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CHAPTER ONE
It isn’t easy to get any privacy in a house like ours. It’s too small and there are too many people in it. But about three years ago I developed this special technique which worked very well, I thought, though it was a bit of an effort, and not something I liked to do very often. For one thing it really needed good weather, and for another, it seemed to me that the more I did it, the more likely I was to be found out. I can remember the last time I did it properly.
It was Easter Saturday. Mum was making a tremendous performance of shampooing the carpet in the middle room. Dad kept appearing in the doorway of the front room to say that the telephone didn’t seem to be working. Sam was entertaining a friend everywhere else in the house. They were all beginning to get on my nerves.
Me, I was sitting trying to read at the table in the kitchen, which is at the back of the house. The wall which had originally divided the kitchen from the middle room had been partly bashed away, years ago, to leave a big square arch, so nobody in either room is really separate from anybody in the other. Apart from the fact that we always eat in the kitchen, and that the sofa and TV are in the middle room, the two rooms are really one.
I’d chosen the kitchen end because in the daytime the kitchen is lightest. It has a long window, above the sink, which looks out over what we call the garden. It has grass, and a hydrangea bush, and a fence all round, so there really isn’t anything else you can call it but it’s so small that when Sam sneezed once out of the open kitchen window, the spit hit the end fence. Of course that may say more about Sam than about the garden.
The middle room window looks out on to a short passage between the outside wall of the kitchen and next door’s fence. Every year Mum fixes pots of geraniums into metal loops she’s stuck into this fence, and quite often they don’t die till as late as July. No sun, a permanent draught and dark brown creosote are very discouraging to geraniums, it seems.
The lightest and best room of all, of course, and the one everyone else in the terrace uses as a living-room, is the front room – but that’s Dad’s office and it can be out of bounds if he’s busy.
What with all the froth and vigour in the middle room, all the moaning about the phone from the front, and Sam and what’s-’is-name everywhere else, it was clearly time to get out.
I banged on the table with the spine of my book and announced loudly that I was going to read in my room. “And I’m going to lock the door,” I said, “I don’t want Sam and his clone barging in on me all the time.”
There wasn’t a lot of response, but Mum had obviously heard, so I walked very noisily up the stairs, listening out for the whereabouts of the others. Dad was back in the front room, but with the door open, dialling a number over and over again. Sam and his guest were temporarily in Sam’s attic bedroom, rearranging the furniture, or possibly dismantling it. When I opened my own bedroom door I noticed the centre light was swinging in time to the thuds coming from above.
I didn’t go in, though. I threw my book on the duvet, took the key from out of the inside keyhole – and then closed and locked the door from the outside. All that was easy. The only trick up to that point was to make sure the family were conveniently placed, and occupied. The next bit, I thought, was where the skill came in.
I had to get down the stairs again, undetected. Past the open door of the front room and along the narrow corridor to the kitchen, passing the open door of the middle room. There is one escape hatch in this stretch – the cupboard under the stairs. I always hoped never to have to hide in there, though, because it would be so hard to explain if I was caught coming out.
The next stretch was without escape opportunities. I had to cross the kitchen, past the huge arch in the middle room, and get out of the back door without making a sound. If spotted at this stage, I used to abandon the whole plan.
If the kitchen could be crossed successfully, and the back door opened and closed under cover of sounds from the rest of the house, there was really only one awkward manoeuvre left. The back door opened on to the mouldy little side passage, and until I got myself round the corner I could be seen from the middle room window. After that, crossing the garden was as nothing, given that I always made sure there was no one in the kitchen or bathroom, which overlooked it, before I set out.
Sometimes Henry watched me from the wall, but he’d never give me away. He’s a thoughtful cat, Henry; a philosopher, Dad says. He’s striped – you can’t call him tabby, that’s too undignified. Once in a while he remembers that he’s supposed to have a killer instinct and he throws himself at a bird, but he always looks relieved when it gets away.
Once I was behind the hydrangea bush, I was out of sight from all angles and could take my time sliding through the gap in the fence. The other side of the gap there was a narrow space with a tree-stump in it, behind a rotting garden shed. Anyone sitting on that tree-stump was protected by the shed, but could see out round it into another world.
The point is, the block I live on has terraced houses along its front and its two sides, each with a garden the size of ours at the back. We live more or less at the centre of the front terrace. Then each end of the fourth side of the block, at the back, there’s a big house with a big back garden. Between these two houses, making them look a bit like lodges protecting a palace, there’s a positively enormous old house, with a garage and a lean-to shed at one side of it and a conservatory in the middle. The first time I really looked at it properly, I thought it was quite out of scale with everything else.
It wasn’t the back of the house, though, that I crept through the fence to look at that day, and all those other days; it was the huge garden. From my bedroom window you could see that this garden took up almost the whole centre of the block, rather like the central gardens in London squares. Eighteen gardens like ours, plus the two bigger ones, joined on to it, divided from it by all sorts of walls and fences and hedges, and even the end of terrace gardens each touched it with one of their corners. It was as though all the smaller plots had joined hands and were dancing around it.
I didn’t only love it because of its size, and because it was hidden in the middle of things. What really made it special was its richness and its patterns. The little gardens were all a mix and a muddle – one with a bird-table, one with a bright blue climbing-frame, one with long wild-looking grass, one with a magnolia tree which wasn’t very big but which took up all of it, one full of dahlias in summer, with upturned flowerpots on sticks among them to trap the earwigs, one with roses and greenfly – all different.
The big garden, though, was planned. It had real trees – two poplars, a pine, a pink horse chestnut and three silver birches. They stood along the sides and were too tall to block anybody’s light, except perhaps from one or two of the bedroom windows. The chestnut might have been a problem, but it was in the right-hand corner if you looked at it from my stump, and so it only overshadowed the biggish garden of the biggish house next door, which I expect could stand it.
At the end nearest to us there was a little orchard of apple and damson trees. Beyond that, moving towards the house, there was a low wall, only a foot or so high, with rock plants growing on top of it – saxifrage and aubretia. This wall was divided in the centre by two shallow, wide steps which led up to the next stage of the garden, and a great wooden pergola curved over these steps and held up an ancient rose, with such a thick, gnarled stem it was almost like a small tree. In summer it was covered in heavy-looking pink flowers.
Beyond the wall was a perfect lawn with two long narrow flowerbeds leading from each side of the pergola up towards the house, and in summer these beds were full of forget-me-nots and snapdragons and pinks. They divided the lawn into three parts, a central strip, and two squares. A dark green conifer stood in the middle of each square, looking like a tall paintbrush, and round each one was a curved white trough on spindly legs. The troughs were filled up with variegated geraniums from the greenhouse in summer.
