luvlee and Bert comes by with Mother, who cuffs her while Bert laughs: You don’t do no grottoing ’til July, Or-dree, an you does it wiv fresh shells, not manky ones. Alluv ve uvver girls is doin’ spring gardens now, you ain’t gotta be different. She does have to be different, though, so she bundles the shells up in her pinny and Mary Jane drags her back to Waldemar Avenue, where Audrey makes her grotto by the front railings, ordering Vi and Olive to get pebbles like vese – not vose , and boxing their ears in turn. Three or four Sally Army oafs come by, just loafing, not marching, one lugging a big bass drum, the others larkin’ abaht with their horns, squelching and parping. They’re pulled up short by the unseasonable grotto – and by Vi, who’s cried so much she has smutty rings round her eyes. They give the little girls a penny and Audrey sends Vi to get a candle from Curtis’s on the corner, then she sneaks it alight from the range and afterwards is content to sit at the kerbside holding the toes of her boots warm puppies , what with it being a fine evening and the sunset catching the swags ’n’ roses so sharp, the swags and roses Mary Jane pointed to proudly, See, proper stukko . . . and the balustrades that ran along the first floor of the terrace, their pillars plump and squared off. In the gathering darkness Audrey croons the rhyme: Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year , or possibly only thinks she does in the hope that it will ward off Strewel Peter, whose cloud of orange hair rises above the chimblies opposite. How could her mother say that? When all the swags ’n’ roses were the same, all the houses were the same? How can anything be beautiful or noble or romantic when it’s the same? Farver’s gonter sea, Muvver’s gonter bringim back — She’s beef to the heels, that one! cries Arnold Collins, who works on the ’buses with Audrey’s father – eez iz conductah – and who comes along the road fulfilling the same role after hours, because Sam Death looks quite tight . The two men are carrying their work satchels and Rothschild still has his gauntlets on – he tousles her hair with his sweated-leather-and-horse smell, then cups her cheek to pull her other one up to his wet scrubbing brush . As her father bends over, his waistcoat bunches up, and his watch flops from its pocket, so that for an instant it lies cold against her clenched face. Collins stands a few feet away, thumbs in his own waistcoat pockets, cap at a jaunty angle. ’E finks isself a reg’lar masher, ’e duzz, Audrey has heard her father tell her mother, the two of them taking their ease over a glass of port wine. – There’s a marshyuness over ’Ammersmiff, a shop girl up in ve Bush. He belches, laughs, wipes his moustache. I dunno, some chap is gonna givim a pasting one of vese days – all of this said with indulgence bordering on respect. But Audrey never likes the way that Arnold Collins looks at her, his hard black eyes rolling over her hair, her chest, her ankles. Getting ready for bed in the front bedroom with the little girls, Audrey still feels those black marbles upon her – and, as the boys join them and all five Death children kneel to murmur perfunctorily, Godless Muvver, Godless Farver, Collins’s eyes are on her yet. In bed, she huddles up against Violet to avoid them while concentrating on the lantern show behind her own eyelids: dark processional shapes moving through riverside mist that are at once the marshyuness, the shop girl and also stately ladies with extravagant bonnets, bustles and parasols that transform into Just So elephants, how-dee-how-dahs waggling on their backs to a brass-band accompaniment, Oo-rum-pum-pah! Oo-rum-pum-pah! magically transmitted from the bandstand in South Park, goldschein , the world sucked gurgling into the fiery trumpet , then blown out again, when all it was, when all it was . . . was a line of cows being herded by a farmer’s boy across the scrublands
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