‘It’s a very nice cake,’ she added when she saw the way he looked at it.
He concentrated hard. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. I must go. Sorry about Freddy here. He just wants to play. Are you sure you don’t need help?’
He ignored her, and she turned, took a few steps, then came back. She peered for a moment in the bag once more, and held out her hand with a coin between two fingers.
‘Get yourself some proper food if you’re hungry. It’s not much, but...’
‘Go away.’
She looked at him a second or so longer, scowled in disapproval, then hurried away. She was now so late she rapidly forgot the thoughtful state walking the dog had induced in her. Still, she felt vaguely proud of herself for giving a little money to that man. It had been, she reassured herself, the right thing to do. Charitable. Kind. The sort of thing nice, friendly people did. Not that she had got many thanks for her gesture. Probably just a drunk who had staggered there after too long in the pub on Friday night, spending his week’s wages. But what if he’d been really ill? Shouldn’t she go back and make sure?
She thought about it, but decided against. She had done what she could, and he had told her to go away. If you really want help, you are polite. You say, help me. That sort of thing. Still...
The thought spoiled her sense of virtue, and now she was annoyed as well as late. The shops closed at half past twelve and would not open again until Monday. If she missed the butcher the rest of her day would be in ruins. What would they eat? Guess who would get the blame? Her dad was a man of habit. It was Saturday, so it was pork chops. And tomorrow a roast. Sometimes Rosie wondered whether they might have pork chops on a Wednesday, but that would have caused confusion. When she grew up and was married with children and a house to look after, she’d have pork chops on whatever day she wanted. If, of course, anyone would have her.
She walked swiftly along the road, trying to keep her mind on the list in her pocket. Grocer, then butcher, then greengrocer. Or perhaps the other way around. Then she’d drop off the dog and the shopping and in the afternoon go round to old Professor Lytten and feed his cat — the thruppence would come in handy now her charitable inclinations had depleted her resources.
Rosie liked Professor Lytten, although she knew she shouldn’t call him that. ‘Not a professor, my dear,’ he would say gently, ‘merely a fellow, toiling in the undergrowth of scholarship.’ But he looked and talked as if he were one. If only her teachers at school were a little bit more like him, she was sure she would enjoy being educated so much more. Instead, she had the prospect of Sunday morning preparing for a spelling test, with her parents muttering in the background, ‘Don’t know why you bother with that.’ And grammar. She hated grammar. ‘Never say “can I be excused”,’ the teacher had thundered at her only the other day. She had had to stand on one leg in agony as the impromptu lesson progressed. ‘We know you can, Wilson. That is obvious just from looking at you. But may you be? That depends. You are asking my permission, not enquiring about your capabilities.’
‘But Miss...’ she had interrupted desperately.
‘Never start a sentence with “But”. It is a conjunction, and in that position joins nothing. It is an error of the sort that marks out the ill-educated.’
When the woman had finished, Rosie had run off to the toilets so quickly she could have won a medal at the Olympics, while the rest of the class cheered derisively.
Feeding Professor Lytten’s cat wasn’t really a job, although only she could ever find anything remotely lovable or interesting in the beast, whose ill-humour was tempered only by laziness. Rather, she did it because every now and then the Professor would be there, and would talk to her. He knew everything.
‘He is a very nice man,’ Rosie had said to her mother once. ‘He talks to me very seriously, you know. But sometimes he just stops, halfway through a sentence, and tells me to go away.’
Rosie was not disconcerted by this peculiar behaviour, and her mother assumed that it was the way professors were all the time. Certainly he never behaved in a manner which was, well, worrying. Quite the contrary; he addressed her gravely and carefully. She would tell him about the books she had read, or a song she had heard, and he never made fun of her or was scornful of her juvenile tastes. Nor did he seem to think that being a girl was a serious flaw.
‘I am afraid I do not know any of Mr Acker Bilk’s music,’ he might say. ‘A grave error on my part, perhaps. I will put on the radio next Saturday and expand my horizons. The clarinet, you say? A popular form of jazz, by the sound of it. It is, certainly, a most expressive instrument, in the right hands. As is the saxophone, of course...’
So Rosie would go home clutching records by Ella Fitzgerald or Duke Ellington — for Lytten was a great enthusiast — convinced of the sophistication of her musical tastes, and knowing rather more about both jazz and the clarinet than she had done when she arrived.
Lytten had even told her some of the stories of Anterwold, to gauge her reaction. She was the only person to know about this imaginary creation of his, apart from his colleagues in the pub and his old friend Angela Meerson. A grand idea, full of interesting characters, although, from Rosie’s critical point of view, there wasn’t much of a story yet. ‘They don’t seem to do anything,’ she pointed out one day. ‘Don’t they fight, or have adventures? Couldn’t you get someone to fall in love, or something? You need stuff like a love interest in a story.’
Lytten coughed, then frowned. ‘I’m setting the context, you see, in which the story takes place.’
‘Oh.’
‘When that’s done, then people will know how to fall in love, and what to fight about.’ He paused and studied her face. ‘You are not convinced, I fear.’
‘It sounds just lovely,’ she reassured him as he looked crestfallen. ‘Professor,’ she continued cautiously, ‘are apparitions real?’
‘How curious you should ask that,’ he said in surprise. ‘I have been thinking about the same thing myself. Great minds, eh? Why do you ask?’
‘Oh... a book. By Agatha Christie.’ She was shamefaced that this was the best she could think of, as she was sure he knew nothing of books with paper covers and pictures on the front. To her surprise, Lytten’s eyes lit up.
‘Agatha Christie! I am very fond of her, although I fear she cheats a bit by always introducing a crucial piece of evidence right at the end. Who do you prefer, Poirot or Miss Marple?’
Rosie considered. ‘Miss Marple is nicer, but Poirot goes to more interesting places. I like reading about foreign places.’
‘A very judicious reply,’ he said. ‘Do you wish to travel, Rosie?’
‘Oh! Yes!’ she replied. ‘Ever since I was little. I want to see everything. Cities and mountains, and strange places. Places no one else has ever seen.’
‘An explorer, then?’
‘Mummy says I should be a nurse.’
Lytten regarded her sympathetically. ‘It is not my place to tell you to ignore your mother’s advice,’ he said. ‘That said, in my opinion, I think you should seriously consider ignoring your mother’s advice. What does Miss Christie have to say about apparitions?’
‘There’s a scene where a character looms out of the mist like an apparition.’
‘I see. A true apparition is something which is not physical. “An idea raised in us”, as Hutcheson put it. It exists only in the mind of the person seeing it, like Beauty or Virtue. Or their opposites, of course. It is supernatural — a ghost or a fairy, or an angel — or it is an optical illusion, like a mirage, or, perhaps, the result of psychological disturbance. Those three classes, I believe, would account for all the possibilities. Would you like a slice of cake with your tea?’