The kitten was licking my fingers with a small, rough tongue.
‘I found a kitten,’ I said.
‘I can see that. She must have followed you back from the fields where you pulled her up.’
‘This is that kitten? The same one that I picked?’
‘Yup. Did she tell you her name yet?’
‘No. Do they do that?’
‘Sometimes. If you listen.’
I saw the lights of the Hempstocks’ farm in front of us, welcoming, and I was cheered, although I could not understand how we had got from the field we were in to the farmhouse so quickly.
‘You were lucky,’ said Lettie. ‘Fifteen feet further back, and the field belongs to Colin Anders.’
‘You would have come anyway,’ I told her. ‘You would have saved me.’
She squeezed my arm with her hand but she said nothing.
I said, ‘Lettie. I don’t want to go home.’ That was not true. I wanted to go home more than anything, just not to the place I had fled that night. I wanted to go back to the home I had lived in before the opal miner had killed himself in our little white Mini, or before he had run over my kitten.
The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not. The rain had become a drizzle once again.
We splashed through deep puddles, Lettie in her wellington boots, my stinging feet bare. The smell of manure was sharp in the air as we reached the farmyard, and then we walked through a side door and into the huge farmhouse kitchen.
Chapter 9
Lettie’s mother was prodding the huge fireplace with a poker, pushing the burning logs together.
Old Mrs Hempstock was stirring a bulbous pot on the stove with a large wooden spoon. She lifted the spoon to her mouth, blew on it theatrically, sipped from it, pursed her lips, then added a pinch of something and a fistful of something else. She turned down the flame. Then she looked at me, from my wet hair to my bare feet, which were blue with cold. As I stood there, a puddle began to appear on the flagstone floor around me, and the drips of water from my dressing gown splashed into it.
‘Hot bath,’ said Old Mrs Hempstock. ‘Or he’ll catch his death.’
‘That was what I said,’ said Lettie.
Lettie’s mother was already hauling a tin bath from beneath the kitchen table, and filling it with steaming water from the enormous black kettle that hung above the fireplace. Pots of cold water were added until she pronounced it the perfect temperature.
‘Right. In you go,’ said Old Mrs Hempstock. ‘Spit-spot.’
I looked at her, horrified. Was I going to have to undress in front of people I didn’t know?
‘We’ll wash your clothes, and dry them for you, and mend that dressing gown,’ said Lettie’s mother, and she took the dressing gown from me, and she took the kitten, which I had barely realised I was still holding, and then she walked away.
As quickly as possible I shed my red nylon pyjamas – the bottoms were soaked and the legs were now ragged and ripped and would never be whole again. I dipped my fingers into the water, then I climbed in and sat in the tin bath in that reassuring kitchen in front of the huge fire, and I leaned back in the hot water. My feet began to throb as they came back to life. I knew that naked was wrong, but the Hempstocks seemed indifferent to my nakedness: Lettie was gone, and my pyjamas and dressing gown with her; her mother was laying the table, getting out and arranging knives, forks, spoons, little jugs and bigger jugs, carving knives and wooden trenchers, and arranging them.
Old Mrs Hempstock passed me a mug, filled with soup from the black pot on the stove. ‘Get that down you. Heat you up from the inside first.’
The soup was rich, and warming. I had never drunk soup in the bath before. It was a perfectly new experience. When I finished the mug, I gave it back to her, and in return she passed me a large cake of white soap and a face flannel and said, ‘Now get scrubbin’. Rub the life and the warmth back into your bones.’
She sat down in a rocking chair on the other side of the fire, and rocked gently, not looking at me.
I felt safe. It was as if the essence of grandmotherliness had been condensed into that one place, that one time. I was not at all afraid of Ursula Monkton, whatever she was, not then. Not there.
Young Mrs Hempstock opened an oven door and took out a pie, its shiny crust brown and glistening, and put it on the window ledge to cool.
I dried myself off with a towel they brought me, the fire’s heat drying me as much as the towel did, then Lettie Hempstock returned and gave me a voluminous white thing, like a girl’s nightdress but made of white cotton, with long arms, and a skirt that draped to the floor, and a white cap. I hesitated to put it on, until I realised what it was: a nightgown. I had seen pictures of them in books. Wee Willie Winkie ran through the town wearing one in every book of nursery rhymes I had ever owned.
I slipped into it. The nightcap was too big for me, and fell down over my face, and Lettie took it away once more.
Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognise, although I think now that they might have been nettles, roasted carrots, blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so nearly did not eat one, but I was brave, and I tried it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood). For dessert, we had the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home.