Mary Poppins fic: Wind in the East
Jan. 1st, 2009 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineThis is where I admit I have no idea what icon to use for Mary Poppins.
Wind in the East
Mary/Bert
Rated PG
Wordcount: 3200
Yuletide treat for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
miriad, originally posted here. Thanks to bdblack (I'm starting to sense a theme, here) and Dafna G, who provided the most thorough ass-kicking I've ever gotten from a beta and made this much better.
Mary Poppins is magic. Bert has known this since he was nine years old.
There was a wind in the East that day. He remembers it because it was so like and yet so unlike the other winds that winter: it was brisk and harsh and cold, just like the rest, but he also remembers some indefinable extra quality. He lifted his nose to it like a hunting hound, and even though he couldn’t tell you what it smelled like, it made him restless and eager and happy.
But restless and eager and happy does not buy hot stew. For that there was the pocket watch of a fine gentleman crossing the park. That was how he first met Mary Poppins, and how he first learned she was magic.
She knew, you see. Knew not only that he had a stolen pocket-watch tucked safely into his bundle of rags, but also the exact specimen of tweed jacket pocket he had plucked it from and the current whereabouts of the wearer of that tweed jacket.
She dragged him across the street, one hand clenched firmly about his shoulder, the other hand clutching a sturdy carpetbag, and parked him in front of the gentleman exiting the stationary shop.
“Sir,” she said, all winning smile and steely undertones and sugar again underneath that, “it seems my ward Bert has something to say to you.”
Bert had never given back a stolen item in his life. Partly this was a practical decision (why steal it in the first place, if you were just going to give it back after?), partly an emotional one (because it’s not that he didn’t know right, only that he didn’t do it, and after all, why face the embarrassment?), but mostly it was a decision born of self-preservation. If a street urchin walks up to a fine gentleman and says, “Sir, I lifted your gold watch,” what happens? Why, that fine gentleman calls the coppers, and that honest street urchin ends up in the workhouse.
But Mary Poppins had her hand on his shoulder, and even though he knew nothing yet about her except her name and the fact that she was apparently magic, he trusted.
Afterward, she cleaned his face and dressed him in a smart suit of clothes pulled from the depths of that carpet bag and fed him a steaming hot mince pie. She was beautiful, he saw then, cheeks flushed rosy from the wind but not a hair out of place, her face perfectly stern and animated with secret laughter all at once.
“Miss,” he asked, trying to eat his pie neatly, “how come that guv ain’t sent me to the workhouse? Is it because you’re magic?”
“Because you were being cared for by a respectable governess,” she said, and scrubbed hard at his face with a napkin. “A boy does not get sent to the workhouse when he’s with a respectable woman.”
“So you’re not magic?” he asked, but it was a trick question. He knew she was magic; the only issue at stake was whether she would lie to him, like every adult.
Instead, she gave him a stern, piercing look. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You should believe what you see with your own eyes.” But under the sternness was a sparkle, and the words danced around his question, inviting him to play along with the Make Believe of “stern, respectable governess” without asking him to believe it.
She did not, in fact, tell him not to steal. There were a great many things she never told him, like “sit up straight” and “chew with your mouth closed” and “don’t dirty your clothes,” all of which he vaguely recalled the dim and distant figure of his own mother saying before she left. She said some of these things, of course, normally when they were out in public and she was inviting the entire world in on their game of Respectable Governess Make Believe, but they were lines said and not things told.
Nevertheless, he was still angry and defensive about the pocket watch, even after they had been together three days and she had not brought it up again.
“Why shouldn’t I lift his bloody watch?” he asked her one day, when she informed him that there was no money for mince pie that day, only stew. “Why should he go back to his bloody warm house in his bloody warm jacket and eat anything he wants, mince and probably steak and, and” -- his imagination utterly failed him then, trying to conjure up the toppings of a rich guv’s table -- “and whatever bloody things he likes, while we--”
Mary Poppins didn’t look up from her embroidery. “If everything is bloody,” she asked in a tone of perfect reasonableness, “whatever will you say when you cut your finger?”
That was the first time she refused to answer a question, even with her dancing dodging sort of words, and this time the secret something that lived in her eyes was sadness instead of laughter. He couldn’t bear making her sad, so he ate his stew and went to sleep and didn’t call anything bloody again.
They had adventures that week. She took him to a part of the city he’d never seen before, where an old man with silver in his hair, shabby gloves on his hands, and kindness in his eyes was pushing a huge broom.
Harry was a street sweeper. He knew every corner and alley of the city, and led all the streetsweepers on a merry chase through the backways and tunnels. The cobbles were rough and coated in soot and grime, and the towering walls nearly met overhead, and cold winds funneled through the alleys -- but Harry looked around the threw his arms wide and called it “my palace,” and “my secret kingdom,” and “the byways of the greatest city in the world,” and Bert looked, and it was beautiful.
Later, the piles of garbage and scraps of paper and newsprint took wing, fluttering madly about their heads, turning to birds and fairies and butterflies as they flew. Mary picked up her skirts as they followed the wild whirlwind, and held her finger out for a newsprint moth to land and brush her with a respectful wing.
(How different it all seems, looking back! “Why, Mary Poppins, it surely is a pleasure seeing you again,” Harry had said, and “oh, ma’am, are you messing up my nice neat sweepings?” as though sweet wrappers took to life and sang to him all the time. “You know you always have a place here, when the wind’s in the East,” he said at the end, and Mary Poppins had clasped his hand tight. Little nine-year-old Bert hadn’t looked, hadn’t wondered, had barely even noticed. How he feels for Harry, now!)
They left Harry with the lady who ran his boarding-house, eating their cabbage and filling the dingy building with laughter, waving gaily as the two of them stepped off down the street. On the way, she brought them past the park where they had first met and past the dark window of that fine gentleman’s house. He didn’t notice that she had answered his question until many years later.
It didn’t last, of course. Mary told him one day that she would be leaving soon, and arranged for a place for him. “I could be a chimney sweep,” he had said. “They want little boys, to fit up the little chimneys.” Somehow he knew he wasn’t going back to lifting pocket-watches.
“I think you will,” she had answered, with a long look and another secret smile. “But we will let your lungs finish growing, before we blacken them.”
She got him a place shining shoes on a street corner. After that he sold fish and chips in a shop (but he didn’t like having to stay so clean all the time), and then swept streets for a little while with Harry.
She came back, just like she said she would, when he had finished growing. She came when he was a struggling seventeen year old street sweeper, trailing two snooty rich girls named Beth and Virginia who tiptoed over the slush and slurry of the streets and cringed away from touching the dirty walls. Bert remembered what to do; he led all Harry’s street sweepers in a riotous game of tag through the alleys until both girls were flushed and filthy and laughing.
The next day they met him again, and Bert nearly died with shock when Mary Poppins took his hand, all businesslike, and suddenly all four of them were three inches tall, playing in the canyons between the cobbles and talking to pigeons three stories tall. But he remembered how calm and unruffled Harry had been, all those years ago, and rode his excitable red squirrel over the curbs as though he always went home this way.
She returned after she had put the girls to bed. “You look surprised, Bert,” she said, sipping her tea like a perfect lady.
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” he said, but she gave him that look, the same look she had given him when he said that pocket watch was his, so he said instead, “I didn’t think you’d still be magic, when you came back.”
Mary Poppins rewarded him with that same sly, secret smile, allowed him again to be in on the joke.
After Harry passed on, Bert got work roofing houses. That was where he learned to draw and discovered the glory of the rooftops.
He was never without occupation for long -- if there were no houses to be roofed, there was music to be made in the squares or art to be drawn on the sidewalks. Bert had his own kind of magic, you see, a magic that made passers-by toss their coins in his cap as he drew, or stop to listen while he played his one-man-band. They liked him and they trusted him, simple as that. Bert was sure it was Mary Poppins’ doing somehow, some dusting of magic that brushed off her and adhered to him in those weeks they spent together in a run-down boarding house.
When he was a swaggering twenty-two year old roofer he saw her again, with a little girl named Ethel and teenage boy called John. The gargoyles on the cathedral of St. James came to life and carried them swinging from the eaves, and he laughed and sang and reached across to clasp her hand. That was the time he noticed she hadn’t aged at all, and also the time he noticed she was beautiful (an entirely different sort of beautiful than he had seen at nine, though she hadn’t changed one bit).
After that he saw her nearly every year: with a boy named Peter when he worked on the loading docks on the river; with twins Matthew and James when he hawked tickets in front of a theatre; with a little girl named Bridgette, nearly as skinny as he must have been, while he strolled through the parks with his mouth-organ, playing for pennies. He learned to always be on the alert for that East wind, and it always made his heart leap when he smelled it.
He wondered, of course, where Mary Poppins went when the wind took her away again. He wondered if there were other children far away, or perhaps her own people somewhere in the sky, or simply a time to rest. He wondered if it was hard for her to leave them (most of them she left for good; he had learned that much. He was one of the rare ones she visited again).
He wondered mostly if she would ever have children of her own, children she would never have to leave. He wondered it because -- and this was a leap of hubris not to be believed, utterly ridiculous to think this -- because he wanted to give her those children.
They sat together after bedtime and ate those greasy mince pies, still his favorite after all these years. She ate them just the way she always had, impossibly neat, yet wickedly delighted by the close brush with messiness. Her time was almost up with the current children, though she betrayed no hint of sadness or regret.
He almost, almost, asked her that night. But somehow, he knew the question would make her sad. That was odd, Bert thought. He normally knew how to leap a rooftop, how to make a stranger laugh, how to coax generosity from passers-by, how to stretch a shilling. It was unsettling, however, to know anything about the workings of Mary Poppins’ heart.
Instead of asking about children, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, first on the back of the fingers like a gentleman, then on the palm like a lover. It was the most forward he’d ever dared be, and he pulled back with one of his grins, the grin he knew she loved, the grin that would allow her to laugh and brush it all off. She cupped his cheek in that hand and said, “Oh, Bert,” and then began to gather her hat and scarf to go, coolly unruffled as always. That night, the wind came again.
So it went that way for a few more years: timid Claire in her pink ruffled dress when he was cleaning cages at the London Zoo and rowdy Thomas and Eileen when he was sweeping chimneys the first time.
They kissed, when the children weren’t around. Mary Poppins’ kisses were exactly like her: practically perfect in every way, but with sparkling hints of uncontained, messy, imperfect joy.
He was bitter at her for a little while, for always leaving, for giving him so little of herself. Then came the year (daydreaming Emily, when he worked as a bellhop in a fine hotel) when he was finally as old as she was, and he thought -- really thought -- about what it must be like to be the one always leaving. He wondered how many she had visited every year, like him, and how many of them she had seen grow old and die.
After that, he wasn’t bitter any more. Instead he was happy when she arrived, kind and funny and charming while she was with him, and understanding when she left. It was all he could give her.
She brought sulky John when he worked with a bricklayer, then Jane and Michael, his favorites so far, when he was sweeping chimneys still and drawing on the sidewalks, then foul-mouthed, cheerful Sean when he trimmed the hedges and trees about the city.
Then Bert got himself a new position, with a circus that pulled into London and hired every man they could find to put up tents and haul fodder. The lion tamer traveled with a son, a cowed, frightened boy named Marko who ran from the ring leader’s yelling and his father’s high expectations and spent his time hiding by the great stacks of railroad ties that ringed the circus grounds.
Bert lurked near him when he could dodge his work. He settled down with his mouth organ, tapping out rhythms on the ties for accompaniment and grinning with his eyes, until the little boy stopped jumping and shying away from his presence.
After a week or so, Bert brought Marko a scrap of paper.
“Here now, what’s this say?” he asked.
Marko glared. “I’ve been practicing my letters,” he said. “Really, I swear.”
“Wasn’t testing you,” Bert insisted. “I just want to know what it says.”
Marko managed to sound out an advertisement for a governess to travel with the circus. Bert watched his face fall.
That night, Bert tore the scrap of paper into tiny bits and watched them fly up the flue, out over the rooftops he loved so well. He had never tried to call her before. It seemed like he ought to light a candle, or say some words, but he didn’t know the words and didn’t think a priest would take too kindly to being asked to summon a magic governess. Instead, he pulled out the mouth-organ again, and let the strains of “chim-chimmeny” float up into the sky.
The next night, the wind came. Even indoors, even in his sleep, Bert could smell it. He always could, now.
Instead of going directly to the boy or the lion tamer, Mary Poppins came to him. He was shoveling manure out of the elephant enclosure, reaching up to pat at the wrinkled grey side. She picked her way neatly and delicately across to him without a hint of fear or disgust.
“He’s a good kid,” said Bert. “Just spent a bit too much time being yelled at, is all.”
“I only visit children who have no one. You know that.”
“He has no one.”
“He has you, Bert,” said Mary Poppins, and stepped closer to lay her hand on his arm. “You know what to do, and have the kindness to do it.”
“Sure, I can teach him to dance in the tent rigging and run about under the elephants and make friends with all the hands. But I can’t make the elephants dance and speak to him.”
“Do you really believe that’s the important part?” she asked him.
Bert didn’t answer.
“I must go where I’m needed,” she said.
It’s not just the children who need you. I need you, Bert almost said, but stopped himself. She would give him that look again, the same look she had given the little boy with the stolen pocket-watch. Back then the look had said, do not treat me like other adults. Now it would say, do not treat me like other women.
“Circus moves about a lot,” he said instead. “I don’t reckon this little bloke has spent more than three weeks at a time in any city in his life.”
“I see,” said Mary Poppins, question hanging in the air.
“So you might have something in common. Might get along,” he finished, as nonchalantly as he could, even though Mary Poppins could get along with any child at all.
“They’ll move again very soon,” she said. “Even if I stay, we won’t see each other.”
Bert paused in his shoveling to lean against the warm, sedate bulk of the elephant. “Well now,” he said. “I figure I’ve done every job in London. What’s left but to travel, hey?”
She looked at him for a long time. Her cheeks were a little pink, even though it was warm in there, with the animals. He knew she didn’t come to anyone’s call. He knew she didn’t raise children with anyone, much less with the likes of him. He wondered if he had finally stepped over an invisible line.
For a moment she didn’t look magic at all, just a very normal, very beautiful woman. Then she leaned forward, impulsive and girlish, and kissed him hard.
“Only a little while,” she said, and he nodded. She stooped down to collect her umbrella and carpet bag, then straightened her spine and tightened her lips. Just like that, she was magic again. “Excuse me, Bert,” she said. “I have an advertisement to answer.”
Wind in the East
Mary/Bert
Rated PG
Wordcount: 3200
Yuletide treat for
miriad, originally posted here. Thanks to bdblack (I'm starting to sense a theme, here) and Dafna G, who provided the most thorough ass-kicking I've ever gotten from a beta and made this much better. Mary Poppins is magic. Bert has known this since he was nine years old.
There was a wind in the East that day. He remembers it because it was so like and yet so unlike the other winds that winter: it was brisk and harsh and cold, just like the rest, but he also remembers some indefinable extra quality. He lifted his nose to it like a hunting hound, and even though he couldn’t tell you what it smelled like, it made him restless and eager and happy.
But restless and eager and happy does not buy hot stew. For that there was the pocket watch of a fine gentleman crossing the park. That was how he first met Mary Poppins, and how he first learned she was magic.
She knew, you see. Knew not only that he had a stolen pocket-watch tucked safely into his bundle of rags, but also the exact specimen of tweed jacket pocket he had plucked it from and the current whereabouts of the wearer of that tweed jacket.
She dragged him across the street, one hand clenched firmly about his shoulder, the other hand clutching a sturdy carpetbag, and parked him in front of the gentleman exiting the stationary shop.
“Sir,” she said, all winning smile and steely undertones and sugar again underneath that, “it seems my ward Bert has something to say to you.”
Bert had never given back a stolen item in his life. Partly this was a practical decision (why steal it in the first place, if you were just going to give it back after?), partly an emotional one (because it’s not that he didn’t know right, only that he didn’t do it, and after all, why face the embarrassment?), but mostly it was a decision born of self-preservation. If a street urchin walks up to a fine gentleman and says, “Sir, I lifted your gold watch,” what happens? Why, that fine gentleman calls the coppers, and that honest street urchin ends up in the workhouse.
But Mary Poppins had her hand on his shoulder, and even though he knew nothing yet about her except her name and the fact that she was apparently magic, he trusted.
Afterward, she cleaned his face and dressed him in a smart suit of clothes pulled from the depths of that carpet bag and fed him a steaming hot mince pie. She was beautiful, he saw then, cheeks flushed rosy from the wind but not a hair out of place, her face perfectly stern and animated with secret laughter all at once.
“Miss,” he asked, trying to eat his pie neatly, “how come that guv ain’t sent me to the workhouse? Is it because you’re magic?”
“Because you were being cared for by a respectable governess,” she said, and scrubbed hard at his face with a napkin. “A boy does not get sent to the workhouse when he’s with a respectable woman.”
“So you’re not magic?” he asked, but it was a trick question. He knew she was magic; the only issue at stake was whether she would lie to him, like every adult.
Instead, she gave him a stern, piercing look. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You should believe what you see with your own eyes.” But under the sternness was a sparkle, and the words danced around his question, inviting him to play along with the Make Believe of “stern, respectable governess” without asking him to believe it.
She did not, in fact, tell him not to steal. There were a great many things she never told him, like “sit up straight” and “chew with your mouth closed” and “don’t dirty your clothes,” all of which he vaguely recalled the dim and distant figure of his own mother saying before she left. She said some of these things, of course, normally when they were out in public and she was inviting the entire world in on their game of Respectable Governess Make Believe, but they were lines said and not things told.
Nevertheless, he was still angry and defensive about the pocket watch, even after they had been together three days and she had not brought it up again.
“Why shouldn’t I lift his bloody watch?” he asked her one day, when she informed him that there was no money for mince pie that day, only stew. “Why should he go back to his bloody warm house in his bloody warm jacket and eat anything he wants, mince and probably steak and, and” -- his imagination utterly failed him then, trying to conjure up the toppings of a rich guv’s table -- “and whatever bloody things he likes, while we--”
Mary Poppins didn’t look up from her embroidery. “If everything is bloody,” she asked in a tone of perfect reasonableness, “whatever will you say when you cut your finger?”
That was the first time she refused to answer a question, even with her dancing dodging sort of words, and this time the secret something that lived in her eyes was sadness instead of laughter. He couldn’t bear making her sad, so he ate his stew and went to sleep and didn’t call anything bloody again.
They had adventures that week. She took him to a part of the city he’d never seen before, where an old man with silver in his hair, shabby gloves on his hands, and kindness in his eyes was pushing a huge broom.
Harry was a street sweeper. He knew every corner and alley of the city, and led all the streetsweepers on a merry chase through the backways and tunnels. The cobbles were rough and coated in soot and grime, and the towering walls nearly met overhead, and cold winds funneled through the alleys -- but Harry looked around the threw his arms wide and called it “my palace,” and “my secret kingdom,” and “the byways of the greatest city in the world,” and Bert looked, and it was beautiful.
Later, the piles of garbage and scraps of paper and newsprint took wing, fluttering madly about their heads, turning to birds and fairies and butterflies as they flew. Mary picked up her skirts as they followed the wild whirlwind, and held her finger out for a newsprint moth to land and brush her with a respectful wing.
(How different it all seems, looking back! “Why, Mary Poppins, it surely is a pleasure seeing you again,” Harry had said, and “oh, ma’am, are you messing up my nice neat sweepings?” as though sweet wrappers took to life and sang to him all the time. “You know you always have a place here, when the wind’s in the East,” he said at the end, and Mary Poppins had clasped his hand tight. Little nine-year-old Bert hadn’t looked, hadn’t wondered, had barely even noticed. How he feels for Harry, now!)
They left Harry with the lady who ran his boarding-house, eating their cabbage and filling the dingy building with laughter, waving gaily as the two of them stepped off down the street. On the way, she brought them past the park where they had first met and past the dark window of that fine gentleman’s house. He didn’t notice that she had answered his question until many years later.
It didn’t last, of course. Mary told him one day that she would be leaving soon, and arranged for a place for him. “I could be a chimney sweep,” he had said. “They want little boys, to fit up the little chimneys.” Somehow he knew he wasn’t going back to lifting pocket-watches.
“I think you will,” she had answered, with a long look and another secret smile. “But we will let your lungs finish growing, before we blacken them.”
She got him a place shining shoes on a street corner. After that he sold fish and chips in a shop (but he didn’t like having to stay so clean all the time), and then swept streets for a little while with Harry.
She came back, just like she said she would, when he had finished growing. She came when he was a struggling seventeen year old street sweeper, trailing two snooty rich girls named Beth and Virginia who tiptoed over the slush and slurry of the streets and cringed away from touching the dirty walls. Bert remembered what to do; he led all Harry’s street sweepers in a riotous game of tag through the alleys until both girls were flushed and filthy and laughing.
The next day they met him again, and Bert nearly died with shock when Mary Poppins took his hand, all businesslike, and suddenly all four of them were three inches tall, playing in the canyons between the cobbles and talking to pigeons three stories tall. But he remembered how calm and unruffled Harry had been, all those years ago, and rode his excitable red squirrel over the curbs as though he always went home this way.
She returned after she had put the girls to bed. “You look surprised, Bert,” she said, sipping her tea like a perfect lady.
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” he said, but she gave him that look, the same look she had given him when he said that pocket watch was his, so he said instead, “I didn’t think you’d still be magic, when you came back.”
Mary Poppins rewarded him with that same sly, secret smile, allowed him again to be in on the joke.
After Harry passed on, Bert got work roofing houses. That was where he learned to draw and discovered the glory of the rooftops.
He was never without occupation for long -- if there were no houses to be roofed, there was music to be made in the squares or art to be drawn on the sidewalks. Bert had his own kind of magic, you see, a magic that made passers-by toss their coins in his cap as he drew, or stop to listen while he played his one-man-band. They liked him and they trusted him, simple as that. Bert was sure it was Mary Poppins’ doing somehow, some dusting of magic that brushed off her and adhered to him in those weeks they spent together in a run-down boarding house.
When he was a swaggering twenty-two year old roofer he saw her again, with a little girl named Ethel and teenage boy called John. The gargoyles on the cathedral of St. James came to life and carried them swinging from the eaves, and he laughed and sang and reached across to clasp her hand. That was the time he noticed she hadn’t aged at all, and also the time he noticed she was beautiful (an entirely different sort of beautiful than he had seen at nine, though she hadn’t changed one bit).
After that he saw her nearly every year: with a boy named Peter when he worked on the loading docks on the river; with twins Matthew and James when he hawked tickets in front of a theatre; with a little girl named Bridgette, nearly as skinny as he must have been, while he strolled through the parks with his mouth-organ, playing for pennies. He learned to always be on the alert for that East wind, and it always made his heart leap when he smelled it.
He wondered, of course, where Mary Poppins went when the wind took her away again. He wondered if there were other children far away, or perhaps her own people somewhere in the sky, or simply a time to rest. He wondered if it was hard for her to leave them (most of them she left for good; he had learned that much. He was one of the rare ones she visited again).
He wondered mostly if she would ever have children of her own, children she would never have to leave. He wondered it because -- and this was a leap of hubris not to be believed, utterly ridiculous to think this -- because he wanted to give her those children.
They sat together after bedtime and ate those greasy mince pies, still his favorite after all these years. She ate them just the way she always had, impossibly neat, yet wickedly delighted by the close brush with messiness. Her time was almost up with the current children, though she betrayed no hint of sadness or regret.
He almost, almost, asked her that night. But somehow, he knew the question would make her sad. That was odd, Bert thought. He normally knew how to leap a rooftop, how to make a stranger laugh, how to coax generosity from passers-by, how to stretch a shilling. It was unsettling, however, to know anything about the workings of Mary Poppins’ heart.
Instead of asking about children, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, first on the back of the fingers like a gentleman, then on the palm like a lover. It was the most forward he’d ever dared be, and he pulled back with one of his grins, the grin he knew she loved, the grin that would allow her to laugh and brush it all off. She cupped his cheek in that hand and said, “Oh, Bert,” and then began to gather her hat and scarf to go, coolly unruffled as always. That night, the wind came again.
So it went that way for a few more years: timid Claire in her pink ruffled dress when he was cleaning cages at the London Zoo and rowdy Thomas and Eileen when he was sweeping chimneys the first time.
They kissed, when the children weren’t around. Mary Poppins’ kisses were exactly like her: practically perfect in every way, but with sparkling hints of uncontained, messy, imperfect joy.
He was bitter at her for a little while, for always leaving, for giving him so little of herself. Then came the year (daydreaming Emily, when he worked as a bellhop in a fine hotel) when he was finally as old as she was, and he thought -- really thought -- about what it must be like to be the one always leaving. He wondered how many she had visited every year, like him, and how many of them she had seen grow old and die.
After that, he wasn’t bitter any more. Instead he was happy when she arrived, kind and funny and charming while she was with him, and understanding when she left. It was all he could give her.
She brought sulky John when he worked with a bricklayer, then Jane and Michael, his favorites so far, when he was sweeping chimneys still and drawing on the sidewalks, then foul-mouthed, cheerful Sean when he trimmed the hedges and trees about the city.
Then Bert got himself a new position, with a circus that pulled into London and hired every man they could find to put up tents and haul fodder. The lion tamer traveled with a son, a cowed, frightened boy named Marko who ran from the ring leader’s yelling and his father’s high expectations and spent his time hiding by the great stacks of railroad ties that ringed the circus grounds.
Bert lurked near him when he could dodge his work. He settled down with his mouth organ, tapping out rhythms on the ties for accompaniment and grinning with his eyes, until the little boy stopped jumping and shying away from his presence.
After a week or so, Bert brought Marko a scrap of paper.
“Here now, what’s this say?” he asked.
Marko glared. “I’ve been practicing my letters,” he said. “Really, I swear.”
“Wasn’t testing you,” Bert insisted. “I just want to know what it says.”
Marko managed to sound out an advertisement for a governess to travel with the circus. Bert watched his face fall.
That night, Bert tore the scrap of paper into tiny bits and watched them fly up the flue, out over the rooftops he loved so well. He had never tried to call her before. It seemed like he ought to light a candle, or say some words, but he didn’t know the words and didn’t think a priest would take too kindly to being asked to summon a magic governess. Instead, he pulled out the mouth-organ again, and let the strains of “chim-chimmeny” float up into the sky.
The next night, the wind came. Even indoors, even in his sleep, Bert could smell it. He always could, now.
Instead of going directly to the boy or the lion tamer, Mary Poppins came to him. He was shoveling manure out of the elephant enclosure, reaching up to pat at the wrinkled grey side. She picked her way neatly and delicately across to him without a hint of fear or disgust.
“He’s a good kid,” said Bert. “Just spent a bit too much time being yelled at, is all.”
“I only visit children who have no one. You know that.”
“He has no one.”
“He has you, Bert,” said Mary Poppins, and stepped closer to lay her hand on his arm. “You know what to do, and have the kindness to do it.”
“Sure, I can teach him to dance in the tent rigging and run about under the elephants and make friends with all the hands. But I can’t make the elephants dance and speak to him.”
“Do you really believe that’s the important part?” she asked him.
Bert didn’t answer.
“I must go where I’m needed,” she said.
It’s not just the children who need you. I need you, Bert almost said, but stopped himself. She would give him that look again, the same look she had given the little boy with the stolen pocket-watch. Back then the look had said, do not treat me like other adults. Now it would say, do not treat me like other women.
“Circus moves about a lot,” he said instead. “I don’t reckon this little bloke has spent more than three weeks at a time in any city in his life.”
“I see,” said Mary Poppins, question hanging in the air.
“So you might have something in common. Might get along,” he finished, as nonchalantly as he could, even though Mary Poppins could get along with any child at all.
“They’ll move again very soon,” she said. “Even if I stay, we won’t see each other.”
Bert paused in his shoveling to lean against the warm, sedate bulk of the elephant. “Well now,” he said. “I figure I’ve done every job in London. What’s left but to travel, hey?”
She looked at him for a long time. Her cheeks were a little pink, even though it was warm in there, with the animals. He knew she didn’t come to anyone’s call. He knew she didn’t raise children with anyone, much less with the likes of him. He wondered if he had finally stepped over an invisible line.
For a moment she didn’t look magic at all, just a very normal, very beautiful woman. Then she leaned forward, impulsive and girlish, and kissed him hard.
“Only a little while,” she said, and he nodded. She stooped down to collect her umbrella and carpet bag, then straightened her spine and tightened her lips. Just like that, she was magic again. “Excuse me, Bert,” she said. “I have an advertisement to answer.”