“Up the foremost hill,” Sandra said. “We tried putting it on the barrow but it barged our legs.”
“Couldn’t you leave it up here?” Julian said. He looked around. “By the wall?”
“Self-caterings steal it,” Mrs. Glasse said. She clapped her hands together, to warm them, hopped from foot to foot. “Summer coming on,” she observed.
“I’m sure I could fix up something,” Julian said. “I could drive a post in behind that wall, nobody would see it, I could chain the table to it. Wrap a chain around the legs and get a padlock.”
“We never thought of that, did we?” Sandra said to her mother. “Well, we did actually, but we’re busy, we didn’t get round to it yet. It’d have to be weather-proofed, though. We couldn’t have our table rotting.”
“Perhaps Julian could build it a house,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Seems cruel to leave it out in the open air, chained up like something dangerous.”
The two women exchanged a glance. They laughed; comfortably enough. Julian felt almost comforted.
The following day, Julian went back to the Glasses’ farm. The women were very busy; Mrs. Glasse sitting by the stove, knitting in an effortful fury, and Sandra, after she had let him in, returning to her task of stuffing dozens of sisal doormats into black plastic bin-liners.
“For the market at Hunstanton,” Mrs. Glasse said. “We’re going tomorrow, we have a stall. Doormats do well, because people live amid such a quantity of mud. And basketwork of all types.”
“Where do you get the doormats?” Julian asked.
“I buy them cheap from a fool.”
“Baskets we make ourselves,” Sandra said. “She taught me. We do it in the winter when the weather keeps us in.”
“How do you get to Hunstanton?”
Mrs. Glasse rolled her eyes. “He do ask questions,” she said.
“Do you like her verb?” Sandra asked. “She does it for the tourists.”
“I only thought, with all your stuff—”
“We have a vehicle,” Mrs. Glasse said. “Of sorts. We try not to take it out more than once a week because of the summonses.”
“She got done for no tax,” Sandra said.
“We have to hide the bloody thing,” Mrs. Glasse said. “The police come down from time to time, sniffing, seeing what they can do us for. We used to have a dog, Billy, they didn’t care for him, weren’t so keen then. But he died.”
“You should get another dog,” Julian said, “if that’s what keeps you safe. I’m sure I could get you a dog.”
“No,” Mrs. Glasse said. He was sitting facing her, and he saw that her large light eyes filled with tears. She was pretty, he thought, might have been pretty, must have been. As if angry with herself, she gave the weighty knitting a push and watched it slither off her lap. “Billy wanted meat,” she said. “I used to feel sorry for him, you can’t expect a dog to get by on carrot and turnip.” She stood up. “That’s enough doormats,” she said. “We’ll bag up the baskets later on, we’ll just have a sit now and a cup of tea.”
Julian said, “I’ll come with you when you do the market. Do you have to take the table? I’ll help you load and unload.”
“You needn’t,” Sandra said. “We’ve always managed.”
“I can do anything you want,” Julian said. “I can patch up the roof if you’ve got a ladder, you’ve got some tiles off. I can do carpentry. I could put you on some new wallpaper if you want. I could lift your potatoes for you.”
Mrs. Glasse said, “Sit down, boy. There’s no need to do anything.”
Julian sat down and drank his tea. He could never remember a time when he had been commanded to do nothing—when it had been enjoined on him.
That summer, it seemed to Ralph, Sandra became a fixture in his house. She was to be found in the kitchen, occupying the rocking chair, her hands folded together, her legs tucked beneath the chair, her ankles crossed. He liked to talk to her if he found her sitting there. She had her wits about her, he told Anna, despite her quaint way of talking; she had a native clarity of mind which the educative process had not succeeded in clouding. School had been an interruption to Sandras life. She had left as soon as she could. “I didn’t see the point of it,” she told Ralph. “It was such a long way, it took hours getting there. It used to be dark by the time I got home.”
Sandra never turned up empty-handed. She brought perhaps a modest present of a lettuce, or some fresh bread; once, when they had not baked, a can of peaches from their store cupboard.
Anna was touched, then exasperated. “Sandra,” she said, “you don’t have to bring us presents. You’re welcome to come here and eat every day and stay as long as you like, nobody who comes here has ever had to pay for their keep.” No one else has ever offered, she thought.
Sometimes Sandra brought a cake; but they baked cakes only as a last resort, when they had nothing else to take to market. They only had to get their fingers amid the eggy stretch and cascading currants, to start cursing and swearing; they were fair set, Sandra said, to slap each other with their wooden spoons. Mrs. Glasse’s cakes had something sad and flat about them, a melancholy Fenlands quality. Sandra’s cakes rose, but in a violent, volcanic way: then cracked on top. How two cakes containing opposite faults could come out of an oven at the same (albeit unreliable) temperature was, Sandra said, one of the mysteries of East Anglia.
But despite their appearance, the cakes sold well enough. People like to buy the fruits of other people’s labor; they like to put the small coin into the very hand that has toiled. Julian thought that it was not the wares that drew the customers, but the women’s full, gray, mesmeric eyes.
That summer he spent market days at Hunstanton, behind the Glasses’ stall; flapping canvas divided him from neighboring stalls, from the shiny acrylic clothing, the check workshirts, the nylon leopard-skin car-seat covers and rubber mats, the cheap lace tablecloths, the bright plastic kitchen gadgets, the inflatable toys for the beach. He felt himself grow an inch taller, his hair tousled, his face sunburned, a canvas bag of change thrown across his body in ammunition-belt style. As summer ended the sea turned to the color of mud, and soon came the wind that cut through the clothes, cut to the bone, propelling the shoppers inland toward the teashops and the amusement
