Little Plum Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 1

  Once upon a time there were two little Japanese dolls whose names were Miss Happiness and Miss Flower. They belonged to a girl called Nona Fell and they were her dearest possessions. Long ago – ‘Nearly a year ago,’ said Nona – when she had first come from India to live in Topmeadow with her cousins, the dolls had arrived too in a Christmas parcel from Great-Aunt Lucy Dickinson. No one knew anything about them but their names, which were written on a piece of paper in Great-Aunt Lucy Dickinson’s spidery handwriting, but the two foreign little dolls had looked as forlorn, cold and homesick as Nona herself. In settling them in she had somehow settled herself.

  Miss Happiness and Miss Flower were only five inches high; they were made of white plaster, their bodies of rag but, as Nona said, they were people. Even Nona’s cousin Tom admitted that. Their eyes were slits of black glass, they had delicate plaster noses and red painted mouths. Their hair was real, black and straight, cut in a fringe. Miss Flower was a little taller and thinner, Miss Happiness’s cheeks were fatter and her red mouth was painted in a smile. Both of them wore kimonos and had a sash high under their arms, folded over into a heavy pad at the back. On their feet were painted sandals. When this story begins they had not met Little Plum. In any case her story begins with the children – Nona and her cousins, Anne, Tom and Belinda – their surname was Fell too – it begins with the children and the House Next Door.

  Nona and Belinda’s bedroom windows looked straight into the House Next Door. The children always called it that because it had no name, besides it was so very much next door that its windows and the Fells’ had only a few yards between them. That was the Fells’ fault, as Father said. Two years ago they had to build on to their house. ‘When we bought it,’ said Father – long, long ago when Anne was a baby – ‘we didn’t know we were going to have all of you!’ A playroom had been built and over it two bedrooms for Nona and Belinda to have as their own, and it was this that brought the two houses so close. There was a hedge between them, though it was not very high, and there was, of course, the ilex tree. It was the only ilex in the road and the Fells were proud of it – a great old tree that was almost evergreen because the old leaves only dropped when the next ones were ready to take their place in August. It grew between the back corner of the Fells’ house and the House Next Door. Its trunk was in the Fells’ garden but its roots and its branches had spread; indeed, some of these almost tapped the next-door upstairs windows. ‘But it belongs to us,’ said Belinda jealously. Father had wanted to lop its branches, or even to cut it down, but Mother would not let him. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, ‘and it does give both houses a little privacy.’

  Mother and Father did not really like the House Next Door being so close, but Belinda and Nona liked to look into the rooms over the way. ‘But I wish there was somebody in them,’ said Belinda. It had been empty for a long, long time and the windows had slowly become so dirty that the children could not see past them, while the roses that grew up the wall had twined right over them. ‘It’s getting derelict,’ said Mother. Derelict means shabby, forgotten, falling to bits, and it was sad that the House Next Door must become that. ‘Why doesn’t somebody buy it?’ asked Belinda.

  ‘I expect the price is too high,’ said Father.

  ‘And I expect it would take a lot of money,’ said Mother, ‘to keep up a house like that.’

  It was true that the Fells’ house and garden would have fitted into half of the gracious white house that had a garden in front with a lawn and flower-beds and a gravel drive round them, and a big garden behind.

  ‘There are eighteen windows just in its front – I counted,’ said Belinda. ‘And in our house live Mother and Father, Anne, Tom, Nona and me – six people,’ which was not counting Mrs Bodger who came to clean every day, while in the House Next Door lived no one at all.

  ‘Poor house, becoming derelict,’ said Nona.

  Nona was nine years old, a dark, thin child. Belinda was eight, a rough, tough little girl with curly fair hair. Anne was fifteen, Tom twelve. Anne, Tom and Belinda had lived in Topmeadow all their lives. It was the suburb of a country market town, not far from London, and it was pretty, with wide streets, houses with gardens, old cottages. It still had its village High Street and its great park, as English villages have, though the park belonged to the town now. The children thought it the best place in the world to live in and it seemed a waste that the House Next Door should be empty.

  Then one September morning Belinda was late. That was not uncommon; she by no means always got up when she was told, and this morning, leaving out washing, not doing up her zip, or tying her shoe laces, she had just pulled her jersey over her head and was giving a hasty brush to her hair when she stopped, the brush still in her hand; a lorry had drawn up at the gate of the House Next Door and men in overalls with ladders, planks and buckets were getting out. Belinda watched while the men came up the path and one of them took a key out of his pocket and opened the front door. Then she saw another thing. A second man had planted a notice board by the hedge. Belinda read it and then, with the brush still in her hand, she tumbled down the stairs and burst into the dining room.

  ‘Guess what?’ she shouted. ‘The House Next Door is sold.’

  Mother, Anne, Tom, Nona all looked up at her but Father only turned over a page of his newspaper, and said, ‘Didn’t I tell you? It was sold a month ago.’

  ‘Father!’ said Belinda, and they all bombarded him with questions.

  ‘What’s their name?’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘When are they coming?’

  ‘Where do they come from?’

  And Belinda beseeched, ‘Have they any children? Have they?’

  Father read a little more, ate another piece of toast, drank a little coffee, while Belinda danced in her chair with impatience. When at last he did speak, all he said was: ‘I suggest, Belinda, you do up your zip.’

  Belinda did up her zip.

  ‘And your shoe laces.’

  Belinda tied her laces.

  ‘And go upstairs and finish brushing your hair. Yes, and you might wash your face,’ Father called up after her. ‘I can see you had cocoa last night for supper.’

  When Belinda came down, neat and tidy, Father had turned another page. She had to wait, but at last he said, ‘I believe their name is Jones.’

  ‘That’s a good ordinary name,’ said Mother.

  ‘Ah, but they are not ordinary Joneses, they are Tiffany Joneses.’

  A double-barrelled name, but it sounded most impressive; in fact, she could hardly say it. ‘Stiffany Jones,’ she said the first time.

  ‘Tiffany Jones,’ Nona corrected her, and then said thoughtfully, ‘It makes Fell seem very plain.’

  ‘He has mines in the Far East; firms in Burma and Japan,’ said Father.

  ‘It sounds rich,’ said Nona.

  ‘They must be rich,’ said Belinda, ‘to pay the high price.’

  ‘We don’t think about whether people are rich or not,’ said Mother, which was not entirely true. Nona and Belinda were to think about it a great deal in the weeks to come, but now there was something else in which they were far more interested.

  ‘Have they any children?’ Belinda asked again.

  Chapter 2

  The House Next Door was made new. ‘And how new!’ said Belinda. All that autumn other boards appeared: Mason and Perry Ltd, Builders; Goss and Gomm, Central Heating; Palmer Green Ltd, Electrical Engineers. Men swarmed in and over the house f
rom the garden to the roof, and the whole road was filled with the sound of knocking and hammering. A concrete mixer turned. Rubble and old wood, pulled-out fireplaces, pipes, cooking stove and cisterns were dumped on the lawn. Lorries came and went; the gas people arrived and a telephone van; and the pavement was taken up. Soon the ilex was covered with dust, and more dust with smells and noise came over the hedge into the Fells’ house. Mother said it was almost unbearable, but Belinda loved it. She and Nona watched all day, every day, and every day they had something new to report.

  ‘It gets intresinger and intresinger,’ said Belinda.

  A fireplace with a white mantel went in; ‘Marble,’ Nona told Belinda. The floors were sanded with a machine that made the worst noise and dust of all. Then they were repolished. Doors and windows, skirting and banisters were painted white. ‘The House Next Door has two staircases,’ said Belinda. She went in and out and had made friends with the workmen, but Nona was too shy; she only watched.

  Then other new boards appeared: Martin Moresby, Decorators, and Hall, Jones and Hall, Perfect Landscape Gardeners. Belinda was not allowed in any more; pale satined wallpapers went up, new carpets were laid in every room and on the stairs.

  ‘Must have cost a fortune,’ said Belinda.

  ‘Not a fortune,’ Anne corrected her, but Belinda nodded her head.

  ‘I heard the men say so.’ Belinda might not be able to go in but she could still look and listen. ‘Saucers and pitchers’, Father called Belinda’s eyes and ears.

  The landscape gardeners tidied the garden, pruned, cleared and weeded; made new paved walks where the old brick paths had been and dug new flower-beds. The lawns were dug up too, smoothed and turfed and rolled, their edges trimmed. The roses round the windows were cut back, and the flower-beds were filled with new plants bearing labels with strange sounding names: ‘Cystisus albus?’ asked Belinda; ‘Viburnum sterile?’ Nona wrote them down and took them to her friend, old Mr Twilfit who kept the bookshop.

  Nona was often in and out of the bookshop, and sometimes she took Miss Happiness and Miss Flower to visit Mr Twilfit. ‘You see, he helped to establish them,’ she said. He had lent her books on Japan so that she could learn to play with them properly, he had helped design the dolls’ house, ‘and he has given me all sorts of things,’ said Nona.

  He was a surprising friend of Nona, who was a timid child. ‘She was brought up in India away from people, and that made her shy,’ Belinda often explained. Most children were afraid of Mr Twilfit; he had a bad temper, a habit of roaring in his deep voice and his eyebrows looked ferocious; ‘grey caterpillars’, Belinda called them. Even she was quiet when she went with Nona to the bookshop, quiet and very respectful; ‘Mr Twilfit must be very wise, with all those books,’ she said.

  ‘Silly, he doesn’t read them,’ said Tom. ‘He sells them.’

  ‘He reads a lot of them,’ said Nona, ‘and Belinda’s right. He is wise; the wisest man I know.’ When there was anything Nona wanted to know she always went and asked Mr Twilfit.

  ‘Cystisus albus?’ he said now. ‘That’s a pearly white broom. Viburnum sterile? That’s a snowball tree.’

  ‘Why couldn’t they say so?’ asked Belinda.

  Even the garage was made new, big enough for three cars, and given doors that opened by themselves if you pressed a button, which seemed magical to Belinda; the garage had a new glass roof too, over its courtyard.

  ‘That’s for the chauffeur to wash the cars under when it rains,’ said Tom.

  ‘Will they have a chauffeur?’ asked Belinda, impressed.

  ‘Sure to; and I expect he will live in the flat over the garage. It’s being made new too,’ said Tom.

  The Tiffany Joneses, it seemed, left nothing to chance. Burglar alarms were fitted to all the doors and the downstairs windows.

  ‘Well, they probably have valuable things,’ said Anne. Then the fire escapes with curly iron steps were built each side of the house; the one on the Fells’ side was close beside the ilex tree, almost touched by its branches.

  ‘I hope they won’t ask us to lop it,’ said Anne.

  ‘They will probably like the way it screens their garden from us,’ said Mother.

  At last, just at Christmas time, the House Next Door was ready, spick and span, in fact so spick and span it made one catch one’s breath.

  ‘Just imagine if you left finger marks on that white paint,’ said Anne.

  ‘If you brought in a bit of mud on those floors,’ said Tom, while Mother said she would hardly dare to cook in the white tiled, blue and white kitchen. The garden too was uncomfortably tidy.

  ‘Suppose a ball went into one of those shrubs,’ said Tom.

  ‘If you fell off your scooter into one of the beds,’ said Belinda, ‘or rode your bicycle on the paths and went on to the new grass.’

  ‘You couldn’t ride your bicycle in that garden,’ said Nona, ‘or scooter.’

  ‘I don’t think there can be any children,’ said Belinda, but when two days after Christmas the furniture arrived, Belinda and Nona saw what was unmistakably children’s furniture – and what beautiful furniture it was. There was a pale blue bed with poles, like a four-poster, with a pale blue dressing table, chest of drawers and chairs to match. There was furniture too, for a sitting room: a school desk, a blackboard, small armchairs, bookcases and, delivered in a special van, a miniature white piano. There were toys: a big dolls’ house, dolls’ beds, a doll’s perambulator almost as large as a real one, a cooking stove, a pale blue bicycle, and all of them were obviously for a girl.

  Tom groaned. ‘We have enough girls already.’

  ‘I think,’ said Belinda, ‘there must be four or five, there are so many toys.’

  ‘But there’s only one bed,’ said Nona.

  To their great excitement, all these were carried into the two rooms that were opposite Nona and Belinda’s bedrooms.

  ‘That’s where the girl is going to sleep and play,’ said Belinda. ‘What fun! We shall be able to watch her and wave to her.’

  ‘If she will wave to us,’ said Nona, but such a doubt never entered Belinda’s head.

  Not long after the furniture, a lady and gentleman arrived.

  ‘In . . . is it a Rolls-Royce?’ whispered Belinda.

  ‘A Phantom Silver Cloud II,’ said Tom, ‘and brand new.’

  It was grey and black with dark grey leather. A gentleman was driving with a lady beside him, and a chauffeur in a grey uniform was sitting behind.

  The big car stopped at the gate: the chauffeur sprang out to open the door, but the gentleman was already out and, ‘Is that the father?’ whispered Belinda. ‘He doesn’t look like a father.’

  He was certainly not like any of the fathers she had ever seen: he was young, tall, thin, pale and far more . . . ‘elegant,’ said Nona. She and Belinda, little girls as they were, could see he was beautifully dressed. ‘I never thought of a man’s clothes being beautiful before,’ said Nona afterwards. ‘His trousers had edges,’ whispered Belinda. She meant their creases were sharply pressed. His shirt seemed to be cream coloured silk, his shoes shone, his dark overcoat looked warm and rich, and Nona thought with a pang of her uncle’s raincoat, his office suit, his old tweed coat and flannels. Mr Tiffany Jones was wearing what Belinda called a city hat, from seeing men who wore them catching the morning train to London. ‘It’s a bowler hat,’ said Nona.

  The lady looked older than he; tall too, but large, in a large fur coat, high-heeled fur boots and a red velvet hat. Her face was red too, ‘red and white,’ said Belinda.

  ‘Hush! That’s rouge and powder,’ said Nona.

  ‘Does she think it looks nice?’ asked Belinda.

  The lady had a string of pearls, and a diamond watch over her glove. Belinda and Nona saw it sparkle as she lifted her hand and, ‘I can smell her from here,’ said Belinda.

  After the Rolls-Royce came another, smaller car and in it were two women who wore white overalls under their coats; it was driven by a m
an who soon afterward appeared in a striped jacket. ‘A butler,’ said Nona, but Mother said he was more likely to be a house-man. The children could see them through the windows, hurrying about, moving furniture, carrying things, while the lady stood in the middle of each room in turn, ordering everyone about.

  The gentleman stayed out in the garden, walking about the lawn, looking at the flower-beds as if he did not like them very much. Every now and again he read one of the labels, and seemed as surprised as Nona and Belinda had been at their names.

  He heard Belinda’s loud voice and looked up, saw them behind the hedge and smiled. Even to the children it seemed a sad and absent-minded smile and, I wonder what’s the matter with him, thought Nona.

  The front door opened. ‘Harold! Harold!’ the lady called in an imperious voice that was louder even than Belinda’s. ‘Harold! You might come and help.’

  ‘My dear Agnes, I thought I should only be in the way.’

  ‘It’s your house!’ said the lady.

  ‘Then isn’t it hers? Isn’t she Mrs Tiffany Jones?’ asked Belinda.

  It seemed that she was not. The new cook had made friends with Mrs Bodger and soon the Fells knew all about the Tiffany Joneses. ‘With Mrs Bodger and Belinda, who could help it?’ as Father said. The real Mrs Tiffany Jones, it seemed, was in hospital because two years ago she had caught polio.

  ‘Polio . . . that’s the illness when you can’t move, isn’t it?’ asked Belinda. She tried to imagine what that would be like. ‘It would be terrible,’ said Belinda, awed.

  ‘Polio often does paralyse,’ said Mother. ‘How very, very sad.’

  ‘She got it in London,’ Belinda reported, ‘and Miss Tiffany Jones had to come and look after the house there, and look after the girl.’ Mrs Bodger had said there was one little girl. ‘Look after her,’ said Belinda, ‘because Mr often goes travelling, but now Mrs Tiffany Jones had been sent to . . . to . . .’ Belinda could not remember the name and said, ‘to a famous hospital there.’