Lost: Part 7

The next morning was dark: the buttercup sun of the previous day banished, replaced by drizzle and fog as heavy as a sodden blanket. The village green appeared to be cut off from the rest of the world. When she set aside the lace curtain, Nell saw that nothing existed beyond its four corners: nothing but dull grey opacity. The sea and colliery streets were stolen. Everything was tainted a murky dishwater grey. Mr Winter would surely not venture out for his morning cigarette in such weather. Anyone with any sense would stay indoors.

Nell dressed quickly and carelessly: a chunky geranium orange jumper, bottle green cords and sky-blue bed socks. She selected clothes for their softness, clothes that would offer protection from the insidious damp. She felt irritated, vexed. It was the weather. The possibilities for the day were limited, as narrow as the new, vaporous world she inhabited. She was even snappish with Ferdinand. The fox simply refused to surface from his den of blue blankets. Only the white tip of his tail was visible. It twitched huffily when Nell tried to coax him out. Finally, her brittle patience shattered,

‘Oh, stay there all day if you like. See if I care! It’s easier without you getting under my feet anyway.’  

Downstairs, Annie cooked fat sausages flecked with sage for breakfast. She served them with soft boiled eggs, buttery Marmite soldiers and a tumble of mushrooms. Whatever problem life cast in Annie’s direction, she always found the appropriate answer with food. ‘I saw that awful fog and thought we needed some bolstering. Autumn is here.’ she declared.

After breakfast was eaten, the dishes washed, dried and set neatly on the dresser, Nell felt better. She would spend the day at home with her books and treasures. In her bedroom, she was pleased to see that Ferdinand had finally roused himself. She felt guilty about her earlier comments. She found her fox standing on two legs, front black paws on the windowsill, peering out across the green. He was concentrating hard, squinting. His nose was pressed to the glass. Nell laughed. He looked like a little old man, straining to read the reduced-price sticker on a packet of biscuits. All he needed to complete the look were some half-moon glasses and a knitted waistcoat. 

‘What are you looking at, you silly old fox?’

When she joined him at the window, she saw what fascinated him so: it was the procession of children heading across the green towards the village school. Today they shivered under glossy, slightly too big (room to grow) raincoats. Their hoods were up, tied tightly under their chins. They looked like an army of terrapins trudging into battle. Mothers looked harried and brisk under limp, ineffective umbrellas. 

‘At least we’re not out there, Ferdinand,’ Nell mused. ‘We’ll have a cosy day. I may even get a jigsaw out, if you can keep your brush under control. Last time every time you walked past I lost at least ten pieces.’

The fox did not seem to hear her. There was no answering grin or firework flash of the eyes. He remained focused on the sorry cavalcade of children. His whole body seemed tense, agitated. He was trembling slightly, but not with fear, with rage.

Nell followed his eyes to see the target of his fury. She found it. At the very end of the line of children was a boy. He looked to be about Nell’s age, but Nell was sure she had never seen him before. She could see why Ferdinand was so alert. There was a lonely, set-apartness about the boy. His colour was black. Pitch black. He carried it like his own personal thundercloud. He seemed steeped in it. He wore no raincoat. He wore no coat at all; just a thin shirt, once white, now dishcloth grey. If it wasn’t for the black plume and Ferdinand’s piercing gaze, Nell might not have noticed the boy at all, so invisible he was in the mist, so camouflaged in dankness. 

A large woman strode ahead of the boy – pushing through the fog like the figurehead of a Viking warship. It was the boy’s mother, Nell assumed. The woman kept turning back and gesturing at the boy, geeing him up as if he was a reluctant pony. The boy ambled. He dragged his feet. He kept his head down. He kept his mouth shut. Suddenly, like lightening, the woman turned and flew at the child, spitting furious comments in his face. Each barb, each remark, Nell sensed, had wounded, like the claws of a cat. Looking over her shoulder, noticing the other mothers and children had now disappeared over the hill, the woman slapped the lad hard across the face. Nell gasped. Ferdinand bared his teeth. Even through distance, through sheets of rain and curtains of fog, the girl and the fox both heard and felt the slap and flinched. They watched as the tank-like woman grabbed the boy’s arm and dragged him in the direction of the school. 

‘Poor boy,’ Nell whispered. ‘Annie would never do that,’ 

She crossed to the bed. Ferdinand had left it a hodgepodge of sheets and blankets. ‘Shall I make it, or are you getting back in?’ 

But Ferdinand was already slinking down the stairs. Seconds later, Nell watched at the window as his red-umber body skulked across the village green. At the rowan tree, he dissolved into the mist as totally as if he had never existed.

 ‘Crazy old fox,’ she muttered to herself, ‘going out in that.’ 

She began to make the bed, just as Annie had showed her. When she pulled back the crisp white sheets, the scent of breezy washing lines and sunshine seemed to lift the drab room. She hummed to herself as she worked. Once the bed was as smooth and tight as a trampoline, she picked the algebra book from the chest of drawers, sat down and began to read.

For lunch, Annie had prepared broth, dense with vegetables, ham and barley and a tower of sliced thickly sliced brown bread, glossy with yellow butter. 

‘This will keep the cold and damp out, Nell.’ 

Annie, it appeared, had spent the morning studying too. She had much to say about her new Delia Smith library book. None of it good. 

‘I have written her a postcard, Nell. Will you pop it to the post box after lunch? I wouldn’t ask you to go out in this weather ordinarily but it is an emergency. That flibbertigibbet is in need of some home-truths.’

Nell nodded distractedly. Ferdinand had not returned. This was not unusual, especially in autumn. He loved the mellow golden days of autumn and would spend hours in the dene. He and his brothers and sisters would trot through the wooded pathways, soaking up the warm, stained glass glow of the changing leaves and the rich earthy smells of the season. They chased squirrels and cooled their paws in the cool, crystal water of the beck while rooks and ravens cawed overhead, singing songs of winter approaching. But Nell could not imagine that Ferdinand would go to the dene in such cold, dank weather. She was troubled by the thought that something was wrong.

She wrapped up warmly for her walk to the post-box. She welcomed the opportunity to look for her fox. She knew her mind would never settle on her books while he was gone. Before she headed out of the door, she glanced Annie’s message on the postcard:

Dear Ms Smith,

Regarding your recipe for shortcrust pastry. You are an idiot.

Yours faithfully,

Miss A Hart.

While she was out she checked the churchyard and the dene for Ferdinand, but he was nowhere to be seen. Back home, Nell gave up on algebra, which she found impossible to understand. Instead she practised column addition and subtraction, generating numbers using a dice and checking the answers on Grannie’s old calculator. She told herself, when she had ten sums correct, she would allow herself to pick up the fairy tale book. The problem was, none of her calculations were correct. The numbers would not stay neatly in their columns, they tumbled on the page like acrobats, they flattened, lengthened or twisted themselves until they became utterly undecipherable. In the end, she abandoned her school work altogether and sat with her head in her hands at her bedroom window, waiting for Ferdinand’s return.

Annie noticed Nell’s gloom and tried to lift her mood by suggesting a Maxwell’s supper of fish, chips and mushy peas. Maxwell’s was on the opposite side of the green. Nell’s face lit up like a candle at Annie’s suggestion, but it wasn’t the idea of supper that excited her. Her stomach was so twisted and tangled with anxiety she worried she would not be able to eat at all. It was the opportunity to search the green again for Ferdinand that caused Nell to rally. The fox, though, was nowhere to be seen.

After supper, Nell feigned a stomach ache and went up to bed. It was only seven o’clock. She did not bother turning on her bedside lamp. She longed to sleep and to sleep deeply and dreamlessly. More than anything, she hoped that when she woke from her black slumber, she would discover Ferdinand was beside her and that the terrible fog had moved on. Before collapsing into bed, she parted the lace curtains and peered outside at the premature darkness. The fog continued to press heavily upon the village. Filmy, blurry lights glowed in every shop and cottage. Behind every window, Nell thought, there were unseen lives that were separate to her own. Separate, but connected. She knew every face. Annie knew every name (and many a tawdry secret). Despite this, the loneliness she felt was desolating. It poured through her. Ferdinand was gone. Her heart had been cut from her body and was out there, walking through the cold, damp night alone.

                                             
            When morning came, Nell found that the fog had moved on to another unsuspecting village. The light in the bedroom was thin and pallid and a groggy and disorientated sun was rising over the sea. Ferdinand, though, had not returned. Hot, silent tears ran down Nell’s face. She looked at the clock. It was twelve minutes past seven. Annie would be up, preparing breakfast. She leapt out of bed to dress, only to discover she was still in yesterday’s clothes. The previous night she had been so wrung out with worry and grief, she had not been able to muster the energy to change into her nightdress. So much the better, she thought, vital minutes dressing would be saved. Nell had already decided she would spend the whole day looking for Ferdinand. She looked out of the window, scanning the village green for the flash of a fox. Instead, her eye was drawn to a shimmering billow of radiant grey: Mr Winter was sitting on the bench underneath the rowan tree. Nell grabbed her binoculars for a closer look. He was wearing little round glasses with tortoiseshell frames and was studying pages of white paper. The glasses made him look owlish: professorial and wise. An idea suddenly struck Nell: who better to help find a missing friend than a detective? A famous detective, no less? Nell understood what she needed to do. She retrieved her moss green notebook from the shoebox under the bed, grabbed a freshly sharpened pencil and raced down the cottage stairs. 

Annie was sitting at the kitchen table; her hands wrapped round a steaming mug of tea. She looked wan and oddly shrunken.

‘Not started breakfast yet, Nell. That fog yesterday, I feel quite drained by it. It will take me another couple of mugs before I get going this morning.’  

The throw-away comment brought a memory to the surface. On Nell’s first morning she had asked her grandmother why she drank so much tea. 

‘Oh, I don’t know, Nelly. But I do know this. Tea flows through my veins. No blood, just tea: strong, sugary Indian tea. You wait and see what comes out when I cut myself.’ 

With a flush of emotion, she remembered how she had watched her grandmother intently, day after day, chopping and slicing in the kitchen, wondering if she would ever get so see the hot steamy tea flowing from her veins. She never did. At times the knife would move so fast it became a silver blur in her grandmother’s hand, but the old lady never once cut herself.

 Suddenly, Nell felt so plump and ripe with love, she wondered if she might burst. As she headed towards the door, she stopped, bent down and kissed her grandmother’s downy cheek. It was powdery and dry and smelt of violets. She had never, in all the years spent with Annie, kissed her before. 

‘My, my, Nell. What’s all this?’ the old lady said. Her voice was gruff, but her eyes were as soft and guileless as a new-born’s.

            ‘Just felt like it, Grannie, silly. You take your time. I’m popping out for some fresh air anyway. I’ll just be on the green. Call me when breakfast is ready.’

Outside, little curls of mist rose from the grass in ghostly white ringlets. The air smelt loamy and damp, but the sun was rising, scattering a silvery light over the sea. The grey man was on his bench. He was smoking a cigarette, but his eyes were still on the sheets of paper held in his left hand. As she walked closer, Nell sensed his focus, his intent. The thought occurred to her that he had a quest of his own. She prayed that he would have time for her, time for Ferdinand.