Eva Moves the Furniture Read online

  That summer was particularly fine, and I set up house for myself and Mary, my doll, under the red-currant bushes. When I had the rooms furnished, I fetched Lily. “Here’s the kitchen,” I said. “And here’s your room. This is your bed.”

  “Very nice.” Lily fingered a cluster of currants. “We’ll soon be making the jam.” She headed back to the kitchen.

  A few minutes later a voice said, “What a cosy house.”

  A woman was peering through the branches. Everything about her shone as if she had been dipped in silver. Her hair was white as the swans I saw when David took me fishing, and she wore a white dress with little blue checks. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to an empty matchbox.

  “That’s the stove. And here’s the pantry.” I indicated a grassy niche lined with pebbles.

  “Oh, you’ve made lots of preserves, like Aunt Lily.”

  I knew, of course, that they were only pebbles with grit clinging to them, but her understanding transformed them into rows of bottled plums and blackberries.

  “I brought you something,” said another voice. A girl with long braids joined the woman. She was seven or eight years older than me, with a rosy face and eyes the colour of bluebells. Her pinafore was hiked up so I could see her knees, dirty and grazed like my own. She handed me half a dozen acorns. “I thought they’d make good cups and saucers.”

  Both the woman and the girl looked familiar. Perhaps I had seen them at Saint Cuthbert’s, or the Co-op? The sun had been shining all along and there was no wind, but now the day grew much warmer. For a moment, with my two guests leaning through the doorway of my little house, I forgot to breathe. Everything was so clear and distinct that it seemed to leave no room for me. Then I thought I was only what Lily called overheated. I took off my cardigan and served them tea in the acorn cups; they sipped appreciatively.

  Later, when I went indoors to wash for lunch, I told Lily, “The woman doesn’t take sugar. But the girl likes two spoons.”

  “She must have a sweet tooth,” said Lily. “Stand still. There’s a twig in your hair.”

  Several weeks passed, enough time for me to have largely forgotten my visitors, before they came again. One morning Lily and I were on our way to gather the eggs when we heard the tinkle of the knife sharpener’s bell in the lane, and she hurried off to give him the carving knife. Alone, clutching the egg bowl, I wandered down the cinder path towards the henhouse. At that age waiting, even briefly, made me feel as if I had been cut free of my moorings and was slowly drifting away.

  “Why don’t you go in and get the eggs? Think how surprised Lily would be.”

  The girl, in her blue pinafore, was swinging on the lowest branch of the apple tree. “I dare you,” she said, dropping to the ground and darting around the side of the house.

  What a good idea. There was the knotted door, the latch, well within my reach. I stepped inside and, setting the empty bowl on the straw, shut the door.

  Lily treated the hens with businesslike contempt, and in her company I found it easy to do the same. “Move, chookie,” I would say, and put my hand into the nest. Now, alone in the small hut, the nine hens grew larger and fiercer by the second. “Go away,” I whispered.

  Something warm brushed my leg. “Aunt Lily!” I cried. But the thick air swallowed my voice.

  Jemima, the black hen, began to push forward.

  “Shoo, shoo. Off you go.”

  The woman stood beside me, the silvery woman, clapping her hands. “Come on, Eva. Let’s get the eggs.”

  I felt as I had beneath the red-currant bushes, suddenly squeezed and breathless. “Come on,” she said again.

  She held the bowl for me while I went from nest to nest, and I noticed she had to stoop to avoid hitting the cobwebby roof, whereas Lily could stand upright with ease. “See?” she said, at the last nest. “You don’t need to be scared of the hens.” She placed the bowl in my hands.

  Before I could thank her, the sound of footsteps made me glance towards the door. By the time I looked back, the woman was gone. I could not have said how. Did she melt through the walls, crawl out of the hatch by which the hens came and went? Between one moment and the next she simply disappeared.

  “Clever girl,” Lily said. “You got the eggs all by yourself.”

  “No. The woman helped me.”

  “That was kind. Next time maybe she can give you a hand to tidy your room.” She took the bowl and ushered me out of the henhouse.

  2

  I am not sure now how long it took me to realise that the woman and the girl were different from our other neighbours. They appeared and disappeared mysteriously, they seemed to have no home, they would not answer simple questions: Do you like dogs? What are your names? “Don’t ask,” they said. “We’re your companions.” And usually I obeyed. The real difference, though, was not their reticence—most grown-ups were unforthcoming—but their invisibility. Several months passed, however, before this became apparent. They seldom visited when Lily and David were around, and in the beginning I was misled by idle remarks about tidying my room, having a sweet tooth.

  Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if, on that first day beneath the red-currant bushes, I had fled screaming to summon Lily’s adult scepticism without delay. But I doubt even she could have saved me. In my mind there was already much confusion between two categories commonly held to be opposites: the living and the dead. As for a third category, the ghosts in my storybooks were filmy, insubstantial beings who did not graze their knees or chase hens. The companions did not seem to fit into that group either; they existed in their own peculiar dimension.

  The ambiguity was easier to contain because I never spoke of them aloud. When our Sunday school teacher explained that Jews did not utter the name Jehovah, I understood at once. I knew that feeling of leaving a blank, of missing a beat. If I could, even now, I would refer to them by a streak of colour, a note of music: the girl and the woman, blue and silver, D sharp and middle C.

  Finally, the autumn after my seventh birthday, I set out for Miss MacGregor’s with my stiff new satchel. I was afraid I would be the class dunce, starting two years late, but thanks to the mornings at the kitchen table, I turned out to be well ahead of the other pupils. After a few days my heart no longer thudded as I swung through the playground gate. Instead I discovered a new emotion: loneliness.

  So far children had been a novelty in my life. Our nearest neighbours, the Wrights at the farm, had three grown sons, and there were no other families within easy walking distance. I had not felt the lack. Now, although my classmates welcomed me to their games of hopscotch and tag, I craved a particular friend. At first I pinned my hopes on Jessie Todd, with whom I shared a desk in the third row. She copied my work shamelessly, and I was careful to keep my slate in view.

  Every afternoon began with spelling. Miss MacGregor came down from the dais and paced the aisles between the desks. “Onion. Suppose. Abrupt. Pigeon,” she enunciated, at measured intervals. One day, while we were wrestling with argument, she plucked Jessie out of her seat and marched her to the front of the room. “Jessie Todd,” she announced, “has been cheating. You all know what cheating is, don’t you?”

  Hands went up. “It’s copying,” said the minister’s son.

  “It’s stealing what doesn’t belong to you,” said the mole catcher’s daughter in the front row. Jessie, her face red as a cockerel’s comb, glared.

  “Why is it wrong to let someone copy your work?” demanded Miss MacGregor.

  She was staring straight at me, but I kept my eyes fixed on my desk, where someone had carved HELL deep into the wood.

  Ian Hunter waved his hand. “It’s helping someone else to sin,” he said. There were suppressed giggles. Ian—his father kept the forge—was the cheekiest boy in the school, always in trouble for scrapping in the playground or not doing his homework.

  For two days Jessie refused to speak to me. Then, during the seven-times table, I sensed her, once again, squinting in
my direction. I leaned back and edged my slate closer. Sharing my work was infinitely preferable to being ignored.

  My longing for a friend was sharpened by Shona and Florence, with whom I sometimes walked part of the way home. Shona, Dr. Pyper’s daughter, was plump and chatty, while Flo, whose father ran the Co-op, was thin and quiet. They lived next door to each other, near Saint Cuthbert’s, and were unlikely best friends. When I accompanied them, Shona would entertain us with a stream of anecdotes about her father’s patients. “And guess what?” she would say, and whisper the crucial information in Flo’s ear. I counted chimney-pots, or sparrows, anything to prevent their guessing how much I minded.

  Usually, however, I walked home alone, and then I summoned Jo and Beth from Little Women, Katy from What Katy Did, Curdie from The Princess and the Goblin. I could travel the whole distance from Miss MacGregor’s to Ballintyre without registering a single detail of the landscape. But when the girl came to meet me, as she sometimes did beyond the forge, she needed neither speech nor gesture to get my attention; her presence thickened the air, as if light bent slightly around her. We would pick dandelion clocks and look for birds’ nests. Or we played pirates, jumping over the puddles to escape capture.

  Now that I was closer to her in age, she seemed to enjoy my company, but I had mixed feelings about hers. She did not have the same constraints as I did—to be home on time, to stay clean—and she bit her nails, a habit Lily had scolded me out of. Besides, I never knew what she would do next. One moment she could be wonderfully sweet, showing me a thrush’s nest or a strange purple mushroom, and the next, for no apparent reason, bad-tempered. Once, when I said I didn’t like porridge, she shoved me in the ditch, muddying my shoes and pinafore, so that Lily threw up her hands at the sight of me. “Good grief, Eva. Were you playing with the pigs?”

  Such encounters only deepened my desire for a real friend, one with whom I could share secrets but who was not, herself, a secret.

  As the years passed, I became convinced that everything would change when I started grammar school. The red brick building with its separate entrances for girls and boys contained my new life, just waiting for me to come and claim it. I would be chosen first at games, given the lead in the school play, have tea parties every Saturday. And the companions? They would simply disappear. I would outgrow them, like my old pinafores which Lily turned into dusters.

  On the first day of term I was hurrying down the lane in my new uniform when the woman stepped from beneath an ash tree. During those years she came much less often than the girl, so her appearance that morning, when even a second’s delay seemed fatal, was especially hard to bear. Nor did I want that curious, uneasy feeling she usually brought in her wake. But there was no help for it; she fell in beside me. “So you’re off to the grammar school,” she said. “Are you excited?”

  “Yes. I’ll be doing French and Latin and there are all kinds of clubs.”

  “French was my favourite subject. Je vais, tu vas, il va, elle va. One year I wrote my Christmas cards in French. No one knew what to make of them.” She laughed.

  “What does je vais mean?”

  “‘I am going.’ Right now, though, I think the word for what we’re doing is dépêcher. Nous nous dépêchons. We are hurrying.”

  We reached the water trough. From town came the sound of a bell chiming. The woman cocked her head. “It’s only eight-thirty. Stop a minute.”

  Reluctantly I turned to face her and found myself caught in her deep-set eyes. At the time I would not have known how to describe their colour. Since then, I have seen that melting grey often in the eyes of babies—it seldom lasts. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll do fine.”

  She straightened my tie and headed through an open gate into a field. When there were no interruptions, she and the girl came and went like ordinary people. I watched her move away, her raincoat blending with the dun-coloured stubble, her hair shining. As I continued towards town, I discovered she had taken some part of my anxiety with her.

  That afternoon Lily made scones for tea, but I couldn’t stop talking long enough to eat. “There are maps all round the classroom. Miss Robinson asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said an explorer.” For my twelfth birthday, David had given me a book called Great Scottish Explorers.

  “An explorer?” Lily shook her head. “What did you learn?”

  “We each had to recite our favourite poem. I did ‘To Autumn.’ Miss Robinson said it was beautiful. I’m sitting next to Catherine Grant. She chose a poem by Keats too, the one about the sedge withering on the lake.”

  “Have another scone,” said Lily. “I don’t think I know Catherine. She’s not in the Sunday school, is she?”

  “No. Her family just moved to Troon this summer. She’s awfully tall and she smells nice, like lavender.” Jessie had always had a grubby smell.

  “Eva, you know it’s rude to talk about how people smell.”

  I continued to study Catherine in sly glances. At morning break she seldom joined in the games. I would see her loitering near the doorway, a heronlike figure in her grey pinafore. Such solitude might have made her seem an outcast, but there was a poise about Catherine; she had chosen to be alone and could choose otherwise.

  Twice a week Mr. Waugh, the bluff red-faced minister, came to the grammar school to teach Scripture. In late September we read the Book of Job. All the disasters visited on the unfortunate Job, Mr. Waugh explained, were the will of God.

  Catherine raised her hand. “Was it God’s will,” she said, “that so many soldiers were killed in France?”

  Her naked phrasing sent a shock through the room. We said the men lost their lives or laid them down. Animals were killed. Even Mr. Waugh looked unnerved. “No, that wasn’t God’s will. It was man’s.”

  “But if God is omnipotent,” Catherine persisted, “why did He let it happen?”

  I could feel her emotions radiating across the desk, though I could not name them. Was it grief that tormented her? Fury?

  Mr. Waugh studied the Bible on his desk as if the answer might be hidden there. Finally he said, “One of the hardest tasks of a Christian’s life is to accept that suffering is visited upon the virtuous. Almost all of us have lost someone. We console ourselves by remembering that our loved ones are safe with God.”

  My eyes filled. SAFE WITH GOD was the inscription on Barbara’s stone. Years later, during another war, patients would ask me Catherine’s question. Why does the sun shine upon the just and the unjust? Why does suffering lead to more suffering? I was no more convincing than Mr. Waugh, but at least I was not, simultaneously, defending my profession.

  That afternoon, as I shelled the broad beans, I told Lily what had happened. Poor child, she said. Since I last mentioned Catherine, she had made it her business to find out about the Grants. While I nudged the beans from their furry niches, she explained that my deskmate was an orphan. Her father had never recovered from being gassed at Neuve-Chapelle; he had died three years ago, followed a month later by her mother. Now Catherine lived with her grandparents.

  Next day I eyed her with even greater interest. I knew a number of children like myself, who did not have the full complement of parents, but to be an outright orphan was altogether more momentous. Several times she met my glance, and when school was over she followed me to the cloakroom. “It’s my birthday on Saturday,” she said. “My grandmother said I could invite someone to tea. Would you like to come?”

  “Yes, please.” Then I caught myself. “I’ll have to ask my aunt.”

  I rushed home, full of plans. Only when I stepped into the kitchen and saw Lily at the ironing board, frowning over a pleated skirt, did I suddenly remember that the previous summer she had refused to let me have tea with the cowman’s daughter. I decided to wait until she came to kiss me good night, always the best time to ask a favour, and meanwhile to be especially helpful. But as I was laying the table for supper, she said, “You’re so quiet, Eva. Did the cat steal your tongue?
” And before I knew what I was doing, I had blurted out the invitation.

  “Can I go?”

  Lily sprinkled water on one of David’s shirts. “May 1. Is it a special occasion?”

  “Her birthday.”

  “In that case”—she pushed the iron over a sleeve—“I don’t see why not. What will you give her?”

  At once my pleasure was eclipsed by this difficult question. None of the usual gifts, ribbons, scrapbooks, toilet water, handkerchiefs, seemed like fitting ambassadors of friendship to Catherine. After two days of brooding, on Saturday morning in Calder’s gift shop I finally bought a china milkmaid, eight inches high with a brimming pail of milk. The instant I got home, I showed her to Lily. “Do you like her?” I said.

  “She’s lovely.” Lily bent to look more closely. “Look at her frock. And you can see each eyelash. How much did she cost?”

  “Two shillings.”

  “Oh, Eva, that’s a lot to spend on someone you hardly know.”

  I blushed. It was indeed twice as much as I had spent on Lily’s last birthday present.

  “There,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scold. It’s very generous of you. I’m sure Catherine will be pleased.”

  After lunch I put on my best brown velveteen and set out, the box cradled in my arms. As I passed the Wrights’ farm, I pictured the afternoon to come. Catherine would take me up to her bedroom. We would talk about being orphans, and I could contribute Barbara. I was nearly at the forge when I had an amazing thought. I could tell Catherine about the companions. Perhaps she might even be able to see them.

  I was so startled, I stopped in my tracks. That the companions were invisible to Lily and David had become a fact of life. Now I realised I had never tried to introduce them to anyone else. I stood motionless, imagining the three of us—Catherine, myself, and the girl—playing together, making up stories and having adventures, until the clanging of the blacksmith’s hammer roused me. I began to walk with increasing swiftness towards the town.