And now there was a new baby, scarlet-faced, blackhaired Rhona. Nanny and Vera were preoccupied. Francis and Janet spent their mornings banished to the garden and the wet fallen leaves; they stumped about, endlessly filling and emptying a small wooden wheelbarrow. When the sun shone they stared at the rents in the clouds, searching for glimpses of God. Nanny had told them about God’s watchful and punitive presence and his place of residence. Janet dreamed about going to heaven, up a ladder from the beach, into the blue sky; God greeted her at the top, clad in a butcher’s striped apron. In the afternoons Nanny put on her coat and her felt hat, skewered to her head with an abundance of jewel-bright hatpins, and they went out walking, one on each side of the pram, the baby prone within. When Francis was tired, he was allowed to sit in the end of the pram, but Janet must walk.
“You’re a big girl now.” She didn’t want to be a big girl. It seemed she was punished for something which happened without her choice or knowledge. Her dismal feet discerned miles of walking, interminable pavements, a vista of life-long streets. In the draper’s shop there were consolations. The oily smell of the paraffin heater and the clean smell of piles of linen and furled spools of cloth offered a warm, ordered atmosphere. In tall, glass-fronted cupboards behind the long dark counter were gleaming reels of thread in every colour. Janet was mesmerised by the rusts which shaded to orange, to coral, almost imperceptibly to pinks; the deep glory of crimson, and the holy splendour of all the purples. Which purple did she like best? She could have dedicated all her day to resolving this question.
It was then that she saw the grey knitted donkey; it was standing on the counter. Her heart lurched. Its packed, cubic body reminded her of Francis; she wanted to hug it so tightly it might be squashed, she wanted to keep it forever. Its gentle, dreamy face and drooping ears indicated that, like herself, it preferred standing about to brisk exercise. Her knees were weak with longing. Each night before she went to sleep she thought about the donkey and added a silent coda to her spoken prayers, begging God to send it to her. She mentioned her great desire to the grown-ups, but was told that it was not her birthday, and it would not be her birthday for a long time. A long time. What if someone bought it first? But each time they visited the draper’s shop the donkey was there, and Janet began to think that God was keeping it for her. One afternoon the garden gate opened and a woman came in. She was carrying the grey knitted donkey. Janet’s heart stopped for a moment and then a great flood of happiness, gratitude, religious fervour swept through her. She seemed to float towards the visitor, smiling and stretching out her hands. She could not speak, but she could hear, “How’s your mother, Janet? I’ve brought a present for your darling baby. I saw it in the shop as I went by; I couldn’t resist it.”
Later that day, when Rhona was sleeping in her pram in the garden, Janet and Francis carted barrowload after barrowload of sodden leaves and laboriously piled them over her. Then they brought earth from the chilly flower beds with their stands of rustling sepia stalks, and scattered it in clods and handfuls over the leaves. Puffing and panting, they toiled back and forth all afternoon. At last Rhona was out of sight, even the outline of her was obliterated. She was silent, she was effaced. Janet would have liked to put the pram out of sight too, at the bottom of the garden, for now no one needed it, but she couldn’t undo the brake. She went in to tell her mother the important news:
“A nasty rat has buried your baby. She’s gone now.” Later at the nursery tea table, the baby, who had emerged unscathed from her tumulus, beamed adoringly and impartially at Nanny, Vera, Grandpa, and her assassins. The grey donkey, infinitely unattainable, stood on the high cupboard. Janet and Francis had been spanked. They were in deep disgrace, and they could not be trusted. Janet did not care. A splinter, a tiny shard of ice crystal, had entered her heart and lodged there.
In the evenings now, when Janet and Francis were tucked in their white iron beds in the nursery, with the sea wind clamouring against the windows, Vera would come in and read to them. She read from Hans Andersen and from the Brothers Grimm, looking herself like some gold-haired and icy princess who might dwell in the depths of aquamarine waters. In the basket chair she sat reading, impersonal and feline, and then she would hear their prayers, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child. Pity my simplicity, suffer me to come to thee. God bless Mummy and Daddy and Grandpa and Francis and Rhona and Nanny and all the animals and the birds and Mr. Churchill.” In a perfumed drift she would vanish from the room, leaving cold and darkness behind her.
Francis fell asleep quickly, making little chewing noises to himself, but Janet lay awake and thought of the great black forests and the lone knight swinging his horse through their pathways, the poisons and perils and the witches. When she thought of the witches she was very frightened. She saw them floating upon the night wind off the sea, hovering in flapping black outside the window, clawing at the panes, clambering and clinging on the house walls. She sucked her thumb so hard that her jaws ached. But then the lighthouse beam came in mercy, revolving its reassurance over the ceiling and down the walls, around and out again, and she was safe enough to return to the forest, the knights and the princesses and maidens and their bleeding hearts. When she was older she intended to be a princess. Almost as much as its image she loved the word, with its tight beginning and its rustling, cascading end, like the gown a princess would wear, with a tiny waist and ruffles and trains of swirling silken skirts. Purple, of course. On such thoughts she slept.
One Saturday afternoon in waning November light Nanny took Francis and Janet to the village hall; they were going to a party, a party for everyone, to celebrate Saint Andrew’s Day. Down the lane from the manse they went and into the street, past the draper’s shop, the grocer’s, the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s, all with their blinds down to prevent the sin of weekend covetousness. Then around the corner to fearful Institution Row, where the war-wounded lived in grim pebbledashed houses with big square windows. If you looked in, you could see them, sitting mournfully by small electric fires or limping on crutches about the room. One lay propped upon a great heap of pillows staring unforgivingly at those who could pass by. Janet used to duck down and run past his window in case he saw her; she was afraid of his hard angry face and the shapeless shrouded rest of him. It was worse in summer when they would sit outside in the mean front garden, a strip communal to all the houses, a length of gravel punctuated by wooden benches constructed from the timber of sunken enemy ships. Some were crazed from shell shock and nodded and muttered to themselves, others displayed the magenta stumps of amputated arms and legs. One sat in a wheelchair and the bright sea breeze whisked about his empty trouser legs. But this November afternoon their windows were dark; there was not one to be seen. Janet’s spirits rose; she looked forward to the party. Nanny and Vera had made carrot cakes and jellies and little pies, and they carried these in wide wicker baskets covered with white cloths. Janet saw herself, a good, kind little girl, bringing her provisions through cold and darkness to the needy, very like Little Red Riding Hood. She banished the thought of the wolf.