Alligator Playground

Beggarland

BEST NOT TO ASK how old she was. Her letter had said eighteen, but she could be anywhere between twenty and thirty. Her reference had sounded all right, so Jane thought she would give her a try.

She wore a red Fair Isle jersey, tartan skirt and lace-up boots, a woollen coat over all with a slim fur collar. Maybe that was how they dressed up North. Yellowish hair straggled both sides of her face below a flowerpot hat of many colours.

‘You’d better come in.’ The last au pair had shot off at no notice to do a tour of Europe with a boyfriend, so Jane wrote to Greta whom she had previously turned down. Beggars can’t be choosers, she said to Tim, so here she was coming up the steps, thin lips tightening as she lugged a suitcase fastened with a trouser belt.

Jane led her into the kitchen, moving the Sunday papers for her to sit down while coffee was made. ‘Are you hungry? There’s bread and cheese. We don’t eat till two.’

Greta’s eyelids were almost closed, as if she hadn’t had enough sleep on the way down. ‘I am ‘ungry.’ She looked around, perhaps hoping for a bed to lie on. ‘Where’s the kids?’

‘In Holland Park, with my husband. They’ll be glad to see you when they get back, I know.’

‘I’ope so.’

Jane put a full spoon of Instant in the mug. ‘The reason you’re here is to keep them amused while I do my work. That’s the main thing. I’m working to a deadline on a book, and can’t have them scratching at my door all summer wanting to be let in.’

Greta cupped her coffee and stared at the steam. ‘My sister’s got three, so I’m used to kids. Where’s that bread and cheese, though?’

‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten.’ Too late to say she might not want her. ‘Then I’ll show you your room.’

In the lounge after dinner Tim said: ‘Where did you find that funny little thing?’

They had been married seven years, and such questions always implied that she had made a mistake. ‘Why?’

‘Doesn’t look up to much. Not like the last one.’

‘She ran out on us, remember? And I have to work, remember?’ He had been redundant for three months, though was to begin a new job on Monday — funnily enough for a bigger salary.

‘Touché,’ he said.

If she put back half a bottle of wine on her own she felt cheerful, and if he did the same while alone he turned benign, but a bottle between them always brought on a skirmish. ‘Anyway, listen to them laughing and screaming upstairs. They’ve never taken to anyone so quickly.’

‘Now then, kids, we’re going to play a game called ‘‘Washing Up’’, and the one who don’t break any pots can come to the sink and squirt in the detergent.’ Greta had lost her sleepy aspect. Her bustling body and shining eyes showed that she liked the game as well.

Jane looked in from her work. Sturdy blond Ben had the dreamy and cunning eyes of his father, while malleable and well-behaved Angela could suddenly break into hellerdom, like herself at that age. By the end of the game the kitchen was brilliant. If they were all like that from the North she couldn’t have enough of them.

‘Oh, mummy, thanks a lot,’ Ben said, when she gave Greta ten pounds to take them out. ‘You’re wonderful.’

‘Where to?’ Greta fitted them into their coats.

‘Anywhere you like.’ As long as you get them off my hands. ‘Just pop into the kitchen and make them something to eat. You needn’t come back for lunch. Then I’ll give you a map of the Underground.’

Greta made Ben leave his plastic gun. ‘Yer don’t want that.’ He would normally have argued, but put it by without a murmur. ‘We aren’t going to rob a bank!’

Funny how she could get twice as much done when the house was empty. At this rate the deadline would be easy. Then the resident neighbourhood pneumatic drill started up, and the first car alarm went off. Still, you couldn’t have everything, and double glazing cut most of the noise.

‘Mummy! Mummy!’ Ben screamed when they came in at six, a little late but better that than too early. ‘We went on the Circle Line, round and round, and played counting the stations. We passed Notting Hill Gate three times.’ He showed a pencil scrawled Tube map. ‘I went up and down the exerlators, and Angie got caught in a door.’

Greta took them upstairs for a bath, then asked would it be all right if they ate in her room? It certainly would. Jane had noted how snappy Tim was at such family meals, especially since Greta was as far from a so-called sex object as it was possible to get.

‘We’re playing ‘‘Restaurants’’.’ Ben scooped up knives and forks. ‘We’re in a caff on the M1, and Greta’s serving us.’

‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ Jane and Tim sat down to a quiet supper. ‘What a rich fantasy life they’re having.’

‘They’ll probably turn into writers.’

‘Don’t be so contemptuous.’ The arrangement was so good he was hoping to spoil it, but at least he was laughing.

Next day Ben ran to her. ‘Mummy, can we have those big boxes the stereos came in? Me and Angie want to play “Cardboard City” in the garden.’

She frowned. ‘How do you know about that?’

He squeezed her hand, as always when wanting something badly. ‘Greta took us doing hide-and-seek at the South Bank, and I saw ‘em. All those beggars in cardboard boxes! Me and Angie want to play beggars, don’t we, Angie? You can come by and give us five pee now and again.’

‘You certainly can’t play “Cardboard City”.’ Jane talked about the unfortunate people who had to live there, mostly through no fault of their own. ‘And don’t say “Me and Angie”. It’s “Angie and I”, as you know.’

Ben’s tears dropped on the sleeve of his blazer. ‘We still want to play it, though. It’s only a game.’

‘All right, but don’t make a noise.’ She looked for her purse: no use moaning about what the world was coming to when it had come to it already.

Obsessive Ben found Tim’s hiking gear and lay in a sleeping bag by the nettles, while Angela, wearing a filthy old jacket, stooped at the unlit camping gas as if cooking his stew. Greta walked by and threw them a coin. They couldn’t wait to get in the garden after breakfast, but their passion for the game came to an end, and Jane had to squash the cardboard flat and jam it in the dustbin a few days later.

‘And what are you going to do today?’

‘I’ll take ‘em to Battersea Park.’ Greta was adept at finding places on the map — considering she hadn’t got to within shouting distance of O Levels.

‘Take this, then, for ice creams and whatnot.’

She felt guilty, but work was getting done. She’d never seen them so happy and excited, on coming home from wherever Greta took them. Sometimes you would have thought they had been down a coalmine, but she soon had them naked and laughing in the bath. ‘They got over the railings and into the flowerbeds before I could pull ‘em back,’ she explained, though with no apology.

Jane soon stopped imagining there were any mysteries about her, as she had with all the au pairs till she got used to them. She was happy enough to sit in her room, sure now of meeting the deadline of her own long story. Needing more background one morning she had to go to the London Library. It was a bother, but she liked to be accurate in social and scientific details.

Traffic was piling up at the roadworks as she went into the Tube. Students from language schools mingled with countless tourists, and she had to stand all the way. A pathetic old tramp held out a hand so she gave him a pound, her vagrant tax for the day.

She could have walked the quarter mile instead of changing lines, but pushing along pavements would have been even more tiresome than the confusion of corridors and escalators. The crowds carried her along on the outside flank, by a woman with two kids at the bottom of the steps before turning left to the platform. Some good souls were clattering money into their tins, so Jane was glad not to bother because a train was ready to go.

She stood by the open door, hearing but not seeing the poor headscarfed beggar and her children calling out for money even though there was little chance from people hurrying to get in before the train left. Their voices startled her, and on bending down to look she caught a two second photo-flash before the doors closed. When she tried to see more the way was blocked by people on the steps.

Those around her must have thought she was another poor mad woman wandering the Underground looking for an unoccupied platform to leap from. She banged the door to get out, then turned her glassy eyes at the communication cord. Her grimace caused a man to lift his newspaper, either to hide behind or keep her off his territory.

Sturdy Ben, hand holding the tin, had the starvo hard-done-by pitiable face of Tiny Tim. Angela was sitting on Greta’s knee, chalk-faced and hungry, as if she hadn’t long for this world. As for Greta, Grim Greta, she dared people to go by and not drop something into a tin.

Jane thought she would faint. I’ll kill her. Her impulse was to go back from the first stop and throw her under a train. But the carriage was squeaking on its way, and as during her panic the day after marrying Tim, she told herself it would be better to have a cup of coffee somewhere and think about it calmly.

Hard to decide, she was paralysed. Minutes went by, before walking along Piccadilly and down to St James’s Square, imagining that everyone passing had seen the woman and her beggar kids in the Underground. She didn’t feel fully sane till searching for her books in Science and Miscellaneous. On her way back they had gone, probably to a scene of better pickings.

Words shied from being corralled into sentences. Luckily she was close to the end so could rehearse the grand telling off to Greta the second she came in. Sentences formed for that all right, so many that she hardly knew which to let out first.

She was making a tisane when the door was kicked open and Ben fell in. ‘Mummy! Mummy! We’re been playing beggars again!’ He wrapped himself around her legs. ‘Oh, it’s such good fun. We love playing beggars, don’t we, Angie?’

Greta came smiling up the steps clutching Angela’s hand. ‘It was all I could do to keep ‘em quiet. They saw a woman and two kids the other day on the Embankment, and gave me no peace.’

Jane’s vitriolic phrases melted. Whose fault had it been, after all? ‘Well, you aren’t to play that game again.’

Ben was ready to cry.

‘Never, you understand. Never.’

‘How long has it been going on?’ Greta was packing her case after supper. Where would she go at this time of night? Apart from that, who told her she had to leave? ‘We’ll send them to RADA,’ Tim had said, taking nothing seriously.

‘Only a few times.’

She was curious. ‘And what about the money you collected?’

‘We was saving it, to go to Southend.’

Inventive and stalwart were the words that came. It was impossible not to laugh. ‘Only to Southend?’

‘Well, I couldn’t take ‘em to New Zealand, could I?’

She laughed again. What else could you do? ‘All right, but you don’t have to leave.’

‘Don’t I?’

Was she happy to hear it, or wasn’t she?

‘I just don’t like black looks, that’s all.’

Jane took her arm. ‘Nobody does. So just stop your packing, and go up to see that the children are all right.’