“Why not, Ellen?” Josephine persisted. “Lucy will be at work, but Flora could visit Cousin Carrie. Couldn’t you, Flora? You could see the ships, the market. We’ll make up a package of food for you to leave at Lucy’s boarding house.”
She broke off as if struck by an idea.
“You’ve never had a holiday, have you?”
“Only to pick blackberries,” Flora said. “At the workhouse.”
Once a year, the children of the workhouse were loaded into two green omnibuses, one for boys and one for girls, and taken to the country to harvest blackberries. With seats inside and on top, the carriages swayed like bloated beetles. Jolted, wide-eyed, the children watched the profligate, dizzying, deafening world. Shop windows with gilt- lettered signs, delivery men, women wearing skirts with street-sweeping hems, shiny horseflesh, whip-wielding coachmen, butter-coloured stone buildings side by side like sheaves of barley…
Flora slid a lock of hair behind her ear and resumed cutting carrots on the scarred wooden block, a whole winter’s worth of carrots having been acquired in exchange for six pairs of men’s mittens. She wanted Josephine to think she had enjoyed her trip to the English countryside, with its hedge-lined fields and air smelling of wildflowers—daisies, lady’s pincushion, foxglove, poppies—names that made her think that her mother, who had taught them to her, could not possibly be dead.
Holiday…
…Matron. Handing out men’s shirts to all the children. Roll up the sleeves. Be careful of thorns. Arranging the children all along a row of blackberry bushes. Pick, pick. She walked up and down behind them, poking with her cane, and Flora saw a place where she and Enid could push through the hedge, dash into an oat field, hide in a stand of willows. Her thought. Like a flung pebble striking the matron’s head, who whirled and caught the very instant of Flora’s reaching for Enid’s hand…
Tears sprang to Flora’s eyes.
“Oh, dear,” Josephine said, watching her. “It wasn’t a holiday, was it.”
“Nor will be a visit to St. John with the likes of him,” Ellen muttered, scooping up the dough and slapping it into a greased bowl.
Mr. Tuck needed to go to St. John to purchase fittings for the little houses—tiny weathervanes and grommets, a miniature boot scraper. He needed a new knife, special varnish, bits of carpeting to cut into playing-card-sized rugs. He was leaving on the morning train and would be back at ten o’clock in the evening. He had asked Flora if she would care to accompany him.
“I think it will be fine, Ellen,” Josephine insisted. “Flora, I will phone Cousin Carrie and see if she can meet you at the train. I don’t expect you to spend the day with Mr. Tuck. Certainly not, Flora. You let him take you to the train and you see that he watches out for you on the trip down and back.”
How he had asked her, Josephine did not know and Flora did not tell.
She remembered the silence before he’d asked. The way he’d considered, his lips tight together like the mouth of a bag. He had been whittling wood, the knife held between finger and thumb, more gentle scrape than carve. She could not reconcile these tender gestures with his lean, intent body, his secretive eyes. He did not love the houses. They were matters of profit. The money-filled drawer made her uneasy and she dropped her eyes a fraction more quickly, now, and he noticed that she did so. I’m going to St. John on Friday, he had said. Wouldn’t you like to come with me. It was almost a taunt. You want to come with me, don’t you, was what he really said, like another voice whispering in her ear, telling her her own desires. He peeled her back, revealed her to herself. He looked up sideways and she thought that once again her thoughts were like a flung pebble, as when Matron had read her intention to flee.
Yet. To go somewhere!
“I would like to see St. John,” she said. She scooped the pennied carrots in both hands and dropped them into a saucepan. “I’d work Sunday to make up.”
“That’s all right, Flora. For goodness’ sakes.”
Flora looked up to see that Josephine was suddenly on the point of tears. Her voice faltered, became breathless. “You work harder than all of us combined.”
—
Flora sat with her nose to the window, the parcel of food on her lap.
“You ever been on a train?” he asked.
His hair, combed, bore the grooves and smell of pomade.
“I was on this train five years ago. The orphanage gave me a paper bag with a piece of bread and some cheese and a hardboiled egg. I had to wear a placard around my neck and people stared at me. Like as if I might steal from them. Like I were an urchin.”
“Well, you were, weren’t you. An urchin.”
“I was not. I was an orphan. Like you.”
Abruptly, he leaned across her to look out the window at the sight of a burning barn: flames bursting from a roof, running men, a rearing horse. The scene was snatched away, the snow-covered landscape resumed. He did not move back entirely. The side of his leg pressed against her. She inched sideways on the wooden seat, her shoulder cold against the glass, a draught chilling her neck.
You want to watch out for him.
He moved back to his side of the bench. He flipped his checking receipt over and over in his palm, staring straight ahead, mouth closed and tongue exploring his teeth. Flora was lulled by the regular, ratcheting movement, the floral carpet under her feet warmed by water pipes in the floorboards. Amid the close-set walls, the varnished wooden ceiling, the murmuring voices, she felt as if she were in a kind of church, a place where people were subdued by a power they could neither understand nor control. She gazed at a hat perched close before her, so close she could touch it, decorated with lacquered berries, feathers. The woman’s neck; a shadow in its
