Free Opposite the Cross Keys by S. T. Haymon Page A

with.’
    The toad question remained unresolved. Whilst Mrs Fenner put away the leftover food, using the rusty old range in the scullery as a larder, I helped Maud wash up. She poured sooty water from the kettle into a basin from which most of the enamel had vanished, adding cold water from the pail on the floor. I did the wiping with what looked like a piece of old sheet, absorbent enough but shedding bits of lint on to the plates which Maud handed to me still a little greasy and speckled with soot. In Norwich she’d have gone through the roof to see plates washed up like that, but in St Awdrey’s it obviously didn’t matter. What a glorious place it was!
    I took the plates back to the living room a few at a time. Charlie had gone and Ellie had taken a chair outside. She had left the front door open, and through it I could see her sitting in the sun, chewing a cream bonbon and combing her hair with a languid rise and fall of fleshy arm. She had done nothing to help with the clearing away. ‘The lazy mauther!’ I muttered under my breath, broadening my vowels and savouring the saying of it. I went back to the scullery and said to Maud, ‘Gimme a dwile, bor, I’ll gi’ the tablecloth a lick.’
    â€˜Who you taking the mickey out of?’ The tone was truculent but I could see Maud was pleased to hear me speaking the native lingo. She handed me a smaller piece of sheet, first wringing it out in the washing-up water. I went back and wiped over the oilcloth, guiding the crumbs and bits of this and that into my hand. My hand wasn’t big enough and several bits fell on the floor, which didn’t matter. O glorious St Awdrey’s, where such things didn’t matter!
    I brushed the bits off my hand into the fire, where they raised little points of flame that lasted less than a second. Mr Fenner was back in his non-rocking rocking chair at the side of the hearth, wearing wire-rimmed half-spectacles and reading his Old Moore’s Almanac . He needed the spectacles because he was engulfed in a cloud of evil-smelling smoke which rose from his clay pipe. It was so thick I couldn’t think how he could see to read, even so.
    He peered out of the smoke and told me I was a good gal. My ma must be pleased to have a good gal like that to help her in the house. I didn’t think it politic to admit that she didn’t; that it was Maud who cleared away the St Giles crumbs and anything else that needed clearing up, me particularly.
    Mr Fenner sucked in his cheeks and blew out a great blast of cloud. It didn’t smell anything like the way my father’s tobacco smelled.
    â€˜Made it myself’ – gently boastful. ‘Grew it, an’ picked it an’ cured it, none of your shop rubbish. What you think of that?’
    Eyes watering, I mimed surprise and admiration.
    â€˜I expec’ you notice it smells a bit different from your ordinary shag?’
    I nodded through the haze. Mr Fenner’s tobacco smelled a lot different from anything.
    Lowering his voice as if he feared to have his secret stolen by spies sent out by the tobacco companies, Mr Fenner explained, ‘Threepennyworth of rum poured over afore you shred it, an’ left for a week to sink in.’ He offered charmingly, ‘I don’t mind giving you a bit, if you like, to take home to your pa.’
    I answered, truthfully, that my mother didn’t like my father smoking a pipe.
    â€˜Oh ah?’ With sympathy for the put-upon male: ‘That kind, is she?’ Mr Fenner withdrew into his private smog, savouring his home-made tobacco and the knowledge, I felt sure, that his wife wasn’t one of that kind.
    We went down the garden, Mrs Fenner, Maud and I, following a path trodden between tall grasses and poppies, and accompanied on our way by two pairs of butterflies, one pair cabbage, one, small tortoiseshell. Bees swerved about their business, grasshoppers chirped. The grasses tickled