Трейси Шевалье - Falling Angel

The girl reminded me of my favorite chocolates, whipped hazelnut creams, and I knew just from looking at her that I wanted her for my best friend. I don’t have a best friend, and have been praying for one. I have often wondered, as I sit in St. Anne’s getting colder and colder (why are churches always cold?), if prayers really work, but it seems this time God has answered them.

“Use your handkerchief, Livy dear, there’s a darling.” The girl’s mother was coming up the path, holding the hand of a younger girl. A tall man with a ginger beard followed them. The younger girl was not so pretty. Though she looked like the other girl, her chin was not so pointed, her hair not so curly, her lips not so big. Her eyes were hazel rather than brown, and she looked at everything as if nothing surprised her. She spotted the boy and me immediately.

“Lavinia,” the older girl said, shrugging her shoulders and tossing her head so that her curls bounced. “Mama, I want you and Papa to call me Lavinia, not Livy.”

I decided then and there that I would never call her Livy.

“Don’t be rude to your mother, Livy,” the man said. “You’re Livy to us and that’s that. Livy is a fine name. When you’re older we’ll call you Lavinia.”

Lavinia frowned at the ground.

“Now stop all this crying,” he continued. “She was a good queen and she lived a long life, but there’s no need for a girl of five to weep quite so much. Besides, you’ll frighten Ivy May.” He nodded at the sister.

I looked at Lavinia again. As far as I could see she was not crying at all, though she was twisting a handkerchief around her fingers. I waved at her to come.

Lavinia smiled. When her parents turned their backs she stepped off the path and behind the headstone.

“I’m five as well,” I said when she was standing next to us. “Though I’ll be six in March.”

“Is that so?” Lavinia said. “I’ll be six in February.”

“Why do you call your parents Mama and Papa? I call mine Mummy and Daddy.”

“Mama and Papa is much more elegant.” Lavinia stared at the boy, who was kneeling by the headstone. “What is your name, please?”

“Maude,” I answered before I realized she was speaking to the boy.

“Simon.”

“You are a very dirty boy.”

“Stop,” I said.

Lavinia looked at me. “Stop what?”

“He’s a gravedigger, that’s why he’s muddy.”

Lavinia took a step backward.

“An apprentice gravedigger,” Simon said. “I was a mute for the undertakers first, but our pa took me on once I could use a spade.”

“There were three mutes at my grandmother’s funeral,” Lavinia said. “One of them was whipped for laughing.”

“My mother says there are not so many funerals like that anymore,” I said. “She says they are too dear and the money should be spent on the living.”

“Our family always has mutes at its funerals. I shall have mutes at mine.”

“Are you dying, then?” Simon asked.

“Of course not!”

“Did you leave your nanny at home as well?” I asked, thinking we should talk about something else before Lavinia got upset and left.

She flushed. “We don’t have a nanny. Mama is perfectly able to look after us herself.”

I didn’t know any children who didn’t have a nanny.

Lavinia was looking at my muff. “Do you like my angel, then?” she asked. “My father let me choose it.”

“My father doesn’t like it,” I declared, though I knew I shouldn’t repeat what Daddy had said. “He called it sentimental nonsense.”

Lavinia frowned. “Well, Papa hates your urn. Anyway, what’s wrong with my angel?”

“I like it,” the boy said.

“So do I,” I lied.

“I think it’s lovely.” Lavinia sighed. “When I go to heaven I want to be taken up by an angel just like that.”

“It’s the nicest angel in the cemetery,” the boy said. “And I know ‘em all. There’s thirty-one of ’em. D‘you want me to show ’em to you?”

“Thirty-one is a prime number,” I said. “It isn’t divisible by anything except one and itself.” Daddy had just explained to me about prime numbers, though I hadn’t understood it all.

Simon took a piece of coal from his pocket and began to draw on the back of the headstone. Soon he had drawn a skull and crossbones-round eye-sockets, a black triangle for a nose, rows of square teeth, and a shadow scratched on one side of the face.

“Don’t do that,” I said. He ignored me. “You can’t do that.”

“I have. Lots. Look at the stones all round us.”

I looked at our family grave. At the very bottom of the plinth that held the urn, a tiny skull and crossbones had been scratched. Daddy would be furious if he knew it was there. I saw then that every stone around us had a skull and crossbones on it. I had never seen them before.

“I’m going to draw one on every grave in the cemetery,” he continued.

“Why do you draw them?” I asked. “Why a skull and crossbones?”

“Reminds you what’s underneath, don’t it? It’s all bones down there, whatever you may put on the grave.”

“Naughty boy,” Lavinia said.

Simon stood up. “I’ll draw one for you,” he said. “I’ll draw one on the back of your angel.”

“Don’t you dare,” Lavinia said.

Simon immediately dropped the piece of coal.

Lavinia looked around as if she were about to leave.

“I know a poem,” Simon said suddenly.

“What poem? Tennyson?”

“Dunno whose son. It’s like this:

There was a young man at Nunhead

Who awoke in his coffin of lead;

‘It is cosy enough,’

He remarked in a huff,

‘But I wasn’t aware I was dead.’ “

“Ugh! That’s disgusting!” Lavinia cried. Simon and I laughed.

“Our pa says lots of people’ve been buried alive,” Simon said. “He says he’s heard‘em, scrabbling inside their coffins as he’s tossing dirt on ’em.”

“Really? Mummy’s afraid of being buried alive,” I said.

“I can’t bear to hear this,” Lavinia cried, covering her ears. “I’m going back.” She went through the graves toward her parents. I wanted to follow her but Simon began talking again.

“Our granpa’s buried here in the meadow.”

“He never was.”

“He is.”

“Show me his grave.”

Simon pointed at a row of wooden crosses over the path from us. Paupers’ graves-Mummy had told me about them, explaining that land had been set aside for people who had no money to pay for a proper plot.

“Which cross is his?” I asked.

“He don’t have one. Cross don’t last. We planted a rosebush there, so we always know where he is. Stole it from one of the gardens down the bottom of the hill.”

I could see a stump of a bush, cut right back for the winter. We live at the bottom of the hill, and we have lots of roses at the front. Perhaps that rosebush was ours.

“He worked here too,” Simon said. “Same as our pa and me. Said it’s the nicest cemetery in London. Wouldn’t have wanted to be buried in any of t‘others. He had stories to tell about t’others. Piles of bones everywhere. Bodies buried with just a sack of soil over ‘em. Phew, the smell!” Simon waved his hand in front of his nose. “And men snatching bodies in the night. Here he were at least safe and sound, with the boundary wall being so high, and the spikes on top.”

“I have to go now,” I said. I didn’t want to look scared like Lavinia, but I didn’t like hearing about the smell of bodies.

Simon shrugged. “I could show you things.”

“Maybe another time.” I ran to catch up with our families, who were walking along together. Lavinia took my hand and squeezed it and I was so pleased I kissed her.