilau rice?’
‘The—’ Nell stopped, her eyes widened, darting over Debbie’s face, visibly stupefied. ‘Oh my God.’ It was the most extraordinary revelation. ‘Debbie!’ Nell clapped her hands over her mouth and just stood there. ‘Twenty-five years, must be,’ she said eventually. ‘I didn’t even think.Pilau.That’s the thing with my mum – she’s always been so – well, you know. And I just thought – probably everyone in the shop just thought – there’s that batty Mrs Hartley, off on one about pillow rice.’
