Tortoise By Candlelight

Book 64: Virago Modern Classics

by Nina Bawden

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Coming of Age; Family Life; Friendship; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

With the ferocity of a mother tiger defending her cubs, fourteen-year-old Emmie Bean watches over her household: her amiable drunken father, her gaunt, evangelical old grandmother, her beautiful, wayward sister Alice and most precious of all, eight-year-old Oliver, who has the countenance of an angel and the ethical sense of a cobra. But with the arrival of new neighbours, the outside world intrudes into the isolated privacy of family life and Emmie's kingdom is no longer secure. Combining the guile of a young child with the desperation of adolescence, Emmie fights to stave off the changes- and the revelations- that growing up necessarily brings. Powerful, heart-rending, but never sentimental, Tortoise by Candlelight is a captivating excursion into the landscape of youth.

Release date: November 3, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 238

Sample

THE gravel pits circled the town, turning it at night into a suburban Venice, glimmering over a waste of water. Darkness hid
the scars: the gaunt, naked machinery, the illegal caravan site, the municipal rubbish tip, the new bungalow foundations.
From the evening trains, roaring across the embankment between the small, shabby stations, the commuters looked down, briefly,
at a different world: the dead, grey lakes, the living river, the long curve of Lombardy poplars, silver-lined.


The poplars were darkening as Emmie ran home. The light on their rustling tips was always the last to shiver and die. Emmie
skirted the filled-in pit, ducked under the loose wire by the notice that said Danger and ran across the tough, tussocky field,
cutting out the bend of the river. She came on to the tow-path where the houseboats, rocking a little, were lit: River View,
Home is the Sailor, Water’s Edge. Emmie ran past them on spiky legs, clutching something to her skinny chest. As the path
swung close to the road the car lights caught her face and made her eyes flash like headlamps in answer. Once past the shelter
of the trees, her dark, flannelly skirt and her dark hair streamed out; she lifted her face to the wind and looked like a
young, fierce, bespectacled avenging angel.


The tow-path ran along the back of two houses. The black water sucked and slapped in the boathouse as she thrust open the
second gate. Light streamed from the kitchen. Emmie stopped by the holly tree and cautiously parted the branches.


The robin sat on the nest warming her cuckoo but Emmie was not interested in the black, toad-like changeling. She bent to examine a small, still object lying on a leaf a few
inches below the nest. When she touched it with her finger, it twitched a little. She let the branch go, squelched up the
gritty path, paused once more, by the rabbit hutches, and flung open the back door. An elderly retriever rose stiffly and
sniffed at her skirt in welcome.


The kitchen was large; a large, deal table stood plumb centre with an open sewing machine at one end and supper for three,
egg-cups and plates, laid on a plastic cloth at the other. There was an American organ against the far wall and a blue flag
hanging from the picture rail above it. The flag had a message worked on it in yellowing silk: BEHOLD, THE LORD IS WITH THEE. The room was lit by one light hanging low; the high, sagging ceilings lurked in darkness. The light shade was fringed, the
fringe swayed in the draught as Emmie opened the door and its shadow danced on the dark wall.


Her brother, Oliver, sat on the rug in front of the wood fire and boxed with Mo. Oliver boxed one-handed, the red squirrel
fought with all four feet, kicking with his hindquarters, clinging to Oliver’s thumb with his front paws, with his strong,
stumpy thumbs and long toes. He chattered and nipped with his teeth.


‘We’ve had four rounds,’ Oliver said. ‘I’m winning.’

The squirrel was eight months old, Oliver eight years. He was small for his age and fair, with hair like soft, white cotton.
A pale fringe of thick lashes hid his eyes. He was gentle and obstinate and untrustworthy. His smile was sweet.


‘You haven’t cleaned the rabbits,’ Emmie accused him.

His smile remained sweet. He simply looked down and away. The light glinted on his lashes, on his beautiful, bent head and
Emmie watched him, raging. She loved him as she loved all her family – deeply, from the soul and with a fierce intolerance.


‘And I didn’t say you could play with Mo,’ she said. He hummed insolently under his breath. Emmie put her big leather notebook
on the table and dived at him. Her weight bore him down. He rolled over on his back like a puppy, smiling up at her as she
pinned him to the rug and sat on his stomach. Nervous as a Victorian miss, Mo ran up the dresser like a flicker from the firelight
and perched on the top shelf, chattering his alarm.


‘I’ve been sick,’ Oliver said plaintively.

Their grandmother, Mrs Bean, came in from the scullery. ‘Brought up his dinner,’ she said. ‘Get off him.’

She was very tall and so thin that her body moved like unfleshed bone beneath her loose jumper suit of handwoven wool. She
wore long, dangling rows of beads, coral and amber, not as decoration but from habit: she had worn them since she was a young
girl. Her grey hair was hidden beneath a man’s fishing hat of blue and green tweed. She had once been a fine, big woman, a
singer; now where Emmie was flat, in the chest, she was almost concave. She was deaf, going blind, but her voice was still
deep and rich as a good bell.


Emmie stood up reluctantly. She said, glaring at Oliver, ‘Didn’t he go back to school this afternoon?’

‘Miss Carter sent me home,’ Oliver said. He watched Emmie slyly and when his grandmother sat down, slid on to her bony lap.

‘He should’ve gone back. You know he can be sick when he likes.’

‘He’s got a nervous stomach,’ Mrs Bean said, half apologetically.

‘Only when it’s something he doesn’t want to do. Or when he’s done something he shouldn’t.’

Emmie chewed at her lower lip. There was a tingling feeling all over her body like a thousand tiny electric shocks under her
skin. She knew what Oliver was likely to have done. The look she shot at him said – just wait till I get you alone. Oliver
stared back at her triumphantly: he was safe for the moment and didn’t look beyond it. Then her threatening expression defeated
him. His lashes came down like a muslin veil and hid his eyes.


‘It’s bad for him to get away with things.’ Emmie’s voice was loud, her indignation flew like arrows. She had a sense of immense
responsibility for others. It didn’t worry her: she was too young to feel burdened, too young to doubt her own strength or
be frightened of failure. She was fourteen and not frightened of anything very much except water and drowning; the things
that drain the spirit out of people, illness and pain and hope deferred, had not touched her yet. Her youth gave her a false
air of certitude and strength. ‘You know what he’s like,’ she said inflexibly.


Oliver wriggled on Mrs Bean’s lap, he was too heavy for her, but she rocked him gently. Beneath Emmie’s stern gaze they became
a useless old woman and a child who couldn’t be trusted. Perhaps that wasn’t so far from the mark either, Mrs Bean thought,
and sighed. All her life she had been a tough, nerveless woman, so healthy that she had never noticed her body any more than
you notice an efficient and enduring piece of machinery. Her husband and two of her sons were dead but if she had ever thought
of death for herself it was with her head, as young people do, not with her stomach. Until she was seventy she had avoided
most of the physical inconveniences of being alive. Now, suddenly, old age had struck at her with its long cavalcade of indignities;
her eyesight, her hearing, even her endurance had begun to desert her, creeping away one by one like rats leaving a doomed city. She wasn’t finished yet but she felt like a shell, a
framework; everything was still there, but reduced to the thinnest lines.


She said, ‘I expect I should have sent him back. But you can’t always do the exact, right thing, Emmie. You can only do the
best you can. And trust in the Lord. He guides His children.’


Normally Emmie was indulgent towards her grandmother’s piety, treating it rather like a child’s belief in Father Christmas.
But in this situation it seemed unhelpful. ‘He doesn’t keep much of an eye on Oliver,’ she said crossly.


‘Now, Emmie …’ Mrs Bean’s voice was more placating than reproachful. Above Oliver’s cottony head her face looked like a skull,
a beautiful, pale, strong skull.


Emmie looked at her. She said, suddenly scared, ‘You all right, Gran?’

Oliver heard the change in her voice and knew her attention was diverted. Thankfully, he slid off the old woman’s lap and
went to the dresser to get his scissors and the remains of the morning newspaper. He had already cut out all the people in
the photographs. He laid them out on the rug and began to snip their heads off, one by one.


Mrs Bean said, ‘A bit tired. I’ll live.’

Emmie shifted from one damp foot to the other. The exhaustion in her grandmother’s face terrified her and at the same time
roused up all her bursting love, so that she felt as if her throat was swelling up. She wanted to wrap her grandmother’s head
in her thin, strong arms and hold it close for hours. She said in a choking voice, ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea, then?’


Mrs Bean saw the expression on her face and heaved herself up out of her chair. ‘Heavens child, I’m all right. You’d better change your socks. You’re slimed up to the knees.’


‘I went in a puddle near the pits. There’s a pair of grebes nesting.’

The tightness left Emmie’s throat and she breathed out slowly, with relief. There was nothing wrong, after all. Gran wasn’t
ill, only old, and she had been old for years. ‘What’s for supper?’ she said.


‘Eggs. But get yourself dried off first. Then you can come and make the cocoa. Alice has had hers. She wants to get out.’

‘Not again?’ Emmie said with disgust. ‘She’d better go before Dad comes in, then. You know what he’ll say.’

‘That’s not your business, Emmie.’

‘He’ll be back early. He said he’d help me with my Latin.’

‘You know better than to count on that,’ Mrs Bean said shortly, and went into the scullery.

Oliver looked up from his murderous ritual on the rug. ‘He never comes back when he says. He forgets and goes to a pub.’

‘Oh shut up,’ Emmie said. ‘He has to go to pubs because all journalists go to pubs. It’s where you pick up contacts. I expect
if he’s late it’s because he’s met someone important who wants him to write something.’


She thought that she did not really believe this and felt, suddenly, sad and ashamed as if she had done something wrong. Frowning
with a kind of embarrassment, she picked up her notebook from the table and held up her wrist for the squirrel who jumped
off the dresser and ran up her arm to sit on her shoulder and bite her ear.


‘He’s got fleas,’ Oliver said. ‘I wish I could catch a flea and train it. Do you think I could catch one of Mo’s fleas, Emmie?’

Emmie ignored him and left the kitchen, chirruping to Mo. It was dark in the hall and there was a cold, sweet, dusty smell
which Emmie did not notice any more than she noticed that the house was dark and Victorian and dilapidated. She knew it needed
painting but her father had said it was not worth painting a rented house, certainly not one that was due to be pulled down
in two years when the gravel pits expanded into the field beside it.


The thought of the house being pulled down hurt Emmie like the thought of someone dying. The house was beautiful and familiar
to her and she loved it uncritically; the big, shabby kitchen, the solid oak staircase with the slippery, carved banister
rail, the lovely, red glass above the front door. She even liked the two large rooms at the front which the laurel bushes,
pressing against the church-like windows, turned into mysterious, green caves. These were not rooms for living in; Emmie went
into them when she wanted to be alone or, sometimes, to look at the birds. The walls were covered with photographs of living
birds; on the tables, on the roll top desk, on the bookcases – on every available piece of massive furniture there were glass
cases of dead, stuffed birds. They had belonged to her grandfather, the ornithologist; the photographs had been taken by his
daughter, the children’s mother, the author of Now Calls the Kittiwake, Little Eagle of the Fastness, and Fly, Lovely Ghost – the story of a mute swan. Over the unused grate with its dusty fan of red crêpe paper, there was an enlarged snapshot of her with the tame swan they
had had one year. For a little while it had hung in the girls’ room but Emmie had put it back in its proper place after Alice
had taken it to bed with her and cried over it, late one night.


*

When Emmie went into their bedroom at the top of the house, Alice was standing in front of the cheval mirror. She was only
two years older than Emmie, but it could easily have been ten. She was fair, a warm, creamy girl, plump and soft-eyed like
a romantic eighteenth-century portrait of a flower girl. Just now, she was wearing a pair of black nylon tights and nothing
else. She had a roll of sticking plaster and a pair of scissors in her hand.


Emmie plumped down on the edge of the double bed and Mo jumped from her shoulder to run, squeaking, backwards and forwards
under the eiderdown.


‘His back itches,’ Emmie said fondly. She pulled off her soaking socks. Underneath her legs were grey and slimy.

‘You smell like a sewer,’ Alice said.

Emmie wrinkled her nose. ‘The fledgling’s out of the nest. That’s the last one.’

‘Did you put it back?’

‘What’s the use? It’ud only be pushed out again. It was still alive, though. I touched it.’

Alice gazed at her reflection. ‘How awful.’ Her eyes filled with tears: she wept easily, at any conventionally sentimental
situation. ‘The mother bird must be so upset,’ she said, admiring her sad face in the glass.


‘Not her.’ Emmie wiped the mud off the soles of her feet with the wet socks.

Alice said reproachfully, ‘How would you feel if the baby you loved was pushed out of the nest?’


‘Birds don’t love,’ Emmie said. ‘They only feed their babies because they gape. That’s why the insides of their mouths are
such a nice colour. Cuckoos’ mouths are awfully pretty – a lovely, bright yellow.’


Alice wasn’t listening. She seldom listened to answers that were more than two sentences long. She was leaning forward, holding her bare left breast in one hand. With the other, she stuck a piece of sticking plaster on one side of the
breast, passed it underneath and drew it carefully upwards on the other side so that the breast jutted out like a milky cone,
pink-tipped.


‘What on earth are you doing?’ Emmie said.

Alice mumbled as if she had pins in her mouth. ‘My bra’s no good. It pokes. The poke shows under my sweater.’

Emmie gasped. ‘You can’t go out with nothing on underneath.’

‘Who’s to know?’

Emmie opened her mouth and shut it again. She watched Alice: the tongue curling between pink lips, the light from the hanging
bulb above her shifting on the smooth skin. Like silk, thought Emmie, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t like anything except young,
washed skin, gleaming like pearl. But pearl’s too hard, she thought. She took off her glasses, frowning and rubbing the bridge
of her nose where it itched. Her eyes were cobalt blue. They had a stern, watchful expression as if she were constantly on
guard, like a woman with small children.


‘You’re going out with Dickie,’ she said.

Alice nodded. She had finished strapping up the other breast and surveyed her outrageously deformed image in the glass. It
seemed to satisfy her; she wriggled into a tight, short skirt, pulled on a white cotton sweater and turned sideways to look
at her profile.


‘You look disgusting,’ Emmie said. ‘What d’you think Gran will say?’

‘She won’t see.’

‘She’s not as blind as that,’ Emmie said contemptuously.


Alice hesitated. The three-quarter view was startling. ‘I’ll put on my leather thing,’ she said. She took a grubby green coat off the hook behind the door and slipped her arms into it, blushing a little.


‘You’ll have to keep it on all the time, you’ll be indecent otherwise. And it’s too hot.’ Emmie put back her glasses and gave
them a little push. They were too big across the bridge of her nose. ‘What if Dad finds out where you’ve gone? He’ll raise
hell.’


Alice gave her a cold look. ‘He won’t know unless you tell him, will he?’

‘Why should I always have to tell lies for you?’

‘You always have. Why should you get squeamish now?’ Alice’s expression became dreamy. ‘Anyway, he’d like Dickie once he really
got to know him.’


‘Fat chance of that! You know why he doesn’t like Dickie.’

Alice went fiery red. ‘It’s not fair,’ she said passionately. ‘Dickie’s not a bit like his father. He’s been to technical school and he’s got ambitions – he’s
not going to stay at the gravel pits all his life. It’s just good money at the moment and he’s got a responsible job being
a pontoon man.’ She added bitterly, ‘The trouble is, Dad wouldn’t know what a responsible job was.’

Emmie sighed but did not contradict her. There was no point. Alice was fond of Dad but she did not respect him. She listens
to Gran too much, Emmie thought – Mrs Bean did not think much of men. Emmie would have laid down her life for her grandmother
who was the warm centre of her world, its heart and stability, but she knew she was sometimes wrong, that she was wrong about Dad. She didn’t understand him. Creative people were always misunderstood, Dad said. One day he would show them
all, Emmie was sure of it, though sometimes she wished he would hurry up and do it soon.


She sat, hugging her thin arms round her thin knees and watched Alice brushing her hair. She said, ‘What about your homework? You shouldn’t go out if you haven’t done your homework.’
She knew it was no good: Alice would do what she wanted as she always did, managing to be both stubborn and light-hearted
at one and the same time. She was a calm, sensual, slow-moving girl who avoided difficult situations and got other people
to do things for her. Her teachers said she was lazy but Emmie knew that she simply saved her energy for the things she thought
important: eating, sleeping, dreaming about being a nurse. Emmie said, ‘You’ll never pass the hospital exam if you don’t work.’


‘I’ll pass,’ Alice said. ‘D’you think I’d go out if I thought it’ud make any difference to that?’ She lifted her hair back over her collar and took a last look in the glass. The down glinted on her short, very pretty upper
lip. She wore no make-up and the light washed over her skin like oil.


Emmie swallowed. Alice was so beautiful that she wanted to cry. ‘I don’t see why you have to go out.’

Alice gave her a kindly glance. ‘You will one day.’

‘It spoils everything,’ Emmie said. She sat, hunched and miserable. Dickie was new, Alice going out in the evening was new.
Emmie was not used to it yet, she thought she would never get used to it. She wished she could keep all her family safe inside
the house, isolated from the indifferent world. ‘I wish we all lived on a desert island,’ she said.


Alice leaned across the bulky chest of drawers that stood in front of the sash window and drew back the curtains. She could
only see her own reflection. ‘There’s new people coming next door,’ she said as she hoisted herself up on to the chest. ‘Dr
Rapier’s going to Corsica for six months. Mrs Hellyer told Gran.’


‘Bad luck,’ Emmie said. Ever since Alice had had her tonsils out she had been mad about doctors, about nurses, about anything to do with the medical profession. She loved the
smell of hospitals, sniffing the air with excitement whenever she went into one, like an animal returning home. For pleasure,
she read back numbers of The Lancet begged from the Rapiers next door.


‘There’s some other people coming,’ Alice said. ‘Friends from Africa.’ She cupped her hand against the glass and looked down
into the road. ‘There’s Dickie.’ Eyes alight, she tumbled down and made for the door.
. . .