Evans - Old Baggage

NOVELS

Spencers List

Odd One Out

Their Finest Hour and a Half
(motion picture released as Their Finest)

Crooked Heart

NOVELS FOR CHILDREN

Small Change for Stuart

Big Change for Stuart

Wed Wabbit

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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday

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Copyright Lissa Evans 2018
Design by Sarah Whittaker/TW
Illustration by Chris Wormell

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473527119

ISBN 9780857523624

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For my sisters:

Mary and Judy

MATTIE ALWAYS CARRIED a club in her handbag just a small one, of polished ash. That was the most infuriating aspect of the whole episode: shed actually been armed when it happened.

The New Years Day fair had been audible from the moment shed left the house a formless roar that receded as soon as she turned off the track and took the path through the woods. The quickest route to the Underground station was along the narrow lane to Hampstead, but there was (as shed pointed out to The Flea only this morning, apropos of their neighbours new motor-car) very little point in living with the Heath absolutely on ones doorstep if one didnt take every opportunity to tramp across it. Besides the exercise, it was a rare walk that didnt provide one with at least a nugget or two of brain-food, as evinced by Matties December column in the Hampstead & Highgate Express in which shed compared a dead duck, frozen into the pond, with the Prime Ministers current position. Shed been bucked by the news that the paper had already received thirteen letters in reply, several of them furious.

Last years beech-mast crunched pleasingly underfoot. It was a day of splendour, the air still, the sky cloudless between bare branches, every vista possessing the hard-edged brilliance of cut glass: all was ruled lines, crisp sounds, sunbeams like polished stair-rods a marvellously true, sharp world.

Lately, Matties view of it had been becoming increasingly impressionistic. I find I am living in a perpetual Pissarro, she had remarked to the optician. Aesthetically pleasing, perhaps, but I miss the detail.

Im afraid that a deterioration in eyesight is inevitable as we get older, Mrs Simpkin.

Miss Simpkin. And I am not yet sixty; Id really rather you didnt speak as if I were creaking along in a bath-chair.

Her new eye-glasses had restored clarity; she might now be walking through one of the landscapes of that tiresome moralist Holman Hunt.

In a tree above her there was a vicious chuckle, and she looked up to see a magpie sidling along a branch, the crown of its head marked with an anomalous white patch, like a tonsure.

Afternoon, Abbot, not seen you in the garden for a day or two. Busy dismembering blue tits, no doubt.

It cocked its head, its wicked gaze fixed upon her. Had she been responsible for naming the species, she would have chosen vigilans rather than pica as its suffix; thieves, they might be, but their watchfulness was paramount. The Abbot glanced over Matties shoulder and she turned, automatically, to check behind her.

She had not lost her own habit of vigilance; in the past, it had been imperative; in the past, she had written articles on the subject.

For those of us in constant danger of re-arrest, there is no other option. Are you certain that the fellow coming up the path is the usual postman, or might he be a plain-clothed police officer? That ordinary cove standing eyeing the goods in a shop window is it possible that hes eyeing your reflection instead? Be like Janus look before and behind; be like Argos, possessor of a hundred eyes.

For now, though, there was only the empty path, barred with shadow. Leaving the shelter of the trees, squinting in the sudden sunlight, she crossed the sandy heath towards Hampstead ponds. The fair was immediately louder, the chaos of noise separating as she drew nearer to wild screaming and the yelp of barkers, the crash and clack of flung missiles, the laboured jollity of a steam organ playing pre-war melodies, Daisy, Daisy succeeding That Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. A helter-skelter was visible, and a spinning ride, chairs on long chains whirling around a central spindle, the occupants twisting like marionettes.

Just ahead of her, a rabbit shot across the path. Ten yards behind it, a spherical Jack Russell laboured in pursuit, slowly followed by a gasping Labrador. Their owner was stationary a short distance away, paused in the act of lighting his pipe.

Did you receive the canine diet sheet I passed to your housekeeper? asked Mattie.

And a Happy New Year to you, too, Miss Simpkin, said Major Lumb, his voice carrying well in the still air. Fine weather. Shall we avoid snow this year, do you think?

They would live far longer and be much happier were they to lose several pounds.

And I would live far longer and be much happier were my next-door neighbour to stop issuing unasked-for advice. Please pass on my greetings to Miss Lee and wish her a thoroughly sanitary 1928. He tipped his hat and turned to follow the pair of animate barrels through the grass.

One meal a day and no tidbits, called Mattie at his retreating back. The only reply was a puff of yellowish smoke.

She snapped open her handbag and took out a small notebook and pencil, thumbing through to a section entitled COLUMN IDEAS.

Speaking out, she wrote. Public silence breeds private misery. Dare to be a Daniel.

She was closing the notebook again when the steam organ changed its tune: Daisy, Daisy gave way to a jaunty march and the melody looped out of the past and caught her like a snare, so that she stood with the book in her hand, her bag open, her feet nailed to the path.

As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne

With an independent air

You can hear the girls declare

He must be a millionaire.

And instead of the tapering tower of the helter-skelter, she was seeing her younger brother, Angus, his dear, handsome face lop-sided, his indented forehead like a battered tin mug, his lips struggling to supply the words. Just try the nouns this time, shed suggested, rewinding the gramophone, and hed managed a ghostly vowel for each, while shed sung the rest with desperate vigour.