Nell struggled down the steps of the colliery library. Her shopping basket was crammed with so many treasures she wondered how she would manage with Grandma’s grocery shopping. She was quietly pleased with her choices though. She’d selected an old book of Grimm’s fairy tales bound in bark-brown leather. Its illustrations were so dark and romantic, her heart had quickened as she’d turned the pages. Each coloured plate was veiled with a sheet of gauzy grey paper. The paper was crinkled like aged skin and seemed to whisper when turned. These frail sheets heightened the book’s aura of mystery. Nell fancied that the pictures were so potent, so dangerous that the reader needed protection from their dreadful power. She must handle this book with care, she told herself.
Her next choice had been an unwieldy book about the solar system. It would not even fit in her shopping basket and had to be carried wedged under her right arm. Nell loved thinking about space. Stars and planets and galaxies always made her feel tiny: as if she were a motionless speck of dust floating in a vast empty silence. She looked forward to reading the book at night by the light of her torch and savouring those feelings of insignificance and wonder.
The sticky, splattered Delia Smith baking book had been selected especially for Grandma Annie. Annie loathed Delia Smith. It was a hatred that ran marrow-deep.
‘If I passed her in the street, Christian that I am, I’d be tempted to push her over,’ she once confessed. ‘She’s all show, that one. Cookery is about more than a page-boy haircut and a pussy-bow blouse.’
Annie would cackle and harrumph over the recipes in the new book, ‘Two ounces of cheddar cheese for a dozen scones? Two? TWO? Is this wartime? Are we rationing again? I’ve got more cheese that that on the pantry mousetrap.’
Like the pantry mousetrap, Annie’s contempt for Delia Smith needed to be nurtured and fed. Her indignation was one of the engines that kept her going, kept her putting one shuffling foot in front of the other. It was healthy, Nell thought. Like an improving hobby or an exercise regime. Some grandmothers crocheted, or enjoyed solving crossword puzzles, Grandma Annie spent happy hours imagining ways she could assault Delia Smith.
‘Maybe I wouldn’t push her over. Maybe I’d accidentally pelt her with eggs.’
‘Accidentally? Grandma?’
Anne would cross her arms over the shelf of her bosom. ‘You’re right. It would hard to make it look like an accident. And would be a waste of good eggs. I’ll ruminate on it.’
Mindful that she needed a broad education, Nell had chosen books about Tudor kings and queens and a natural history book about the wildlife of Great Britain. This contained a whole chapter about foxes. Ferdinand, who could not read himself, enjoyed bed time stories and she could imagine his delight at discovering all the ridiculous notions humans had about his kind.
For her last choice of book though, Nell’s found it hard to muster any enthusiasm at all. It was a mathematics book about something called algebra.Nell did not enjoy maths, but she hoped to gain some intangible credit from God or Grandma for persevering with the dreaded subject. As she checked out the books at the desk, Miss Paul’s lips pursed tightly as she peered at the algebra book. Her eyebrows joined together to form the shape of an arrow and her sunflower colour soured to a fizzing, acid yellow.
‘And for whom is this book for, I wonder?’ Her words were furred with frosty disapproval.
Nell noticed that the book had never been checked out before, despite looking very old. She was not surprised. In a library crammed with beautiful texts, what kind of fool would select an algebra book?
‘For me, Miss Paul. To practise my maths.’
The librarian tutted. ‘I am not sure this is suitable, Nell. This is for much older, more experienced mathematicians.’ The final word was emphasised with a prim and patronising simper. She snapped the book shut and placed it away from the others. ‘Maybe in five or six years, dear.’
Nell felt Ferdinand’s eyes upon her. While she had browsed the library shelves, he had draped himself across one of windowsills. From the outside of the library it must have looked like an old lady’s fox stole had been casually tossed to one side. His fur glowed like umber velvet in the September sun. Recognising the sourness of Miss Paul’s tone, he raised his head and flashed his eyes. He noted the angry red rash that was creeping across Nell’s neck. Nell was poised for battle. So was he.
Nell took a deep, bolstering breath. She had not expected a row over mathematics. Still, the situation did seem to confirm her view that numbers were more trouble than they were worth. Colours were all that mattered. Colours and words.
As if confronting a playground bully, Nell stood up straight, maximising every foot and inch of her frail, proud body. She jutted out her chin, reached forward and purposefully slid the algebra book back to Miss Paul.
‘Actually, I expect this is going to be too easy for me. I once got a gold shield for my times tables. Even the eights don’t fox me. I’ll take it please, Miss Paul.’ Nell was pleased to hear her voice ring loud and clear. Ferdinand showed his appreciation of her assurance with a blink.
The librarian paused and looked at Nell coolly, as if appraising her value. Her hand wavered uncertainly above the algebra book. Nell met the woman’s eyes and held her gaze until she saw the air between them bloom with clouds of frost.
‘Well, well, you, you know best, I suppose,’ the librarian stuttered as she opened the book’s front cover and stamped the return date on the pale-yellow leaf. The battle had been won.
‘Should you not be in class, Nell? I thought the village school was back today,’
Nell did not answer. Rather than savouring the delicious victory, she was gazing at the neat pad of midnight-blue ink and red enamelled date-stamper Miss Paul used to check out books. The stamper made such a satisfying sound: brisk and efficient and solemn. In the sombre silence of the library, the metallic snap of the stamper was a gentle percussion. It was one of Nell’s favourite sounds. It was as comforting as heels on cobbles, the whistle of a kettle on a December night, the chug of a steam train. The sound of the stamper was royal blue in colour. Crisp and beautiful. Nell was hypnotised. She would give anything for a stamper of her own. She imagined the date stamped neatly in her moss-green note book. Every sighting of the grey man stamped and dated with a librarian’s quiet precision.
‘Nell?’ Miss Paul was looking at her with expectation.
‘Sorry, Miss. Did you say something?’
‘I was asking why you weren’t at school.’
Nell heard the rasp of paws on the library’s parquet floor. Ferdinand had leapt from the windowsill. It was time to go.
She picked up the creaking basket of books. ‘Well, I should be, Miss, but Grannie’s ill. In bed. I am looking after her, see? Doing her shopping and stuff. I’d best be off back to her.’ She took a step towards the door.
‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that. Maybe she would like a couple of nice stories to read. Shall I select some for you? How about a Mills and Boon?’ Miss Paul left the desk and floated towards the Romance section of the library.
Nell stifled a snort. Miss Paul had obviously never met Annie Hart. She could just imagine her grandma’s comments if shown a romance paperback. ‘What am I? A dizzy, decrepit old fool with pneumonia and a broken heart?’
‘No thank you, Miss Paul,’ Nell cried. ‘Grandma’s not exactly the romance type. But she did once mention she’d quite like a guide to butchery, if you can find one.’ Before the startled librarian could reply, Nell and Ferdinand had clambered down the library steps into the cotton-blue morning.
Within ten minutes, Grandma’s shopping was done: a firm white cauliflower, twelve fatty rashers of bacon, a stottie for lunchtime sandwiches and a slab of orange cheddar the size of a bible (both old and new testaments). From the Post Office, Nell had bought six second class stamps and a book of bank postcards (for Grandma’s missives to the BBC about Delia Smith’s culinary outrages). Everything on Annie’s Christmas card list was ticked off: the rest of the day was at Nell’s command.
She had just left the bakery when she noticed the custard tarts in the window. There were three left, glowing like nutmeg-speckled suns. Grandma Annie adored custard tarts. When Annie ate something particularly delicious, her whole body, her face, her being, her colour all bloomed and shimmered with decadent pleasure. Nell could not resist buying them. She did not really have enough money, but if she walked home instead of taking the bus, she could manage it. Imagining her grandmother’s beaming face was persuasion enough. The sumptuous wobbliness of the speckled custard reminded Nell of her grandmother’s plump, freckled arms. She bought all three (it felt unkind to leave one behind like an unwanted puppy). She would walk the two miles home with Ferdinand. Her books were cumbersome and the net shopping bag cut into her hands, but to be outside on a school day felt deliciously illicit. She imagined she was the only child in the village who was free on that glorious, vanilla scented September day. She pictured the thousands of villages spangled across the land, all full of busyness and wonder. Maybe she was the only child in the whole country who was savouring such freedom. The thought of such uniqueness, such power made her giddy. She was acutely aware of the blood coursing through her veins and the fresh breeze on her skin. She felt ripe, plump and bursting with life and happiness. She would savour this moment the way Annie would savour her custard tart. On her journey home, she would find a memento, a keepsake of the morning the surging possibilities of life quite overwhelmed her. It could be a tiny thing, a scrap from the vast paraphernalia of life: a ticket, a leaf, a pebble. It would be meaningless to others, but to Nell it would transport her back to the morning she finally understood her place in the world. Some tiny object would present itself, she knew. It always did.
On the bakery steps, she paused to try and balance the brown paper bag of custard tarts on top of the library books in her basket. She wondered if all three would make it back to the cottage. She supposed she could eat one on the way, the extra one, the spare. Grandma would never know. It was a wicked thought, but it was tempting nevertheless.
She stepped lightly into the golden street, turned towards home, and stopped abruptly. There hewas. Right in front of her! The Grey Man. The pavement bustled with shoppers and prams and bicycles and toddlers. In the middle of the friendly hubbub,
he stood silently, motionlessly and stared with grave unseeing eyes. His gaze was directed at the old, abandoned shop that neighboured the bakery. Nell looked from the man’s face, to the shop and back again. She wanted to see what enthralled him so, what horrified him so. She looked again at the object of his fascination: all she saw was peeling paint and windows covered in newspaper yellowed to brittle parchment. The man’s colour was dark, darker than she’d seen it before. It was grey, of course, but the grey of storm-clouds and shipwrecks and wolves. The division between the energy of the sunlit street and the stillness and darkness of the man and the shop brought to mind a stage. For a moment, Nell found that she herself could not move. She too was frozen. She too was hushed. Ferdinand snaked close her body, seeking comfort. The warmth of his fur against her bare legs soothed her. Should she speak to the man? Would he recognise her? Would he even notice her? If she passed him, if she passed through his auditorium of darkness, would she feel a chill? Her chest thudded at the thought.
Maybe sheshould speak first, be bold. She shuffled words and phrases around in her mind like cards in a deck, but no combination sounded right, sounded natural. She decided she would walk in the opposite direction and avoid the grey man and the troubling darkness altogether. Just as she was about to turn away, the man roused himself from the blackness of his stupor. He shook his head and rubbed his face with his hands, his movements heavy and desolate. He turned away from the old shop and began to walk up the street. It was like watching an ancient tree uproot itself: proud, stiff and defeated. His weariness, his suffering affected Nell. It pressed upon her heart. She could not bear it. She felt tears pooling in her eyes. She could not help it. It was the same when she noticed Annie’s face contort with pain when climbing the stairs. Or even when she heard an old love song full of heartbreak on the crackling cottage wireless. Life could be full of joy one minute: full pain the next. The dark and the light. It could switch in a heartbeat. The man, as he walked away from her, seemed stooped with darkness and pain. The pressure on her heart mounted, became more urgent. She could almost picture the heavy brass weights Grandma used with her old scales piled upon it. She felt a beckoning: a calling. Without thinking, she found herself rushing after the grey man, darting in and out of shoppers and dog-walkers and lampposts. She was a line unspooling – madly, unstoppably. And suddenly she was there. Right next to him, right by his side: walking in step with the man from the cottage next door. Her breath was shaky and ragged. She kept her eyes forward. She felt him turn to glance at her, but he did not stop, he did not speak. They walked. They walked together. They walked past grocers and florists, bus stops and betting shops, past dogs tied to lampposts and cats curled in shop windows. The longer they walked, the softer the grey man’s colour became until it eventually it was the violet stillness of a midsummer dusk.
Between cracks of silence, words and questions unfurled in Nell’s mind. But she found she did not need to speak them. The silence was enough. The rhythm of their footsteps was enough. Ferdinand stepped quickly between them, his nose high and proud, pointing homewards. The girl and the man were a fox’s width apart. When she felt brave enough, Nell stole a glance at the grey man’s face. The furrows that ran down the sides of his mouth were gouged deep. His whole face was striated with tiny lines that brought to mind tributaries on an old map. The lines seemed to trickle downwards, pulled by a strange gravity. Where had each line come from, she wondered? Had each been earned by a crime solved or paid for with disappointment? Could the man’s story be read in those lines, the way gypsies read lives in palms? Nell’s heart contracted again.
‘Can I help you with your shopping? It looks heavy.’ His voice was unexpectedly soft and low. Nell had to turn her head to hear him. He was looking at her now. His eyes were olive pools of still water. His face seemed softer too, the hard line his mouth not as severe. His clothes were rumpled. He was a tumbled, jumbled man, she thought, constructed from the piles of clothes in the 10p basket in the Oxfam shop – abandoned and unloved, but softened with the wear of age.
‘Oh, I can manage, ta. I am stronger than I look,’
‘I know you can manage. I can see that. Thought I could help is all. Give you a rest.’ The man glanced at Nell and shrugged. He smiled gently, almost shyly. It was an awkward smile: the smile of a man who was not used to speaking to children. Nell felt her heart burst with affection, that was something else they had in common: she did not know how to speak to children either.
‘Well, the bag is quite heavy. It’s the cauliflower. I got the biggest one I could find. We’re having cauliflower cheese for supper tonight.’
The grey man stopped and held out his hand, ‘Give it here then.’ When he smiled again the tributaries of lines lifted as if buoyed by tiny balloons. Somehow the sadness remained.
Nell lifted the bag carefully over Ferdinand’s head. ‘Okay then. For a rest.’ She felt instantly freer. ‘The handle does dig in a bit mind.’
‘Oh, I expect I’ll survive.’
They walked on in mellow, thoughtful silence. After a while, Nell noticed the hair along Ferdinand’s spine prickle and rise. He bared his tiny teeth and peered up at her meaningfully, his eyes black with alarm. Nell looked around but could see nothing untoward.
Listen! Listen! the fox warned.
The words trilled in her mind with such clarity, she marvelled that they had not been spoken out loud, loud enough for the grey man to hear. What was she listening for? She closed her eyes for a second to shut out the hum of the street. Then she heard it. Then she understood Ferdinand’s fear. They were approaching the colliery primary school. The chattering, giggling sounds of morning break bubbled around them. The grey man was a policeman. It was the law that children must go to school. Nell knew this. Grandma had parroted the words of the so-called ‘do-gooders’ who called to check on Nell. The girl, the man and the fox were parallel to the playground now. The man seemed to hesitate as he passed, his eyes were drawn to the playing children. His face was turned away from her; his colour had darkened again.
‘You live on the green, in the village, by the church.’ Nell blurted out. Her whole being seemed to tense, like a fist closing. She had to distract the man from the schoolyard, from realising he was walking with a criminal.
‘Yes, yes I do.’
‘I live in the cottage next door, with Annie. Annie Hart. She’s my grandmother. Grandma Annie, I call her.’ Nell’s words tumbled clumsily out.
A wry smile, a fox’s smile, flittered on the man’s face. ‘Do you really live next door? I can’t say I had noticed.’
His crooked smile made Nell question whether that statement was true. But she supposed it was possible, maybe he had forgotten their eyes meeting the previous morning. She was, after all, a highly experienced undercover agent. She felt herself puff up with pride that her surveillance had gone unnoticed, that she had fooled a ‘famous’ policeman. She glanced down at Ferdinand to see if he had understood significance of the revelation. He answered with a toothy grin.
They were passing danger zone of the school now. The man glanced one more time over his shoulder at the surging, racing children. Her looked down at Nell. His olive eyes, she noticed, were flecked with copper light. His face was grave. The silence between them buzzed like a dying insect. He hadrealised. It hadoccurred to him that she was not where she should be. He was going to arrest her and for once, Nell could not think of anything to say to divert him. She simply waited for his words, his charges.
‘You going to the bus stop?’ he said, nodding to where a line of elderly ladies with unshakable cauliflower perms were lined up waiting for the ten thirty to Sunderland.
Was that it? Really? Was that all he was going to say?
She was safe. There, in the far distance, on the mound of the village green, the grey church revealed itself. It seemed to Nell to be a good sign.
‘No. We’re walking. . . I’m walking.’
‘Aye, me too,’ the man replied.
‘My name is Nell. Nell Day. It’s not Hart like Grannie because, well, I suppose it’s. . . ’ her voice trailed away. She didn’t very much feel like explaining her family tree to the grey man. She didn’t think she needed to. He understood things without words.
‘Well, Nell Day, my name is David Winter. Nice to meet you.’ The grey man stopped for a moment. For a few devastating seconds, Nell wondered if it was to shake her hand. The thought made her stomach lurch. She always managed to get things like that wrong. She would offer the wrong hand, or her hand would be too sweaty or too cold. Her handshake would be too brief or too long. She saw with gratitude, the grey man had stopped simply to move the shopping bag from his left hand to his right. He smiled again at Nell. She liked his smile, she thought. It held within it the gentle comfort of old books and still, silent rooms.
‘Is the bag too heavy for you, Mr Winter. Shall I take it again?’
‘Don’t be daft. I am not on the scrap heap yet, am I?’
Nell turned to peer at the man. She took his question very seriously. She studied the lines on his face with renewed interest. ‘Are you sure? You look like you might be.’
The man guffawed. ‘I suppose I am in a sense. I am retired now. Just last month, actually. Getting old.’
‘Youdolook old,’ Nell agreed passionately. It was as if their thoughts as well as their footsteps were synchronised – just as it was with Ferdinand.
‘Do I now? Must be retirement, they say that does it. Finishes you off.’
‘No, I don’t think it is the retirement, Mr Winter. Not if that was just this month. It can’t be just that, you see you look like you’ve been old for a very, very long time indeed.’
The laugh that exploded from the thin grey man was joyous: loud and spontaneous and full of light. Nell wasn’t sure what she had said that was so funny, but she found herself laughing too.
‘I’m old, Nell. I am old.’
‘You are! You’re like a wise old tree. The lines on your face tell your history.’
The man laughed again. ‘I like the wise bit, at least.’
The September morning glowed with a carefree barley-sugar light. A cherry red tractor pulling towering bales of sweet-smelling straw chugged up the colliery bank. Wisps of dry spun gold fluttered behind, carpeting the street. A few strands wrapped themselves around Nell’s face, momentarily blinding her. The grey man smiled again as she freed herself. When he wasn’t looking, she held the strands to her nose, inhaled the scent of a summer past. She then wrapped them into a neat coil and put them in her pocket for safe keeping.
‘Quite a few books in your basket there. You must like reading, Nell.’
‘I get a new set of books every Monday. I’m home-schooled, you see,’ She was pleased at how deftly she had broached the subject of her schooling. She watched the grey man to see how he digested this new information. He accepted it with an easy nod.
‘And they are all for you, these books?’
‘Well, the Delia Smith is for Grannie.’
‘Ah, Delia. Of course. Is Grannie a fan?’
Nell hesitated. If some strange and mysterious fate did befall Delia Smith (such as ‘falling’ under a potato lorry or being pelted with rotten eggs) she would hate her Grandmother to be implicated. The grey man was an officer of the law, after all.
‘Grandma Annie is a wonderful cook,’ she said graciously. It was the truth, after all. ‘The other books are all for me. Shall I tell you what I have got? There’s a book of fairy tales with really creepy pictures. I love fairy tales: wild animals, thorny forests, lost children, magic and spells. I thought maybe I could write my own. Then there is a book . . . ’
Nell babbled on about her choices. Her words gurgled as freely as water trickling down a hillside stream. Even though the grey man was right next to her, and nodded his head and smiled at her commentary, she sensed he had left her somehow. Sensed he had been carried away on his own stream of memories.
‘Anyway, I expect the algebra will be the trickiest. Maybe even harder than the eight times table.’ Nell glanced at her watch. They had been walking together for sixteen minutes and had reached the foot of the village green. The late morning air was as soft as thistledown.
‘What were you looking at, in the colliery?’ Nell asked. She had no idea where the question came from. Maybe it had been hovering like a ghost at the edge of her consciousness since she had first seen the man that morning. Maybe Ferdinand had summoned it. The grey man stopped walking and looked up towards the grey church on the hill, towards his new home, stilled by the sudden quietness of deep thought.
‘Looking at?’ he said. His voice sounded strange to Nell: strained and distant.
‘That old shop, with the newspapers, next to the bakery.’
‘Oh that old place,’ the man started to walk across the green, striding ahead, leaving Nell and Ferdinand behind. For the first time since they had met, they were out of step. Nell followed, eyes down, bewildered at what she had said that was wrong. All summer, the grass had been velvet green, embroidered with daisies and buttercups. Now it was looking pale and exhausted. Nell sensed she had stumbled upon something important with her question about the shop, but understood it to be a subject the man would rather not pursue. With relief, she noticed he had stopped and was waiting for her catch up. He glanced as he turned, to the sea and the red-brick colliery streets they had left behind.
‘I was just thinking about those witches and thorny forests and lost children,’ he said simply. ‘Howay, Nell, let’s get home, eh?’
At the doorstep of Nell’s cottage they said their goodbyes.
‘Thank you for your company, Nell. I enjoyed our chat.’
‘Thank you for your help with the shopping, Mr Winter.’
They sounded oddly formal and stiff, like they were repeating dialogue from one of the old British films Annie would watch on a Sunday afternoon on BBC2.
The grey man tried to hand the shopping bag to Nell but one of his shirt cuffs had become twisted in the handle. As he struggled to free himself, Nell saw a tiny blue button fall into the bag. The grey man seemed not to have noticed. She looked purposely at Ferdinand who answered with a knowing blink.
The memento of her morning had magically offered itself, just as she had known it would.
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