The Christmas Mouse Read online

  ‘You know what you are, don’t you?’ she began. The boy shook his head uncomprehendingly.

  ‘You are a burglar and a thief,’ Mrs Berry told him. ‘If I handed you over to the police, you’d get what you deserve.’

  At this the child’s dark eyes widened in horror.

  ‘Yes, you may well look frightened,’ said Mrs Berry, pressing home the attack. ‘People who break into other people’s homes and take their things are nothing more than common criminals and have to be punished.’

  ‘I never took nothin’,’ whispered the boy. With a shock, Mrs Berry realized that these were the first words that she had heard him utter.

  ‘If I hadn’t caught you when I did,’ replied Mrs Berry severely, ‘you would have eaten that cake of mine double quick! Now wouldn’t you? Admit it. Tell the truth.’

  ‘I was hungry,’ said the child. He put his two hands on his bare knees and bent his head. A tear splashed down upon the back of one hand, glittering in the firelight.

  ‘And I suppose you are still hungry?’ observed Mrs Berry, her eyes upon the tear that was now joined by another.

  ‘It’s no good piping your eye,’ she said bracingly, ‘though I’m glad to see you’re sorry. But whether ’tis for what you’ve done, or simply being sorry for yourself, I just don’t know.’

  She leaned forward and patted the tear-wet hand.

  ‘Here,’ she said, more gently, ‘blow your nose again and cheer up. I’ll go and get you something to eat, although you know full well you don’t deserve it.’ She struggled from her chair again.

  ‘It won’t be cake, I can tell you that,’ she told him flatly. ‘That’s for tea tomorrow – today, I suppose I should say. Do you realize, young man, that it’s Christmas Day?’

  The boy, snuffling into his handkerchief, looked bewildered but made no comment.

  ‘Well, what about bread and milk?’

  A vision of her two little granddaughters spooning up their supper – days ago, it seemed, although it was only a few hours – rose before her eyes. Simple and nourishing, and warming for this poor, silly, frightened child!

  ‘Thank you,’ said the boy. ‘I like bread and milk.’

  She left him, still sniffing, but with the second paper handkerchief deposited on the back of the fire as instructed.

  ‘Not a sound now,’ warned Mrs Berry, as she departed. ‘There’s two little girls asleep up there. And their ma. All tired out and need their sleep. Same as I do, for that matter.’

  She cut a thick slice of bread in the cold kitchen. The wind had not abated, although the rain seemed less violent, Mrs Berry thought, as she waited for the milk to heat. She tidied the cake tin away, wondering whether she would fancy the cake at tea time after all its vicissitudes. Had those grubby paws touched it, she wondered?

  She poured the steaming milk over the bread cubes, sprinkled it well with brown sugar and carried the bowl to the child.

  He was lying back in the chair with his eyes shut, and for a moment Mrs Berry thought he was asleep. He looked so defenceless, so young, and so meekly mouse-like, lying there with his pink-tipped pointed nose in the air, that Mrs Berry’s first instinct was to tuck him up in her dressing gown and be thankful that he was at rest.

  But the child struggled upright, and held out his skinny hands for the bowl and spoon. For the first time he smiled, and although it was a poor, wan thing as smiles go, it lit up the boy’s face and made him seem fleetingly attractive.

  Mrs Berry sat down and watched him attack the meal. It was obvious he was ravenously hungry.

  ‘I never had no tea,’ said the child, conscious of Mrs Berry’s eyes upon him.

  ‘Why not?’

  The boy shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Been naughty?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Had too much dinner then?’

  The child gave a short laugh.

  ‘Never get too much dinner.’

  ‘Was your mother out then?’

  ‘No.’

  The boy fell silent, intent upon spooning the last delicious morsels from the bottom of the bowl.

  ‘I don’t live with my mother,’ he said at last.

  ‘With your gran?’

  ‘No. A foster mother.’

  Mrs Berry nodded, her eyes never moving from the child’s face. What was behind this escapade?

  ‘Where have you come from?’ she asked.

  The boy put the empty bowl carefully in the corner of the hearth.

  ‘Tupps Hill,’ he answered.

  Tupps Hill! A good two or three miles away! What a journey the child must have made, and in such a storm!

  ‘Why d’you want to know?’ said the boy, in a sudden panic. ‘You going to send the police there? They don’t know nothin’ about me runnin’ off. Honest! Don’t let on, madam, please, madam!’

  The ‘madam’ amused and touched Mrs Berry. Was this how he had been told to address someone in charge of an institution, or perhaps a lady magistrate at some court proceedings? This child had an unhappy background, that seemed certain. But why was he so scared of the police?

  ‘If you behave yourself and show some sense,’ said Mrs Berry, ‘the police will not be told anything at all. But I want to know more about you, young man.’

  She picked up the bowl.

  ‘Would you like some more?’

  ‘Can I?’ said the child eagerly.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Berry, resting the bowl on one hip and looking down at the boy.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Stephen.’

  ‘Stephen what?’

  ‘It’s not my foster mother’s name,’ said the boy evasively.

  ‘So I imagine. What is it, though?’

  ‘It’s Amonetti. Stephen Amonetti.’

  Mrs Berry nodded slowly, as things began to fall into place.

  ‘So you’re Stephen Amonetti, are you? I think I knew your dad some years ago.’

  She walked slowly from the room, sorting out a rag bag of memories, as she made her way thoughtfully towards the kitchen.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Amonetti!

  Pepe Amonetti! She could see him now, as he had first appeared in Beech Green during the final months of the last war. He was a very young Italian prisoner of war, barely twenty, and his dark curls and sweeping black eyelashes soon had all the village girls talking.

  He was the youngest of a band of Italian prisoners allotted to Jesse Miller, who then farmed a large area at Beech Green. He was quite irrepressible, bubbling over with the joy of living – doubly relishing life, perhaps, because of his short time on active service.

  As he drove the tractor, or cleared a ditch, or slashed back a hedge, he sang at the top of his voice, or chattered in his pidgin English to any passer-by.

  The girls, of course, did not pass by. The string of compliments, the flashing glances, the expressive hands, slowed their steps. Pepe, with his foreign beauty, stood out from the local village boys like some exotic orchid among a bunch of cottage flowers. In theory, he had little spare time for such dalliance. In practice, he managed very well, with a dozen or more willing partners.

  The young lady most in demand at Beech Green at that time was a blonde beauty called Gloria Jarvis.

  The Jarvises were a respectable couple with a string of flighty daughters. Gloria was one of the youngest, and had learned a great deal from her older sisters. The fact that the air base nearby housed several hundred eager young Americans generous with candy, cigarettes and nylon stockings had hastened Gloria’s progress in the art of making herself charming.

  As was to be expected, ‘them Jarvis girls’ were considered by the upright members of the community to be ‘a fair scandal, and a disgrace to honest parents.’ Any man, however ill-favoured or decrepit, was reckoned to be in danger from their wiles, and as soon as Pepe arrived at Beech Green it was a foregone conclusion that he would fall prey to one of the Jarvis harpies.

  �
�Not that he’ll put up much of a fight,’ observed one middle-aged lady to her neighbour. ‘Got a roving eye himself, that lad.’

  ‘Well,’ replied her companion indulgently, ‘you knows what these foreigners are! Hot blooded. It’s all that everlasting sun!’

  ‘My Albert was down with bronchitis and chilblains all through the Italian campaign,’ retorted the first lady. ‘No, you can’t blame the climate for their goings-on. It’s just that they’re made that way, and them Jarvis girls won’t cool their blood, that’s for sure.’

  It was not long before Pepe’s exploits, much magnified in conversations among scandalized matrons, were common knowledge in the neighbourhood, and it was Gloria Jarvis who was named as being the chief object of his attentions.

  Gloria may have lost her heart to Pepe’s Latin charms, but she did not lose her head. An Italian prisoner of war had little money to spend on a girl, and Gloria continued to see a great deal of her American admirers who spent more freely. Those of them who knew about Pepe dismissed the affair good-naturedly. Gloria was a good-time girl, wasn’t she? So what?

  Pepe, on the other hand, resented the other men’s attentions, and became more and more possessive as time went by. He certainly had more hold over the wayward Gloria than his rivals, and though she tossed her blonde Edwardian coiffure and pretended indifference, Gloria was secretly a little afraid of Pepe’s passion.

  The war ended in 1945, a few months after their first meeting, and Pepe elected to stay on in England as a farm worker. By this time, a child was on the way, and Gloria and Pepe were married at the registry office in Caxley.

  The child, a girl, had Pepe’s dark good looks. A blond boy, the image of his mother, appeared a year later, and the family began to be accepted in Beech Green. Pepe continued to work for Jesse Miller and to occupy one of his cottages.

  For a few years all went well, and then Pepe vanished. Gloria and the two children had a hard time of it, although Jesse Miller kindheartedly allowed them to continue to live in the cottage. It was during these difficult days that Mrs Berry had got to know Gloria better.

  She was vain, stupid and a slattern, but she was also abandoned and in despair. Mrs Berry helped her to find some work at a local big house, and now and again looked after the children to enable Gloria to go shopping or to visit the doctor. The old Jarvises were dead, by now, and the older sisters were little help.

  Mrs Berry showed Gloria how to make simple garments for the children, taught her how to knit and, more useful still, how to choose the cheap cuts of meat and cook them so that a shilling would stretch to its farthest limit.

  Happily married herself, Mrs Berry urged Gloria to find Pepe and make it up, if only for the sake of the family. But it was two years before the errant husband was traced, and another fifteen months before he could be persuaded to return.

  He had found work in Nottingham, and came back to Beech Green just long enough to collect Gloria and the children, their few poor sticks of furniture and their clothes. They left for Nottingham one grey December day, but Pepe had found time to call at Mrs Berry’s and to thank her for all she had done.

  Handsomer than ever, Pepe had stood on her doorstep, refusing to come in, his eyes shy, his smile completely disarming. No one, least of all Mrs Berry, could have remained hostile to this winning charmer with his foreign good manners.

  ‘I did nothing – no more than any other neighbour,’ Mrs Berry told him. ‘But now it’s your concern, Pepe. You see you treat her right and make a fresh start.’

  ‘Indeed, yes. I do mean to do that,’ said Pepe earnestly. He thrust his hand down inside his greatcoat and produced a ruffled black kitten, which he held out to Mrs Berry with a courtly bow.

  ‘Would you please to accept? A thank you from the Amonettis?’

  Mrs Berry was taken aback but rallied bravely. She knew quite well that the kitten was their own, and that they could not be bothered to take it with them to their new home. But who could resist such a gesture? And who would look after the poor little waif if she did not adopt it?

  She took the warm furry scrap and held it against her face.

  ‘Thank you, Pepe. I shall treasure it as a reminder of you all. Good luck now, and mind my words.’

  For some time after this Mrs Berry heard nothing of the Amonettis. The kitten, named Pepe after its donor, grew up to be a formidable mouser and was much loved by the Berry family. Years later, someone in Caxley told Mrs Berry that Pepe had vanished yet again, and that Gloria had returned to live with a sister in the county town twenty miles away. Whilst there, she had had one last brief reconciliation with Pepe, but within a week there had been recriminations, violence and police action. After this, Pepe had vanished for good, and it was generally believed that this time he had returned to Italy.

  The outcome of that short reunion must be Stephen, Mrs Berry thought to herself, as she stood in her draughty kitchen preparing the boy’s meal. Gloria’s present circumstances she knew from hearsay. She continued to live in one room of her sister’s house and was what Mrs Berry still thought of as ‘a woman of the streets.’ No wonder that the boy had been taken into the care of the local authority. His mother, though to be pitied in some ways, Mrs Berry told herself charitably, was no fit person to bring up the boy, and heaven above knows what the conditions of the sister’s house might be! Those Jarvis girls had all been first-class sluts, and no mistake!

  Mrs Berry picked up the tray and carried it back to the fireside.

  The child’s smile was stronger this time.

  ‘You are very kind,’ he said, with a touch of his father’s grace, reaching hungrily for the food.

  She sat back in the armchair and watched the boy. Now that he had eaten and was getting warm, the pinched look, which sharpened his mouselike features, had lessened. His cheeks glowed pink and his lustrous dark eyes glanced about the room as he became more relaxed. Given time, thought Mrs Berry, this boy could become as bewitching as his father. But, at the moment, he was unhappy. What could have sent the child out into such a night as this? And furthermore, what was to be done about it?

  Mrs Berry bided her time until the second bowlful had vanished, then took up the poker. The boy looked apprehensive, but Mrs Berry, ignoring him, set the poker about its legitimate business of stirring the fire into a blaze, and then replaced it quietly.

  ‘Now,’ she said, in a businesslike tone, ‘you can just explain what brings you into my house at this time of night, my boy.’

  There was a long pause. In the silence, the clock on the mantel shelf struck two and a cinder clinked into the hearth. The wind seemed to have shifted its quarter slightly, for now it had found a crevice by the window and moaned there as if craving for admittance.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ said Mrs Berry ominously.

  The boy’s thin fingers fidgeted nervously with the toggle fastenings. His eyes were downcast.

  ‘Not much to tell,’ he said at last, in a husky whisper.

  ‘There must be plenty,’ replied Mrs Berry, ‘to bring you out from a warm bed on Christmas Eve.’

  The child shook his head unhappily. Tears welled up again in the dark eyes.

  ‘Now, that’s enough of that!’ said the old lady. ‘We’ve had enough waterworks for one night. If you won’t tell me yourself, you can just answer a few questions. And I want the truth, mind!’

  The boy nodded, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. Mrs Berry pointed in silence to the paper hankies beside him. Meekly, he took one and dried his eyes.

  ‘You say you live at Tupps Hill?’

  The child nodded.

  ‘Who with?’

  A look of fear crept over the mouselike face.

  ‘You tellin’ the police?’

  ‘Not if you tell me the truth.’

  ‘I live at Number Three. With Mrs Rose.’

  ‘Betty Rose? And her husband’s Dick Rose, the road-man?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Mrs Berry digested this information, wh
ilst the child took advantage of the lull in the interrogation to turn his shoes in the hearth. They were drying nicely.

  Mrs Berry tried to remember all she knew about the Roses. They had been married some time before her own girls, she seemed to recall, and Betty’s mother had been in good service at Caxley. Other than that, she knew little about them, except that they were known to be a respectable honest pair and regular churchgoers. Dick Rose was a slow methodical fellow, who would never rise above his present job of road sweeper in Caxley, from what Mrs Berry had heard.

  ‘Any children?’ she asked.

  ‘Two!’ replied the boy. He looked sulky. Was this the clue? Was the child jealous for some reason?

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Jim’s eleven, two years older ’n me. Patsy’s eight, nearly nine. A bit younger ’n me.’

  That would be about right, thought Mrs Berry, trying to piece the past together from her haphazard memories, and the child’s reluctant disclosures.

  ‘You’re lucky to live with the Roses,’ observed the old lady, ‘and to have the two children for company.’

  The boy gave a sniff, but whether in disgust or from natural causes it was impossible to say.

  ‘You get on all right?’

  ‘Sometimes. Patsy tags on too much. Girls is soppy.’

  ‘They’ve usually got more sense than boys,’ retorted Mrs Berry, standing up for her own sex. ‘You notice it isn’t Patsy who’s run out into a storm and got into trouble.’

  The child stuck out his lower lip mutinously but said nothing. The drenched raincoat was now steaming steadily, and Mrs Berry turned it on the back of the chair. The boy’s thin T-shirt, which had been hanging over the fire screen, was now dry, and Mrs Berry smoothed it neatly into shape on her knee before folding it.

  ‘Patsy’s got a watch,’ said the boy suddenly.

  ‘Has she now?’

  ‘So’s Jim. They both got watches. Patsy and Jim.’