The Friday Tree (10 page)

At the entrance, she saw why there was no one. The high, black gates were wrapped round with their chain. The schoolyard, cold and bleak, was deserted. Brigid’s heart began beating in her throat, in her ears. She did not know how to get home by herself. She had no money. She had never stood on a street by herself, and she did not know anyone here. It began to feel difficult to breathe, and the breaths that got through were ragged and scratchy. She started to run, this way, that, up the street, down, trying to get away from herself, from the fear and the painful beating. She said what she remembered of the only prayer she liked in school: “
Oh, Angel of God, My Guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here
,” running again, saying it over, down the way she had come, towards the main road where her father had left her and, then, in an instant, she stopped. Her heart turned over. She saw, standing on the other side of the street, plain as could be, in his long tweed coat, her own father. Brigid did not hesitate. She held up her arms and threw herself towards the far side of the road.

Brigid did not see anything, not the woman opening her door, with hands to her face in horror, nor the great lorry trying to stop, screaming with effort as Brigid ran blindly across its path. Only as it managed to halt, an inch from her, did she finally see it, finally hear its screech, towering above her like a panting animal, a smell of burning rubber from its tyres, each one bigger than she was. She looked up, and up, as far as the sky. She saw a man’s face flat, wild, almost grey, his eyes filled with terror, his eyes closing, opening, his head sinking down. He was leaning over his steering wheel, staring at her, as she stood, still and surprised, in the middle of the road.

When she moved, it was not of her doing. From the corner of her eye, she saw the tall figure in its long tweed coat standing above her. Sure that it was her father, she suddenly realised that it was not and she was flooded first with despair then, immediately, with joy, as she saw who it really was. She knew this face, this dark hair with its silver wings. She knew these kind eyes. When he said, “Whoa!” she knew his voice too. The man bending down to her with arms outstretched was George Bailey, George Bailey himself, straight from Bedford Falls. Brigid relaxed as he lifted her away from the lorry, spoke to the driver, carried her to the other side of the road, and set her lightly down. Brigid, far away now from his great height, looked up at him. His hands still on her shoulders, he bent to her level, easily, long, strong legs hunkered on his heels. His voice low and gentle, he asked: “Why did you do that?”

Brigid lifted her shoulders and let them fall. His hands rested on them, steadily, without weight. “My daddy went in his car,” she said. “The school is closed. I thought my daddy had come back.”

He said nothing. His face was quiet, listening, the lines round his eyes kindly, a man who liked to laugh. Yet, he was all stillness. He looked at her so long that she thought she might fall inside his eyes, deep blue, now grey, full of light, eyes like the sky or the sea. Since her father had gone away to have his eyes healed, since Francis had gone away every day to his school, Brigid had never felt so sure of anyone as she did of George Bailey. She reached out and took his hand.

He held her lightly, safely. He said: “Brigid.”

She said: “You know my name.”

He smiled a little, and the lines around his eyes deepened. “I know quite a bit,” he said. “You live in the house near the lemonade factory, right at the edge of the town: the house with the plot and the trees behind.”

Brigid nodded. She felt her heart slow down, the sadness ebbing away. She knew how he knew, because she had prayed for an angel and got George Bailey himself. No wings, no white. Her angel was George Bailey in a tweed coat. He stood up and reached out his other hand to her. Lying in the palm were two shiny chestnuts, polished like wood, one with a rough pale piece in
the middle, the other a smooth deep chocolate that she could almost taste.

“Conkers,” said Brigid. “Thank you!”

“I’ll take you home now,” he said.

She slid her hand once more into his, and stood with him in the sharp morning until the trolleybus, its bland face impassive, slid alongside them. Brigid and George sat at ease together on the long leather seats inside the door and, this time, Brigid was close enough to the forward-facing benches to hold, as Francis had done, the smooth knob at the edge of the first seat. The silver knob beneath her hand, and the warmth of George Bailey beside her took away all fear. She relaxed as they climbed the hill, watching the road dip down to where her house was. They passed the convent and the junctions for the roads to the mountain and the city, just as she had done with her family the day they had gone to buy shoes. All was the same – the park’s green revolving gate, its sparse firs and poplars, the depot, the barracks – and Brigid felt content, at peace, as if she were with Francis. George Bailey did not speak, but to Brigid it was as though he had wrapped her in calm, so that she had no more worries. In her pocket, her hand turned over and over the silky chestnuts he had given her.

At the lemonade factory, they got off the bus, Brigid reaching her hand to him as if he were her father. He held her hand firmly as they crossed the wide road. She heard the cows in the farm’s cowshed, contented now. She too was contented: she was safe. George Bailey had saved her.

As they reached the gate, he said: “Brigid, will you promise me never to run out on the road again, whoever you think you see?”

Brigid said: “Yes. I’m sorry.”

He said: “Don’t be sorry. Just don’t do that again. Promise
me.”

Brigid nodded. “May I ask you something?”

George opened the wooden gates, and handed her in before him.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Are you really George Bailey?”

He smiled, and the kind lines deepened at his eyes. “George Bailey,” he said, and he laughed, softly. “Yes. Okay, then. I’m George Bailey.”

They were almost at the front steps.

“I knew it,” said Brigid, as he walked with her before him up the steps at the side of the house, and rang the doorbell. He was standing with her, a little behind. She could feel his warmth, the protection of his whole body. She could hardly wait to show him to her mother. Perhaps they could keep him.

The door opened. She looked up at her mother’s face, and saw that it was puzzled, surprised and afraid, all at once. “Brigid,” she said. “What on earth . . . ?”

“It’s all right, Mama,” Brigid said, happily. “The school was closed. George Bailey brought me home.”

Her mother looked hard at her, reaching out and drawing her into the house. She closed the door.

“Mama!” cried Brigid. “You shut the door on George Bailey!”

For the second time that morning, someone bent down in front of Brigid and looked deep into her. “Brigid,” said her mother, “there was no one with you.”

Brigid opened her mouth but, still holding her firmly by the hand, her mother opened the door.

“Look, Brigid,” she said.

No one was there. Brigid twisted round to look up at her mother. “He must have gone when you closed the door. He was there, Mama. He brought me home. He’s my angel. And look what he gave me!” She reached into her pocket for the chestnuts, but they were no longer there.

“Brigid,” said her mother. “I’m going to get you to bed and call the doctor. I don’t know where you’ve been, or what’s happened to you, or how you got home, but I do know when I opened that door you were by yourself on the doorstep.”

Brigid, baffled, consented to be led upstairs to her room, but she did not stay in bed. Once the door was closed, she slid down as quietly as she could to the floor, walked on careful tiptoe to the window, and looked out at the seven trees, shedding in slow spirals their last few leaves. There was the Friday Tree, its poor arms bare, and underneath, Brigid’s hazy sight could just make out the same thin trail of smoke she and Francis had seen in the summer.

Chapter 7: Cannonball

If Brigid had thought she would be quizzed about George Bailey, she was wrong. As it happened, she did not think much more about anything that evening. Waiting in her room for the doctor, Brigid became slowly conscious of something surrounding her, something that was like a headache, yet not quite. She could not describe it to the doctor when he came. She heard him sigh and tell her mother that the child was suffering from strong imagination and mild shock. It was a good thing, he said, that she was able to find her way home, but she must learn not to talk to strangers. Then he snapped his bag shut, turned to her mother, and said: “When’s the Boss in? I must have a yarn with him,” and left the room without another word. For some time, she could hear his voice downstairs, low and comforting like the men in the night, but she could not hear what was being said, and it hurt her neck to crane.

Isobel brought up tea and toast, and said she should thank her stars she was alive, if only she knew, but Brigid found she did not want to eat, and as for the stars she was to thank, they could wait. The smell of toast, even of tea, made her – or the person who was wearing her pyjamas, the Not-Brigid who was somehow beside her – want to vomit. She could not speak of this. It was all outside her, all at a distance. Even when Francis came in, smelling of the open air, she could not tell him how it was with her. Sitting on the chair close beside her bed, he seemed a long way away, his voice nearly an echo. She began to describe what had happened, about George, yet he drifted, his edges shimmering, and she soon stopped trying.

The headache grew round her, as though the whole room had become a state of pain, and she was locked inside. The light from the window grew harsh, almost blinding, but she could not remember how to get up and pull the blinds. When the light darkened to purple, and shadows played like water on the wall, there was some relief. When the purple became grey, then nearly black, she was almost glad that even Francis had disappeared, and she was to be left a little while in peace.

It was when the room became fully dark, the pain at bay as long as she did not move, that she heard a key turn in the door. Her father’s voice travelled through the stairwell, low and deep. A long time later, she heard the doctor leave, his old car rattling, spreading out in the air, then fading away. Brigid was only too willing to stay in bed as she had been told, and as she sank slowly into sleep her last thought was that nobody was interested in her morning with George, and that her father had not come up to see her.

That night she could not stay in her own sleep. Miss Chalk did not come, but others did. She heard the screaming of witches above the house, and voices spoke together, hoarse, high, singing and growling. They hurt her ears and her eyes like hot needles. Wires twisted in her head and her neck. The sheets on the bed grew wrinkled, damply writhing, an angry sea: she was a ship tossed about, and voices blew like the wind, lamenting and moaning. She tried to escape, and the floor came up to meet her. She was almost steadied by its cold, and the steel restraints of the pain: anything to be out of the terrible boiling bath her bed had become. Holding first on to the chair and then the door handle, Brigid inched her way from her bedroom. In her parents’ room, she groped her way around the wall until she reached the side of their high bed. She could see her father’s face, familiar again without his glasses, the curving arch of his nose. Her mother turned over with a sigh, her pale profile composed, even in sleep. Everything was still, except for a slight sound, a sliding, hissing sound. It was coming from the corner, the tallboy in the corner, but they did not hear. They did not waken, even when, to Brigid’s silent horror, the sound took form: from the tallboy in the corner slithered an old woman, the witch whose scream she had heard in her nightmare, and she was making her bent way through the polished wood of the drawers as if they were water, tapping with her black stick as she slid towards Brigid who, inching backwards through the pain in her neck and her back and head, somehow managed to get to her own room, back to the drunken ship in the writhing sea. Too frightened to open her eyes, she kept them shut until, at last, she dropped into a black, troubled sleep, where German aeroplanes dropped bombs from the lightshade, and the bed was no longer a wrinkled sea but a burning building in which she, the last person alive, stood helpless as the world fell away.

When she woke, she was not in her room. She heard traffic, car horns and brakes. She was in her parents’ room, at the front of the house. It was day, warm yellow light coming through the Holland blinds, all three pulled down to shade her eyes. Brigid could not look at the light. Everything hurt. Then, she saw Francis, sitting by the window with his cat’s cradle of string, but there was too much pain to speak, and her eyes wanted to close, and the light had changed when she opened them again. The sounds were quieter, and it was no longer morning. It was an evening room, and she could see the tallboy, clear now: there was no witchwoman at the moment, but her mother was there, and the square man with his snapping bag who was the doctor. He had wakened her with cold metal on her chest, and now he lifted her up, gently, to put it on her back. He wanted her to breathe, and it hurt. He had to lift her; he told her she was a rag doll. She was very tired. He bent her neck over and over until it touched her chest, and she could not tell him how it hurt. Then he wrote on his pad, and put a wooden stick in her mouth until her throat came up to meet it. She could not breathe. Her throat closed over the stick, and she began to retch. Her mother, quiet, watching, suddenly reached forward and held her at her back. The doctor took the stick away, and her mother eased away her arm. Brigid fell back on the pillows, and all the pain of the night shot through her shoulders and her head.