Lottie Project (12 page)

‘I always wondered how people wrote those little messages,’ I said. ‘Is it difficult?’

‘No, pet, it’s easy as anything,’ said Lisa’s mum, and when she had finished she let me practise icing these cookies she’d baked. I iced my name and then Lisa’s and then Angela’s. That was dead crafty, because we got to eat them!

I asked Lisa’s mum how she made the cake and she thought I was angling for a slice of that too.

‘Sorry, pet. I’m saving it for the ladies at my party. Hey, maybe your mother would like to come?’
She
hesitated. ‘I mean, just for the chit-chat at the party. I know she’s not really in a position to buy any jewellery right this moment.’

‘She goes to bed really early now. Because she has to get up at five for this new job,’ I said.

Lisa’s mum’s smooth face went into a crease of pain.

‘Oh my goodness. She’s being so
brave
,’ she said, as if Jo went and wrestled with a pit of poisonous snakes instead of one unwieldy industrial cleaner.

‘But I really would like to know how to make a sponge cake like that. We don’t make cakes at home,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s so simple. And really not very expensive. Tell your mother you just need to put the butter and the sugar and the flour in the blender and—’

‘No, we haven’t got a blender.’

Lisa’s mum stared as if I’d said we hadn’t got a
kitchen
.

‘Oh. Well. I suppose you could mix it all by hand. I know!’ She went to her shelf of cookery books beside the spice rack and pulled out an old fat book; the pages had gone a little yellow. She flicked through it.

‘Aha! This was
my
mother’s cookery book. She certainly didn’t have a blender. Yes, there’s a whole section on cake-making. Do you think your mother would like to borrow it?’

‘It’s not for Jo, it’s for me. I’d
love
to borrow it,’ I said eagerly. ‘I want to
suss
out how to make cakes. Proper ones, not the packet sort.’

‘Well, good for you. I wish my Lisa would get interested in cookery. You’re a strange girl, Charlie. You’ve always seemed such a tomboy. I never thought you’d get keen on cake-making. Still, you’re all getting older. It’s only natural you’re changing.’

‘I’m not changing,’ I said quickly.

‘What’s that saying? “Too old for toys but too young for boys.” Though my Lisa has certainly started on boys already. It’s Dave this and Dave that until we’re sick of the sound of him! Which boy do you like, Charlie?’

‘None of them,’ I said firmly.

‘Give it another six months,’ said Lisa’s mum, smiling at me.

I had to stay polite because she’d just lent me the cookery book but when I got home to Jo I moaned like anything.

‘She’s treating me like I’m retarded or something,’ I said. ‘Like I still play with my Barbie dolls.’

‘What’s wrong with Barbie dolls?’ said Jo.

She used to buy me lots of Barbies with all their different outfits and we’d dress them up and drive them round in their Cadillac and take them to the disco and make them bop up and down on their tiny high heels. I think Jo liked playing Barbie games just as much as I did. If not more. I wanted to chuck all mine out ages ago but she wouldn’t let me.

‘Store them in a drawer and keep them for
your
daughter,’ she said.

So they’re stored. I took off all their glitzy little outfits and laid them on their backs in my underwear drawer and covered them with bits of old pillow case, playing one last ritual game with them. Mortuaries.

Jo got totally unnerved when she opened the drawer looking for spare socks.

‘Have you come to view the corpses?’ I said.

‘You are a seriously weird child.’

‘It’s coming from a single-parent family,’ I said. ‘I’m seriously deprived. It’s no wonder I’m weird.’

I was only joking of course. I
like
being a select family of two. Jo and me. And that’s the way it’s always going to be.

TOYS AND BOOKS

I CANNOT BELIEVE
the toys the children have here! Victor has a dappled rocking horse as big as the old pony in the field behind our cottage at home. It’s such a splendid creature, with a curly mane and a long tail of real horse’s hair, a red saddle and reins and great green rockers. Louisa begs and begs Victor to let her take a turn but he will rarely agree. Once when the children were downstairs with the Mistress I stood staring at the rocking horse. Before I knew what I was doing I had hitched my skirts above my knees and clambered into the saddle. I fingered the curly mane and stroked the smooth shining wood, and then I dared lean forward and rock once, twice, three times. The rockers creaked and I did not dare persist in case they could hear me down below.

Louisa’s china doll seemed to watch with her blue glass eyes. Her painted red lips were open as if she might tell. But I must not be fanciful. She is only a doll. But a beautiful doll all the same, with
golden
ringlets and three sets of fine clothes. She even has little lace mittens for her tiny china fingers, imagine! I have had to help Louisa on and off with those clothes, stripping the doll right down to her white silk drawers. She has three petticoats, two silk and one flannel, and white cotton stockings and little soft kid shoes, three pairs, in black and grey and pink for parties. Three pairs of shoes for a doll that cannot walk. Rose and Jessie and I have never had soft shoes. We’d run around barefoot in the summer and plod in our old boots throughout the winter. How Rose and Jessie would love Louisa’s dolls, and the dolls’ house with all the furniture – little chairs and tables, a four-poster bed no less, and even a miniature mop and mangle in the scullery!

We had our own halfpenny dolls at home, one each in our Christmas stockings, and we’d sew them little dresses and make them a home in an old wooden crate, the same crate that was once our Frank’s boat and carriage. Sometimes I gave baby Ada-May a ride in that old crate and she crowed with delight . . .

Oh, how I miss her. How I miss Rose
and
Jessie. I even miss Frank. I miss dear Mother most of all. I write to her once a week, unburdening my heart. I hope Rose reads my letters properly to Mother. She can read well enough when she wants, but she hurries so over the words. Mother was kept at home as a child to mind her own young brothers and sisters so she never learnt to read. She used to marvel after I went to the village school and learnt to spell out words.

Miss Worthbeck let me read aloud to the children on Friday afternoons from wonderful story books,
Alice
and
The Water Babies
and some of Mr Dickens’s books. I do not wish to boast but she once said I had Shining Intelligence.

My Shining Intelligence is tarnishing rapidly now I am a nursery maid.

FAMILY

IT WAS GRANDMA
and Grandpa’s Pearl Wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks.

‘We’re not having a party,’ said Grandma. ‘That’s not our way.’ She spoke as if parties were incredibly vulgar, on a par with naked mud wrestling in pig sties. ‘We thought we’d like to celebrate the occasion with a special Sunday lunch.’ She paused. ‘Just for the family.’

She meant Jo and me. Once she was off the phone we moaned and groaned, trying to think up wild excuses to get out of it. We don’t like going to Grandma and Grandpa’s at the best of times.