When Marnie Was There

Chapter One

ANNA

MRS PRESTON, WITH her usual worried look, straightened Anna’s hat.

“Be a good girl,” she said. “Have a nice time and – and – well, come back nice and brown and happy.” She put an arm round her and kissed her goodbye, trying to make her feel warm and safe and wanted.

But Anna could feel she was trying and wished she would not. It made a barrier between them so that it was impossible for her to say goodbye naturally, with the spontaneous hug and kiss that other children managed so easily, and that Mrs Preston would so much have liked. Instead she could only stand there stiffly by the open door of the carriage, with her case in her hand, hoping she looked ordinary and wishing the train would go.

Mrs Preston, seeing Anna’s ‘ordinary’ look – which in her own mind she thought of as her ‘wooden face’ – sighed and turned her attention to more practical things.

“You’ve got your big case on the rack and your comic’s in your mac pocket.” She fumbled in her handbag. “Here you are, dear. Some chocolate for the journey and a packet of paper hankies to wipe your mouth after.”

A whistle blew and a porter began slamming the carriage doors. Mrs Preston poked Anna gently in the back. “Better get in, dear. You’re just off.” And then, as Anna scrambled up with a mumbled, “Don’t push!” and stood looking down, still unsmiling, from the carriage window – “Give my love to Mrs Pegg and Sam and tell them I’ll hope to get down before very long – if I can get a day excursion, that is—” The train began moving imperceptibly along the platform and Mrs Preston began gabbling – “Send me a card when you get there. Remember they’re meeting you at Heacham. Don’t forget to look out for them. And don’t forget to change at King’s Lynn, you can’t go wrong. There’s a stamped card already addressed in the inner pocket of your case. Just to say you’ve arrived safely – you know. Goodbye, dear, be a good girl.”

Then, as she began running and looking suddenly pathetic, almost beseeching, something softened inside Anna just in time. She leaned out of the window and shouted, “Goodbye, Auntie. Thank you for the chocolate. Goodbye!”

She just had time to see Mrs Preston’s worried look change to a smile at hearing the unaccustomed use of the name “Auntie”, then the train gathered speed and a bend in the line hid her from view.

Anna sat down without looking round, broke off four squares of chocolate, put the rest of the bar in her pocket with the packet of paper handkerchiefs, and opened her comic. Two hours – more than two hours – to King’s Lynn. With luck, if she just looked ‘ordinary’ no-one would speak to her in all that time. She could read her comic and then stare out of the window, thinking about nothing.

Anna spent a great deal of her time thinking about nothing these days. In fact it was partly because of her habit of thinking about nothing that she was travelling up to Norfolk now, to stay with Mr and Mrs Pegg. That – and other things. The other things were difficult to explain, they were so vague and indeterminate. There was the business of not having best friends at school like all the others, not particularly wanting to ask anyone home to tea, and not particularly caring that no-one asked her.

Mrs Preston just would not believe that Anna did not mind. She was always saying things like, “There now, what a shame! Do you mean to say they’ve all gone off to the ice rink and never asked you?” (Or the cinema, or the Zoo, or the nature ramble, or the treasure hunt.) – And, “Why don’t you ask next time? Let them know you’d like to go too. Say something like,’ If you’ve room for an extra one, how about me? I’d love to come.’ If you don’t look interested nobody’ll know you are.”

But Anna was not interested. Not any more. She knew perfectly well – though she could never have explained it to Mrs Preston – that things like parties and best friends and going to tea with people were fine for everyone else, because everyone else was ‘inside’ – inside some sort of invisible magic circle. But Anna herself was outside. And so these things had nothing to do with her. It was as simple as that.

Then there was not-even-trying. That was another thing. Anna always thought of not-even-trying as if it were one long word, she had heard it said so often during the last six months. Miss Davison, her form teacher, said it at school, “Anna, you’re not-even-trying.” It was written on her report at the end of term. And Mrs Preston said it at home.

“It isn’t as if there’s anything wrong with you,” she would say. “I mean you’re not handicapped in any way and I’m sure you’re just as clever as any of the others. But this not-even-trying is going to spoil your whole future.” And when anyone asked about Anna, which school she would be going to later on, and so on, she would say, “I really don’t know. I’m afraid she’s not-even-trying. It’s going to be difficult to know quite what to do with her.”

Anna herself did not mind. As with the other things, she was not worried at all. But everyone else seemed worried. First Mrs Preston, then Miss Davison, and then Dr Brown who was called in when she had asthma and couldn’t go to school for nearly two weeks.

“I hear you’ve been worried about school,” Dr Brown had remarked with a kindly twinkle in his eye.

“I’m not. She is,” Anna had mumbled.

“A-ah!” Dr Brown had walked about the bedroom, picking things up and examining them closely, then putting them down again. “And you feel sick before Arithmetic?”

“Sometimes.”

“A-ah!” Dr Brown placed a small china pig carefully back on the mantelpiece and stared earnestly into its painted black eyes. “I think you are worried, you know,” he murmured. Anna was silent. “Aren’t you?” He turned round to face her again.

“I thought you were talking to the pig,” she said.

Dr Brown had almost smiled then, but Anna had continued to look severe, so he went on seriously. “I think perhaps you are worried, and I’ll tell you why. I think you’re worried because your—” He broke off and came towards her again. “What do you call her?”

“Who?”

“Mrs Preston. Do you call her Auntie?” Anna nodded. “I think perhaps you’re worried because Auntie’s worried, is that it?”

“No, I told you, I’m not worried.”

He had stopped walking about then and stood looking down at her consideringly as she lay there, wheezing, with her ‘ordinary’ face on. Then he had looked at his watch and said briskly, “Good. Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?” and gone running downstairs to talk to Mrs Preston.

After that things changed quite quickly. Firstly Anna didn’t go back to school, though it was a good six weeks till the end of term. Instead she and Mrs Preston went shopping and bought shorts and sandshoes and a thick rolltop jersey for Anna. Then Mrs Preston had a reply to the letter she had written to her old friend, Susan Pegg, saying yes, the little lass could come and welcome. She and Sam would be glad to have her, though not so young as they was and Sam’s rheumatics something chronic last winter. But seeing she was a quiet little thing and not over fond of gadding about, they hoped she’d be happy. “As you may recall,” wrote Mrs Pegg, “we’re plain and homely up at ours, but comfortable beds and nothing wanting now we’ve got the telly.”

“Why does she says ‘up at ours’?” asked Anna.

“It means at home, at our place. That’s how they say it in Norfolk.”

“Oh.”

Anna had then, surprisingly, slammed the door and stamped noisily upstairs.

“Now whatever did I say to upset her?” thought Mrs Preston, as she put the letter in the sideboard drawer to show to Mr Preston later. She could never have guessed, but Anna had taken sudden and unreasonable exception to being called “a quiet little thing”. It was one thing not to want to talk to people, but quite another to be called names like that. The stamps on the stairs were to prove that she was nothing of the sort.

Remembering this now as she sat in the train pretending to read her comic (which she had long since finished), she suddenly wondered if anyone here might be having the same idea about her. Creasing her forehead into a forbidding frown, she lifted her head for the first time and glared round at the other occupants of the carriage. One, an old man, was fast asleep in a corner. A woman opposite him was making her face up carefully in a pocket mirror. Anna stared, fascinated, for a moment, realised her frown was slipping, and turned to glare at the woman opposite her. She, too, was asleep.

So the ‘ordinary’ face had worked. No-one had even noticed her. Relieved, she turned to the window and stared out at the long flat stretches of the fens, with their single farmhouses standing isolated from each other, fields apart, and thought about nothing at all.

Chapter Two

THE PEGGS

ANNA KNEW THAT the large, round-faced woman waving a shopping bag at her on the platform must be Mrs Pegg, and went up to her.

“There you are, my duck! Now ain’t that nice! And the bus just come in now. Here, give me your case and we’ll run!”

A single-decker bus, already nearly full, was waiting in the station yard. “There’s a seat down there,” panted Mrs Pegg. “Go you on down, my duck, and I’ll sit here by the driver. Morning, Mr Beales! Morning Mrs Wells! Lovely weather we’re having. And how’s Sharon?”

Anna pushed her way down the bus, glad she was not going to have to sit by Sharon, who was only about four and had fat, red-brown cheeks and almost white fair hair. She never knew what to say to children who were so much younger than she was.

Fields stretched on either side, sloping fields of yellow, green and brown. Ploughed fields that looked like brown corduroy, and cabbage fields that were pure blue. As the bus dashed along narrow lanes Anna saw splashes of scarlet poppies in the hedgerows, and then away to the left, she saw the long thin line of the sea. She felt her heart jump and looked around quickly to see whether anyone else had noticed, but no-one had. They were all talking. They must be so used to it that they didn’t even see it, she thought, staring and staring… and sank into a quiet dream of nothing, with her eyes wide open.

And then they were at Little Overton. The bus went down a long steep hill, Anna saw a great expanse of sky and sea and sunlit marsh all spread out before her, then the bus turned sharply and drew up with a jolt.

“Not far now,” said Mrs Pegg as they picked up the cases and the bus roared away down the coast road. “Sam’ll be expecting us now. He’ll have heard the bus go by.”

“Buses go by all the time at home,” said Anna.

“That must be noisy,” said Mrs Pegg, clicking her tongue.

“I don’t notice it,” said Anna. Then remembering the people on the bus, she asked abruptly, “Do you notice it when you see the sea?”

Mrs Pegg looked surprised. “Me see the sea? Oh no, I never do that! I ain’t been near-nor-by the sea, not since I were a wench.”

“But we saw it from the bus.”

“Oh, that! Yes, I suppose you would.”

They turned in at a little gate no higher than Anna’s hand. The tiny garden was full of flowers and there was a loud humming of bees. They walked up the short path to the open cottage door.

“Here we are, Sam, safe and sound!” said Mrs Pegg, shouting into the darkness, and Anna realised that the large patch of shadow in the corner must be an armchair with Mr Pegg in it. “But we’ll take these things up first,” said Mrs Pegg, and hustled her into what looked at first sight like a cupboard, but turned out to be a small, steep, winding staircase. At the top she pushed open a door, which opened with a latch instead of a handle. “Here we are. It ain’t grand but nice and clean, and a good feather mattress. Come you on down when you’re ready, my duck. I’ll go and put kettle on.”

Anna saw a little room with white walls, a low sloping ceiling, and one small window, so low down in the wall that she had to bend down to see out of it. It looked out on to a small whitewashed yard and an outhouse with a long tin bath hanging on its wall. Beyond that there were fields.

There was a picture over the bed, a framed sampler in red and blue cross-stitch, with the words Hold fast that which is Good embroidered over a blue anchor. Anna looked at this with mistrust. It was the word “good”. Not that she herself was particularly naughty, in fact her school reports quite often gave her a “Good” for Conduct, but in some odd way the word seemed to leave her outside. She didn’t feel good…

Still, it was a nice room, she decided cautiously. Plain but nice. Best of all it had the same smell as she had noticed downstairs. A warm, sweet, old smell – quite different from the smell of polish at home or the smell of disinfectant at school.

She hung up her mackintosh on the peg behind the door, then stood for a moment in the middle of the room, holding her breath and listening. She did not want to go down again but there was no excuse for not. She counted six, gave a little cough, and went.

“Ah, so there you are, my biddy!” said Mr Pegg, peering up at her. “My word, but you’ve growed! Quite a big little-old-girl you’re getting to be. Ain’t she, Susan?”

Anna looked into Mr Pegg’s wrinkled, weatherbeaten face. The small pale blue eyes were almost hidden under shaggy eyebrows.

“How do you do?” she said gravely, holding out her hand.

“A-ah, that’s my biddy,” said Mr Pegg, taking her hand and patting it absent-mindedly. “And how’s your foster-ma keeping, eh?”

Anna looked at Mrs Pegg.

“Your mum, my duck,” said Mrs Pegg quickly. “Sam’s asking if she’s well.”

“My mother’s dead,” said Anna stiffly. “She died ages ago. I thought you knew.”

“Yes, yes, my maid. We knowed all about that,” said Sam, gruffly kind. “And your gran too, more’s the pity.” – Anna’s face stiffened even more – “That’s why I said your foster-ma – Mrs Preston. Nancy Piggott as she used to be. She’s your foster-ma, ain’t she? A good woman, Nancy Preston. Always had a kind heart. She’s a good ma to you, I’ll be bound. Keeping nicely, is she?”

“She’s very well, thank you,” said Anna primly.

“But you don’t like me calling her ‘ma,’ eh? Is that it?” said Sam, his eyes crinkling up at the corners.

“No, of course she don’t!” said Mrs Pegg. “Ma’s old fashioned these days. I expect you call her ‘Mum’, don’t you, love?”

“I call her ‘Auntie’,” said Anna, then mumbled as an afterthought, “sometimes.” It was difficult to know how to explain that she seldom called Mrs Preston by any name at all. There was no need, it wasn’t as if there was a crowd of them at home. Only Mr Preston, who called his wife Nan, and occasionally Raymond, who worked in a bank now he was grown up and always called his mother “Mims”, or occasionally “Ma” to be funny. Anna thought “Mims” was a silly name to call your own mother… She stood there now in front of Mr Pegg’s chair, her eyes troubled, wondering what to say next.

Mrs Pegg came to the rescue. “Any road, I’m sure she’s as good as a mother to you, whatever you call her,” she said in her downright, comfortable way. “And I’m sure when all’s said and done you love her almost as much as if she was your own mother, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes!” said Anna. “More,” and felt a sudden pricking behind the eyelids as she remembered her last sight of Mrs Preston running to keep up with the train and reminding her about the postcard.

“That’s right, then,” said Mrs Pegg.

“I’ve got a postcard to post,” said Anna, her voice coming out suddenly loud – she had been so afraid of it cracking – “will you show me where to post it when I’ve written it?”

Mrs Pegg said yes, of course she would. Anna could write it now in the front room while she got tea ready. “Come you here,” she said, “and I’ll show you.” She wiped her hands down the side of her dress and showed Anna to a room on the other side of the passage. “There’s a little table in here under the windie.”

The tiny room, over-full of furniture, was in half darkness. Mrs Pegg pulled back the curtains and moved a potted palm from the small bamboo table. Then she bent admiringly over a large white bowl full of pink and blue artificial flowers, which half filled the window.

“Wonderful, ain’t they?” she said, blowing the dust from the plastic petals. “Everlasting.”

She gazed at them for a moment, wiping the scalloped edges of the boat-shaped bowl with a corner of her dress, then smiled at Anna and went out, closing the door behind her.

This must be the best room, thought Anna, as she tiptoed carefully over the polished linoleum and slippery hearthrug; like the lounge at home, which was only used at weekends or when there were visitors. But very different.

She sat down at the bamboo table and brought out her postcard addressed to Mrs Stanley Preston, 25 Elmwood Terrace, London, and wrote on the other side, Arrived safely. It’s quite nice here. My room has a sloping ceiling and the window is on the floor. It smells different from home. I forgot to ask can I wear shorts every day unless I’m going somewhere special?

She paused, suddenly wanting to say something more affectionate than the conventional “love from Anna”, but not knowing how to say it.

From the kitchen came the low rumble of voices. Mrs Pegg was saying to Sam, “Poor little-old-thing, losing her mother when she was such a mite – and her granny. It’s a pity she’s so pale and scrawny, and a bit sober-sides as well, but I expect we’ll rub along together all right. She’s taking her time over that postcard, ain’t she? Had I better tell her tea’s ready?”

In the front room Anna was still sucking her pen. Outside, beyond the great boat-shaped bowl that nearly filled the window ledge, she could see glimpses of the tiny garden dreaming in the sunshine, bees still buzzing in and out of the bright flowers. Inside, as imprisoned as the bluebottles that crawled up and down inside the closed window, she sat staring at the plastic hydrangeas, wondering how to tell Mrs Preston that of course she loved her, without committing herself.

By the time Mrs Pegg had come to the front-room door and said, “Tea’s ready, lass!” she had decided on “tons of love” instead of just “love”, and added a P.S. The chocolate was lovely. I’ve saved some for tonight.

That, she knew, would please Mrs Preston without seeming to promise anything. After all, she still might not always feel loving when she got home again.

Chapter Three

ON THE STAITHE

“JUST UP THE lane and turn left at the crossroads,” said Mrs Pegg. “Post Office is only a little way up. And the road to the creek’s on the right. Go you and have a look round.” She nodded encouragingly and turned back indoors.

Anna found the Post Office – which to her surprise was a cobbled cottage like the Peggs’, with a flat letterbox in the wall – and posted her card. Then she walked back to the crossroads. She felt free now. Free and empty. No need to talk to anyone, or be polite, or bother about anything. There was hardly anyone about anyway. A farm worker passed her on a bicycle, said “Good afternoon,” and was gone before she even had time to show her surprise. She gave a little skip and turned down the short road to the staithe, and saw the creek lying ahead of her.