Moving Day (Based on Mary Renault's The Charioteer)

This was the day they were to pack the trunks.   Laurie had been told it twice the day before; but it was impossible to wrap his mind around the idea that they were really leaving home to go and live with his grandfather.   Crates of straw had been delivered the previous week, and many of the things from the living-room and his mother’s room had disappeared inside.   Yet somehow home remained stub­bornly unaltered.  After all, his toys were still in their cupboard and his clothes in their drawers in the chest.   So his mother’s words of warning slipped through one ear and out the other, leaving no impression behind.
        For a while, the little boy played unheeded in the front hall.   Then he wandered down to the kitchen.   The cook was sorting out the best saucepans to take to her next position, and her suitcase stood by the back door beside a basket.   Something lay at the top, wrapped in a cloth.   Curious, he went over to find out what it was, and was turning the corners back to discover the last of the Christmas fruit cake when she turned and saw him.
        “Would you like a bit of that?” she asked cunningly.   “You sit yourself down and keep your mouth for the cake, and I’ll cut you a good slice.”   Understanding only the offer, Laurie scrambled onto one of the wooden chairs, while she fetched a knife from the bottom of the basket.
        Last December, his mother had said that it was far too rich for a child his age.   His father had demurred.   But, even though Christmas comes but once a year, she had been firm; and Laurie had had to content himself with nursery fare.   Now he had a chance to admire the cake as it deserved, dark as gingerbread, thick with fruit and nuts, and—he lifted it to his nose—fragrant with all the spices of the Orient.   He carefully bit off one small corner and chewed slowly, savouring the cherries, peel, and almonds as he encountered them, and saving the icing-covered marzipan for the last sweet bites.   Ignored behind him, the cook ransacked the pantry.
        When his mother came downstairs calling for him, Laurie quickly brushed down his front:   eating between meals was not permitted.
        She told him firmly to go upstairs:   he was to pack his toys himself.  He clambered from the chair and left the kitchen, while she remained to give instructions to the cook about the movers.
        An open trunk now stood in the centre of the nursery.   When he looked inside, he saw that it was half filled with his clothes, neatly folded at the bottom, with tissue paper laid between the layers.   To be quite sure of what he was seeing, he checked the drawers of the chest.   They were indeed empty; furthermore, the bed had been stripped of its sheets and blankets.
        They must be moving.
        Chilled, he opened the door of the toy cupboard.   At least here all was normal.   The upper shelf still held the row of books that he wasn’t old enough for yet, and below them were his engine and toy sailboat, three picture books, a bag of marbles, a set of wooden blocks, the stuffed bear, the jack-in-the-box, the Noah’s ark, a gaily painted top, and a box with two jigsaw puzzles in it, though one of them was missing a piece.   He did not take them out.   They belonged there, unless he took them out to play; they did not belong in the trunk.
        “Laurie, have you started packing yet?”   His mother’s voice wafted up the stairs.
        There was no help for it.   The decision had been made—over his head, as all important decisions were made.   Laurie’s lower lip trembled a little as he took the sailboat over to the trunk, leant over and down, and dropped it onto the folded clothes.   He walked back and reached down the blocks, piling them into his arms, clutching them as he crossed the rug.
        His mother came in as he tumbled them down onto the little boat.   “Oh, not like that, darling,” she cried.   “You’ll break the mast!”
        She picked the boat up out of the trunk, and wrapped it in tissue.   He realized that there was a stack of it beside the trunk for this purpose.   He hadn’t noticed.   He plodded back and forth fetching his toys for her, while she wrapped them and laid them away.
        When he stretched up on tiptoe to get down the first of the books, his mother stopped him.   “No, leave them,” she said sharply.   “You don’t want those.   We’ll get you new ones when you’re old enough.”
        He looked at her in disbelief.   The books were a legacy.   They had been his father’s; and, when he grew old enough to read them for himself, they would be his.   Laurie knew that his father was in disgrace:   it was why he’d left.   But it had never occurred to him that his father’s books might equally be banished.
        His father had gone—and he was never coming home.
        Somehow, up till now, it had never quite seemed to Laurie that his father’s departure could truly be final.   After all, as a newspaperman, he often went away covering a story.   His absence this time had almost seemed only another trip abroad.   Longer than usual, certainly; but it had been easy to hope that there would come some indefinite time when he would return.
        He would never see his father again.   Grief welled, and he had to sniff up hard as it overflowed.
        His mother heard him, and turned round.   “Oh, Laurie,” she said, exasperated.   “Honestly, they’re just books.”   She gave him a firm admonishing look.   He was letting her down.   “It’s beneath you to act like this,” she told him.  “You’re far too big a boy to be crying.”
        Laurie was astonished that she could have so mistaken his grief.   He stammered incoherently, his face still streaming.
        But, as he struggled for self-control, it dawned on him that he dared not explain her error.   His mother would be most displeased.   Laurie thought, horrified, that he might himself be banished from her company, just as his father had been.   Perhaps he would be left behind in the empty house with the books.
        “Oh!” he heard his mother exclaim.   She sounded annoyed.   Bewildered, he saw her pounce on the trunk and start to whisk out the contents, first the blocks and boat and other toys, and then the neatly folded stacks of clothes.   “Oh, really, Laurie!”   He wiped his face on his sleeve, and thrust a hand into his pocket in a vain search for a handkerchief to blow his nose.
        “They’ll have to go on the bottom,” she said, her voice sharp with irritation.   “They’re too heavy to lie on top of the other things. They’ll crease the clothes and break your toys.   Really, Laurie,” she turned to him, her arms full of his underclothes, “if you wanted to take the books that much, you should have said so earlier, before I started packing.”
        Supplied with a clean handkerchief from the trunk, Laurie made his way along the landing to the bathroom, where he stood on the stool to turn the tap. There was no flannel.   It must be packed.   He wet the handkerchief and used it to wipe his face, feeling very grown up and responsible.   He returned to the nursery to find that his mother had packed the dozen or so books, covered them well with tissue, and put his clothes back inside.   “Where have you been?” she asked.   He showed her the wet handkerchief, which she took from him gingerly.  “Did you turn off the tap?”
        When she returned, the rest of the packing took a remarkably short time.
        Then there was a creaking on the stair, and the cook at the door, and his mother got up from locking the trunk, and went downstairs to give instructions to the movers.   Laurie was usually fascinated by workmen, with their boots, but he did not follow her down.   He had another concern.   In the repacking of the trunk, he had seen all its contents turned out onto the floor.
        He looked around.   There was nothing on the top of the bedside cupboard, not even the saucer for the night-light; but he had seen it in the trunk, wrapped in tissue.   The nursery chamber pot with its painted bunny rabbits had also been packed, though he’d been too old to need it for months now.   Laurie opened the door anyway, not at all surprised to find the cupboard empty.
        He crossed the room, and stretched on tiptoe to peer at the top of the chest.   Then he dragged out the drawers, though he knew perfectly well that everything that was supposed to be in there had been taken out and packed.
        The sense of urgency grew.   Then he remembered that haste makes waste (a proverb that had occasionally been made personally relevant), and thought of the speed with which his mother must have been packing while he had been downstairs in the kitchen eating his slice of cake.   He returned to the bedside cupboard and pulled until he had managed to pry it away from the wall; but, when he peered into the shadow behind, he still did not see anything.
        Downstairs, the movers were shifting the boxes in the ground floor rooms out to the cart in the street.   He could hear them, minding their words in his mother’s presence.   Any moment now, they would be coming upstairs to collect the locked trunk.
        Desperately, Laurie checked inside the bedside cupboard again, though he knew it would still be quite empty; and then—an inspiration—he got down on his stomach to look under the bed.   Nothing.
        He looked round. Where could they be?   She must have packed them, she knew what they meant to him.   Yet he knew they were nowhere in the trunk.   The blue and gold cap from his father’s broken fountain-pen; the knob of pink quartz from his mother’s old hatpin; the smoothly frosted piece of sea glass; and the big and beautiful, red-and-blue twist marble, so much more special than the ordinary ones in their small cloth bag.   She couldn’t have thrown them out!
        Could she?
        Laurie looked around the room desperately.   His mother had explained that the furniture was rented with the house and would be staying in town when they left.   Everything was still there, except the clothes and bedding:   bed, chest, bedside cupboard, lamp, curtains, rug...everything.   Except....
        The wastepaper basket.
        Quickly, Laurie went into the next room.   The basket there was missing too. Had his mother packed them?   Were they tucked into one of the big boxes? He thought:   if she’d taken them, it wouldn’t be with the rubbish still in them. Surely, she would have emptied that out first.
        Rather than pass the open door of the living-room where his mother was instructing the movers which room to clear next, he hurried down the back stairs, one hand pressed against the wall for support, since there was no bannister. At the bottom was the kitchen.   The cook and her perquisites had already departed.  Laurie ran through unhindered, and out the back door to the alley where the dust bins lived.
        The dustmen came early, far earlier than his mother rose.   They were as early as the cook, who had to light the fire and prepare breakfast. Anything his mother had thrown out should still be here.   Laurie desperately pried the lid off the nearer bin, and tried to peer inside.   It was far too high.   He grasped the rim and pulled, trying to tip it over.   It passed its centre of gravity and fell, hitting his foot, and rolling sideways against the wall.
        He got down on his knees on the paving, and crawled in head first, scrabbling out the contents; and then he searched through the ashes, egg shells and bacon rinds, scrumpled paper, shards of china, and empty bottles.   His treasures were at the bottom of the second bin, where their small size had sifted them down under larger debris.
        One by one he picked them out, rubbed them clean on the grey flannel of his short pants, and stuffed them in the pocket.   He knew that only he would care to keep them safe; and there was nowhere else he could think of that could possibly be safer than that.
        All the way to the station in the cab, he sat beside his mother with one hand in his pocket to be sure.
        As they waited on the platform for the train, and found their seats, he kept slipping his hand in to check that nothing had fallen out.
        In the carriage, as he looked at the picture book his mother had packed for him, his hand stole in his pocket when she wasn’t looking.
        When they arrived at Little Broughton, and she talked to the porter about having the trunks sent to the cottage, he stood with his hand in his pocket until she turned, and told him sharply not to slouch like a common little ragamuffin but stand properly and remember he was supposed to be a young gentleman.
        The village was too small for a cab, and they walked along the cobbled street to his grandfather’s cottage, just as they had when Grannie died and they came to say good-bye and stayed for the funeral.   This time, they would not be going home afterwards; and Laurie was hard put to it to stammer his greetings to Granddaddy when he came out of his study.   The straight-backed grey-haired old soldier looked down at him sternly, as he always did; and Laurie once again sought the consolation of his secret treasures for reassurance.   Laurence Lethbridge stifled his annoyance at the sight of his namesake
standing insolent with his hand in his pocket.
        “His hair is very red,” he greeted his daughter.   “Just like his father’s.”
        Laurie clutched the cap of the fountain-pen hard.
        “He’s only a little boy,” his mother said, weakly.
        Laurie was taken to wash his hands and face, and then ate a cold supper that had been left for them by the woman who came to clean.   His mother took him up to the bedroom that would now be his, which had been Great Uncle Edward’s when he was a boy.   She helped him unpack the suitcase that she had brought for him, and told him to get into his pyjamas and brush his teeth.   After he had said his prayers and been tucked in, she knelt by the bed.
        “I know it seems strange now, darling,” she said.   “But you’ll get used to living here, and come to love it.   You’ll see.”
        “I’d rather go home,” Laurie whispered, knowing it was futile.
        “Oh, no, you don’t really, you know,” she said.   “In a day or two you’ll forget all about it and want to live here, won’t you?”   She gave him that sweet, winsome smile that said Mummy knew what he wanted far better than he ever could.   “Granddaddy needs us now that Grannie has gone.   I’ll take care of him, and”—she smiled with a false gaiety that bewildered him—“you’ll take care of me!   How about that?”
        All he could do was nod, and watch her go out of the room.   The trunks had not yet been delivered, and so there were no night-light candles.   She left the door open so that light might filter upstairs and into the room.
        After he had listened to her feet going down to the ground floor and into Grannie’s sitting-room, Laurie lay awake for a long time in the strange bed with its unfamiliar bumps, looking out through the many-paned window where twigs tapped, trying to get in.   In the country quiet, he had no difficulty hearing the voices downstairs.
        “I’ve got the arrangements in hand,” he heard Granddaddy say.   “Don’t worry about the details.   At least the fellow has the decency not to drag the business out, despite his religion.   What you ever saw in him, I don’t know.   Should never have let you go off like that, war or no war!”  There was a muffled murmur from his mother.   Laurie couldn’t quite make out the words.   Then Granddaddy’s voice, clear and loud, “Just wish your mother could have lived to see you come home.”
        Home.   This wasn’t home.
        Laurie rolled over, burying his face so the pillow could swallow his tears.  Home had to be here now, and here was strange; and he would never be going home ever again.
        The comfort of his father’s fountain-pen cap was in the pocket of the short pants folded over the chair across the room; but Laurie did not get up to fetch it, and hold it in bed with him.   It wouldn’t do any good.   How could it?   He didn’t live there any more.