Helen Adeline Baxter, Sam's best chum from the second form, had a pale blue bedroom with shelves full of Ruth Fielding books, all the covers glossy and pages crisp, a complete set brought back by her Aunt Edwina after a trip to New York. Helen had a glamourous eighteen year old sister named Portia who let them borrow her high-heeled evening shoes if they did not wear them outside and a brother named Cecil who was prominently featured in silver-framed photographs scattered about the chintz sitting room and anywhere else there was a polished table at the ready. Sam knew he must be quite good at sport, based on the number of trophies and medals decorating his room; he was rarely home from school and she'd only met him twice, but it was enough times to know he was real and not like the brother she had pretended to have for a year, clipping a small, grainy picture of Greville Stevens from the paper and pasting it into a little frame she kept in a place of honor on her bureau, an oval thickly covered with seashells acquired after much pleading on a trip to Brighton. She had decided her imaginary brother would be John Martin Greville Stewart but they would have called him something else, like Toddy or Kip, and he'd be everything she wanted, friendly and funny and willing to let a little sister tag along on all sorts of adventures, to toss her the last apple from the bowl as he went out the door to find his mates. Of course, that was all a pretend, it was only Mummy and Dad at home with Mrs. Hodges to do in the kitchen and Sam in what used to be the nursery, where the frieze was faded endlessly gambolling lambs and there was a dusty matching ruffle around the bedside lamp and the bedskirt.
Sam wasn't bothered that Helen went to the pictures quite a lot and had a real cream tea nearly every day with scones and clotted cream and never had to eat limp bloater paste sandwiches. Helen called her mother "Mother," not babyish Mummy, but Sam's mother had laughed when Sam tried it and it really wasn't a cozy enough name so she wasn't much put out by that either. She didn't mind the row of simpering porcelain dolls in silk and velvet or Helen's taffeta Sunday frock in canary yellow with absolute festoons of lace at the collar and cuffs. She minded, she minded very much, Helen's brand-new bicycle.
To be fair, Helen didn't make much of it, simply pointed it out where it leaned insouciantly in all its gleaming chromium glory against the neat garden shed. Sam had goggled at it and had understood, in that instant, that it was everything she had ever dreamed of and never imagined and that there was no way that a similar Lady's Golden Sunbeam would ever lean again the far more rickety garden shed behind the vicarage which was stuffed with slightly rusty trowels and endless clay pots, a mower that was never sharp enough and half-empty seed packets, but never any sort of cycle, certainly not one that shone like Ezekial's flying chariot. It had taken a great deal of effort, but Sam had managed make an off-handed remark about the Sunbeam to Helen, along the lines of "I say, that's jolly good, how nice for you!" and then, as her hostess clearly hadn't any interest in showing Sam the oiled gears or offering to let Sam peddle it up and down the street, just to get the feel of it, she'd asked half-truthfully, "Is tea on yet for I'm most awfully hungry and I thought you mentioned something about orange marmalade?" Mummy would wince to hear her say it, but Helen wouldn't and there'd be a reason to walk away from the object of Sam's most ardent desire. She had gotten down three fresh tea-cakes for she was hungry but eschewed the little lemon tarts she would ordinarily have enjoyed very much and managed to excuse herself early with some nonsense about helping Mummy prepare for the jumble; there'd just been one a few weeks ago but Helen was not a terribly inquisitive girl, so the lie had gone unexplored and Sam had not had to force her face to serene blandness any longer.
As she'd had tramped home, she'd been able to at least put into words what she felt—there were teeth in her heart, her very heart! over that bicycle and she knew she was not a very good girl after all, for all the careful praying her parents did over her and her own admittedly feeble attempts to do good deeds as her Girl Guides troop strenuously reminded her at every turn. She couldn't help longing to be the one who would ride furiously down lanes, feeling the wind against her cheeks, pacing a bird, any bird that happened to fly by, whizzing past Tommy Carter and his pack of boys so quickly that their voices calling after her would sound like a flock of chattering jackdaws. To be able to move, to go places and as quickly as she could! To make her escape if she wished under her own power, letting her sedate coat flap behind her. She saw herself in a red jersey, a satchel with a few apples slung across her chest and a sunny afternoon of curious roads stretching ahead, mysterious adventures to be had for the asking. It was a dream that would never, could never come true, the very worst kind of dream to have.
She confessed to Mummy how jealous she was of Helen and was corrected "Envious, dear, not jealous" and given an absent-minded pat but a rather keen look as her mother remarked, "It's quite good of God to let you see into your own heart—it's much harder to be happy for Helen than it would be for a girl you didn't care for, to be happy for a friend even if they should have what you want so." Then Sam had been asked to see to the tea-things as Mrs. Hodges would be happy of a little help and Mummy was expected at the church. Her father must have been told of Sam's difficulty, for he made a point of telling her in his most vicarish tone, "'A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness of the bones,' Proverbs 14:30, Samanatha" as she went to him for the goodnight kiss he always placed right in the middle of her forehead under her fringe but he'd chucked her chin a little and his eyes were warm.
Sam tried to have a sound heart, but her mind didn't quite want to obey her; she found herself thinking of the time she'd overheard her mother saying what a shame it was Helen Baxter had a cast in her eye, though of course those things couldn't be helped or when her father had remarked it was a small miracle the Baxter girl wasn't entirely spoilt and at least Samantha would grown up valuing what was real. Except Sam thought her father was mistaken, for she couldn't help valuing Helen's bicycle over anything else she'd ever seen and she couldn't help the prayer for a bicycle of her own that seemed to fly right from her lips straight to God's ear as she knelt beside her ned, before she had even prayed for Mummy or Dad or Aunt Muriel who was away being a missonary in India and probably never had a proper cream tea for years at a time, not one solitary bit of fun just joyful abnegation. She'd rather God hadn't decided to be so good to her, she was perfectly content that her heart remain in dark shadow, a mystery that she would have to wait many more chapters to solve like Ruth Fielding or Betty Gordon. She tried very hard not to think about the Sunbeam, for the envy would leap around inside her like the very devil himself before it fizzled away within her marrow, and it was discouraging that it didn't get any better with prayer or time or distance from the bicycle. So many things intervened—her mother's illness, the War, her work with Mr. Foyle, and still the bicycle and its intoxicating promise lingered like Xanadu or toothache. Sam tried to cultivate Christian resignation and when that was insufficient, she made a second or third cup of weak tea and wondered where Helen might be or Portia, smart in London nightclubs in scarlet lipstick or muddy, well-fed Land Girls planting potatoes in breeches, whether Cecil had survived Normandy and tried to wish instead for the lemon tart she hadn't taken.
Sam couldn't imagine which of her parents had told the story she'd thought had been long-forgotten and what tone of voice they must have used, but she couldn't help clapping her hands with glee at Christmas morning 1947, when under the tree there were several gaily wrapped packages she'd sorted out herself with pine needles scattered about and one slightly weather-beaten but entirely serviceable Lady's Sunbeam with a red satin ribbon round the handlebar and a little tag with her name in elegant script. She was so happy she was speechless and she couldn't even mind that she'd not be able to ride until the summer, after the baby came, and mutely accepted the soft kiss that came with "Happy Christmas, Sam. You'll tell me if you don't like it, won't you?" throwing her arms around her clever, generous, silly husband, who thought that was a question worth asking.