By the time Sugar leaves Mrs Castaway’s and steps onto the snowy cobblestones of Silver Street, the snow has stopped falling, and the carol-singer has melted away.
* * *
Not all the shops are open, Sugar finds. A worrying trend. Are we heading for a future when everything shuts at Christmas? God forbid.
Still, there are enough establishments open for her purposes. The stationer’s has a full display of Christmas cards in the window, garlanded with tinsel, cotton-wool snow and robins made of fabric remnants. After long deliberation, Sugar chooses a card that performs an amusing trick when a paper tag is pulled – an angel whose wings flap. Such clever things they make nowadays; there seems no end to the ingenuity of modern manufacture.
In a confectioner’s a few doors along, she seriously considers buying a prettily packaged box of chocolates, but fears the assortment will not be to her taste. Instead, she bids the shopkeeper fill a paper bag with dark chocolate pralines, her favourites.
The poulterer’s shop is slightly disappointing by comparison. All the fine, plump birds which she recalls hanging there only a few days ago – chickens with rosettes pinned to their breasts, huge turkeys with comically dangling heads, clutches of ducklings – are gone now, gobbled up by the ovens of the prosperous. At this moment they’re no doubt filling the busy kitchens of respectable houses with the smell of roast meat and savoury stuffing. Here in the poulterer’s shop on Christmas afternoon, only a few scraggy birds remain. Sugar chooses the best of them, a chicken.
In the street, tempting the impetuous and the dirt-poor, hawkers are selling toys and trifles for children – balloons, paper windmills, mice made of sweet dough. Sugar buys several mice from a leering old man, bites the head off one, chews thoughtfully, spits it out.
With every step of her superior black boots, Sugar ventures deeper into the network of poorer streets hidden behind the thoroughfare. From a greengrocer’s barrow she buys a few carrots and potatoes, and walks on, swinging an increasingly heavy basket alongside her skirts. The farther she moves away from Regent Street, the more the opulence of the West End seems an absurd dream, punctured by the reality of squalor.
At last she finds a bakery whose stock-in-trade is not fancy cakes and pastries, but copious amounts of cheap bread. Its clientele is the poor wretches who live in the crumbling lodging-houses and hovels all about here. A queue of customers – ragamuffins, street vendors, Irishwomen – jostles in the doorway and spills out into the street; this baker not only bakes bread but cooks entire dinners for families who don’t possess an oven. Hours of roasting can be bought for a pittance, and, for an additional halfpenny, a generous ladleful of the baker’s own special gravy is thrown into the bargain.
Sugar waits for ninety minutes near the baker’s. She could have gone home and waited there, but waiting on the street is something she is good at. She takes refuge for a while inside a chandler’s, pretending to be interested in buying some stolen goods. When her toes have defrosted and the chandler is beginning to annoy her, she moves on. Three passersby offer to rent her affections; she refuses.
At the appointed time she returns for her Christmas meal. The baker greets her with a distracted smile; his brown beard is powdered white with flour. Ah, yes, the lassie with the chicken, he remembers now.
The dishes and bowls into which the piping-hot food has been transferred are chipped and stained, barely fit for a drunkard’s street-stall, but even so, the baker obliges Sugar to pay him a shilling, as a security in case she fails to return them. He can tell she’s never done this before; other customers bring their own pots and crockery.
‘Mind you come back tomorrow,’ he warns. Sugar nods, though she hasn’t the least intention of returning this miserable bric-a-brac. She can earn a shilling in ten minutes of lying on her bed.
‘Merry Christmas,’ she winks, as she balances her heavy-laden basket in the crook of her arm.
By the time Sugar has walked back to Mrs Castaway’s, the food has lost a good deal of its heat. This hiring of ovens is, after all, a service designed for labourers’ families waiting hungrily around the corner from the baker’s, not for prostitutes in Silver Street. Moreover, by the time Sugar has located Christopher and summoned him up to her bedroom, and the basket’s contents are finally unveiled to the astonished boy, the chicken is barely lukewarm. Nevertheless it releases a delicious smell, and the roast vegetables twinkle in their juicy dishes. It may not be a feast borne by servants in a halo of steam, but by the standards of Mrs Castaway’s on a snowy afternoon, it’s an exotic surprise.
Sugar carves a hunk off the chicken’s breast, another off the drumstick, and doles these onto a fresh plate along with some potato and carrot. She adds a big spoonful of the baker’s special stuffing, scrapes some gravy from the bottom of the dish.
‘Here,’ she says evenly, handing the plate to Christopher. ‘Merry Christmas.’
The boy’s face is inscrutable as he takes the food from her; he might almost be accepting a pile of washing. Nevertheless, he sits on a footstool and balances the plate on his knees. With his fingers, he begins to transfer the food to his mouth.
Sugar eats with him. There’s a vaguely muttony taste to the chicken, suggesting that two very different animals sat side by side during their sojourn in the communal oven. Even so, it’s good.
‘I should’ve bought something to drink,’ she mutters. Next to the bed, there’s half a bottle of red wine left over from last night; too potent for a child who’s accustomed to diluted beer.
‘I don’t need nuffink,’ says Christopher, popping another roast potato into his mouth.
‘Here’s a card, too,’ says Sugar, and produces it. Observing that his fingers are otherwise occupied and greasy, she demonstrates the action of the paper angel’s wings by pulling on the tab. Christopher smiles broadly. She can’t recall ever seeing him smile before.
Outside in the street, a tuneless female voice begins to sing. It’s not ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ this time, nor even a festive song. Instead, this worthy woman, employing her considerable lungpower in the attempt to penetrate the walls and windows of Mrs Castaway’s, bawls:
For you upon this blessed morn, Of Virgin Mother undefiled, An Infant all Divine is born, And God becomes a little Child.
Christopher’s smile broadens. He is almost unrecognisable, with deep creases in his cheeks, a twinkle in his eye, and a dark grease-smudge on his nose.
‘Have a sip of wine,’ says Sugar, handing him the bottle. ‘Not too much, though; it will turn your tongue grey.’
Christopher takes a swig from the bottle. Do not be scandalised: he’s had strong drink all his life, and wine is cleaner than water.
No palace hath He but a shed, No cradle but a manger mean: Yet o’er that peerless Infant’s Head A new and wondrous star is seen …
‘Here, have a mouse,’ says Sugar, setting one of the sweet dough fancies on the floor in front of him. ‘They’re not very good. Scarcely fit for mice to eat.’
Christopher, having scoffed his Christmas meal, takes a cautious nibble at the confectionery.
‘Nuffink wrong wiv it,’ he pronounces, and bites the creature in half.
Sugar is relieved he likes it; she’d meant to give him some chocolates, but her own greed got the better of her, and she ate them all while waiting for the meal to be cooked. There is a limit to human generosity, even at Christmas.
‘That’s me finished,’ says Christopher suddenly. ‘Give me them pillercases.’
Sugar