by Eva Ibbotson
‘You can look now,’ he called.
Sidi took her knuckles from her eyes, climbed down from the sledge – and saw, shining from the darkness of the winter forest, the living glory that was Jan’s tree.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh!’
And for her, this moment was for ever Christmas and was for ever love.
That summer, they lost Abyssinia. ‘That beast, Mussolini,’ wrote Sidi from Berlin, knowing the blow that Jan had sustained over the Lion of Judah, now exiled and playing croquet on an English lawn.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the boy wrote back. ‘We’ll go to Madagascar – or the Gold Coast, maybe.’
But when they met again, they went on speaking of Abyssinia for it is not easy to rename a country of the heart.
They were growing up fast. The lost look was seldom seen, now, in Sidi’s eyes. The boy was her secret, her philosopher’s stone, her talisman against the confusions and betrayals of her life. As for Jan, it seemed to his teachers and his family that there was nothing he could not do.
Then, in the autumn of 1937, a minor actress who coveted Sybilla Berger’s roles unveiled a secret. Frau Hoffmansburg’s father, a blond, amiable Professor of Botany in the University of Trubingen was, by birth, a Jew. The massive deportations had not yet begun, but Frau Hoffmansburg wasted no time. She collected her jewels, her latest lover and (partly to annoy her husband) her daughter – and prepared to leave for England.
‘But we can’t go! We can’t!’ cried Sidi, and broke into a storm of weeping.
‘What on earth’s the matter with the child?’ asked Frau Hoffmansburg.
Miss Hogg, decreasing for the armholes of an angora cardigan, did not enlighten her.
They went to London. Miss Hogg was dismissed, went to stay with a cousin in Berkshire and after three months of boredom, took a job with a family in New Zealand. Sidi trailed after her mother from hotel room to borrowed apartment, writing, writing, printing her changing addresses on the outsides of envelopes, the insides, always and only terrified that she would lose touch with Jan. He wrote back bravely, hearteningly. He had found a Scottish lady in the market town and was learning English. He was learning it quickly, she had praised his accent and very soon now he would come. ‘And wherever we are, Sidi, wherever we go,’ he wrote, old enough now for metaphor and poetry, ‘we’ll make it Abyssinia.’
Sybilla, meanwhile, devoutly navigating the tricky shoals of the casting couch, was finding her nearly adolescent daughter distinctly in the way. She jettisoned her lover, acquired a rich protector and sent Sidi to an exclusive boarding-school in Kent.
When Jan’s first letter came, Sidi was sent for and told that letters from boys were not allowed. She smuggled her own letters out, gave him the address of the village post office, was caught and sent for again. When it happened a third time, Frau Hoffmansburg was informed and expulsion threatened. It was only when Sybilla swore to make trouble for Jan’s parents that Sidi gave in.
Six months later, Hitler invaded Poland – and the waters of Babylon closed over her head.
Miss Hogg, who had not been rated very highly by the ushers, was in the back pew. She had, after all, not managed to have tea with Sidi after the fitting, but as she was dragged away by Sybilla, Sidi had once again implored her governess to, ‘Please, oh please be there!’
So Miss Hogg was there, in the flower-bedecked private chapel on Sidi’s stepfather’s estate, beside a lady in a magenta toque with veiling who now said:
‘Of course it’s been a great disappointment to Sybilla. She had such hopes for Sidi.’
‘What’s wrong with the young man?’ asked her neighbour, who had patriotically retrimmed her pre-war Ascot hat with cherries. ‘He’s supposed to be terribly clever and I gather he did some fearfully brave cloak-and-dagger thing in the war.’
‘Well, my dear, a foreigner and an absolute nobody it seems.’
‘A foreigner? With a name like John West?’
‘Oh, the Intelligence people re-christened him in the war. They did that quite often with Jews and Poles and things when they dropped them back into Europe. The Nazis did such awful things to them if they were caught. He wanted to change back, I believe, but his firm persuaded him not to.’
‘Well, I must say I think he looks rather sweet.’
The bridegroom had reached the chancel steps. Miss Hogg fumbled for her spectacles, then gave up, for the organ had burst into a glorious Bach chorale. The bride entered, paused to give her erstwhile governess a smile of complicity and utter joy – and walked to where the boy stood waiting.
Miss Hogg, at this point, wept. But somewhere in the forests of Abyssinia, a lion, golden-eyed and gentle, lifted his great, majestic head … and roared.
A DARK-HAIRED DAUGHTER
WHEN JULIE HOWARD came to tea and burst into tears over my flapjacks, I rejected, quite quickly, a number of possibilities. That she had ‘ Fallen in Love with Another’, for example. I lived opposite the Howards in a cottage I had bought after my retirement from the village school, and only the broad mindedness acquired by dealing for thirty years with what went on behind the Infant lavatories enabled me to view, unblushingly, the physical enthusiasm of Julie for her husband and his for her. Similarly I rejected bankruptcy (Donald was the local doctor and doing very nicely), petty crime and illness. Julie looked fine.
Or did she?
‘You’re pregnant again?’ I hazarded and quickly poured another cup of tea.
She nodded, sniffed. ‘It’s so awful, Mouncey, I don’t know what to do! It isn’t just the guilt, though that’s dreadful. I mean, did you know that all the people in the world can’t stand together on the Isle of Wight any more? Perhaps on one toe, that’s all! But quite apart from that, I just don’t feel I can bear it!’
‘I suppose you couldn’t…’ I began – and stopped.
My first memory of Julie was of a huge-eyed and duskyheaded five-year-old, tottering in tear-stained from break with a waterlogged earthworm hanging in a swoon from her small, pink hand. As a destroyer of life, bom or unborn, Julie Howard was clearly a non-starter.
‘There’s only one way I can bear it,’ she said. ‘If it’s a girl. A dark-haired little girl, very small and gentle. I could bear that. Maybe she’d love music and I could play the piano to her, or she’d want to go to ballet classes. Of course I wouldn’t pressurize her; if she wanted to be an engineer or an aviator I’d back her up. Naturally. But you know what I mean?’
I did know.
Julie already had three little boys. I myself had watched them – alike as peas, terrible as an army with banners – grow from bald and bullet-headed babies chronically crimsoned with hunger and rage, to flaxen-headed, blue-eyed replicas of their father who spent their days ricocheting off the furniture, whooping from upturned wheelbarrows or falling out of the few trees in the Howards’ garden which had survived their coming. ‘Julie’s Juggernauts’ was how Angus, Jamie and Guy were known in East Moreton, and if Julie felt she could face only a gentle, dark-haired daughter, no living soul could blame her.
‘Girls are more likely later in marriage; I read it somewhere,’ I said. ‘It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’
News of the baby spreading through East Moreton found the village sharply divided. There were optimists like Mrs Hicks, the grocer’s wife, who cited cases of daughters born to men with as many as seven sons, and there were others, such as Ben Farrer at The Feathers, who said darkly that Dr Howard’s genes were not of the kind that gave way suddenly. What everyone was agreed on was that if the baby was another boy, Julie – already worn out by the other three and never allowed, being a doctor’s wife, to be ill – would crack up and crack up badly.
I like to think that my own efforts had something to do with the growth of confidence in Moreton as Julie’s pregnancy advanced. After all, a retired headmistress has a certain standing. Certainly by the late spring, anyone who dared to suggest that the Howards’ new baby might be a boy was regarded as unpatriotic, defe
atist or just plain nasty.
Meanwhile, over snatched cups of coffee in my cottage, Julie and I played the name game. Sometimes it was a grave and dedicated little girl out of a Russian ballet school that we conjured up:
‘What about Natasha, do you like that? Or Tatiana?’
Sometimes we felt old-fashioned and Victorian.
‘Tabitha’s nice, don’t you think? Or Griselda? Do you remember The Cuckoo Clock?’
Or we would draw out of the ether a peat-eyed, barefooted little Celt as we toyed with Kirsty or Mhairi or Catriona.
Once – I had neuralgia and wasn’t quite myself – I said stupidly: ‘And if it’s a boy?’
Julie’s face clouded over. ‘Oh, don’t, Mouncey. Please don’t even talk about it!’
As the months passed, the support of the village grew steadily. Mrs Hicks said Julie was carrying high and that was a girl for sure; old Mrs Elmhirst, who dabbled in astrology, said that nothing could be more favourable than the way Jupiter was carrying on with Mars; and the Vicar, when questioned, closed his eyes and intoned: ‘… all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’
Nevertheless, in secret I worried about Julie. As her pregnancy advanced she looked more and more exhausted and once, when I found her crying over the ironing board, she said, ‘Oh, Mouncey, I had such a ghastly dream! The midwife was holding up the baby – all bald and bullet-headed, you know, with ears like handlebars – and saying, “It’s a boy!” and when I put out my arms to take him he punched me on the jaw.’ She began to cry again. ‘I’m so tired, Mouncey, I can’t take any more males!’
Two weeks before the baby was due, my widowed sister rang from London. She had to have a minor operation and asked if I could possibly come up for a few days to help.
It was a beautiful summer afternoon when I returned. Stepping down on to the platform I saw Mrs Hicks on the other side, waiting for the 3.47 to town.
She saw me and waved. ‘The baby’s come, Miss Mouncefield!’ she shouted – and then her train drew in and I could hear no more.
Well, no matter. The cottage hospital was not far out of my way and I only had a little case. I set off down the High Street.
It was a heartening and friendly place, the maternity wing. Glistening lino, fresh-painted walls …
‘May I see Mrs Howard? I know it’s not visiting time, but I’ve just come from town.’
The Sister nodded. ‘Room 23. She’s on her own, being a doctor’s wife.’
My hand was shaking as I opened the door. Suddenly I felt I could not bear it if Julie had not got her heart’s desire.
It was all right! More than all right! Julie was sitting up in bed, her cheeks glowing and her eyes blazing with joy.
I went over and kissed her. ‘I haven’t brought any flowers yet, pet, I just came off the train.’
‘I don’t need flowers,’ said Julie ecstatically. ‘I don’t need anything! Look!’
She pointed to the cot from which soft snuffling noises came. I went over, peered inside – and almost recoiled.
Pugilistic, steaming with uncontrollable life, bald and bullet-headed, with ears like handlebars, the latest Howard chewed with cannibalistic fervour at his own wrist.
‘Isn’t he gorgeous, Mouncey? Isn’t he the most beautiful baby you ever saw?’ said Julie, and the look on her face made my heart turn over. ‘I’m so happy! So incredibly happy! I must be the happiest person in the world!’
THIS YEAR’S WINNER
THERE ARE not many girls left nowadays who care deeply about the fate of the anchovy, but Gussie MacLeod was such a girl.
It was not anchovies, however – dangerously over-fished and threatened though they were – that were occupying her attention on the morning that the summons came, but turtles, infant ones, some one hundred and fifty of which she was escorting, under a large golfing umbrella, from the fringes of the white sand beach down to the azure Pacific.
Augusta had spent all of her twenty years on the Toto Islands where her father was the doctor, and escorting things took up a good deal of her time. She escorted orphans to the clinic, lepers to film shows of The Red Shoes, displaced boobies back to their nests … And now, the baby turtles whose tragic odyssey after hatching, menaced by vultures and frigate birds, by iguanas and ghost crabs and dessication, Gussie could not allow to proceed without her help.
She had reached the water’s edge and was shoving off an inane and tank-like parent who seemed on course to flatten the entire brood, when she heard a sharp whistle and looked up to see a little native boy beckoning to her.
‘You’re wanted,’ he said. ‘ By the fire-engine shed, straight away. With a bathing costume.’
‘Oh no! What is it, do you know?’
The boy shook his head. ‘It’s important, though.’
Gussie sighed. Another shark drill, probably. And planting her umbrella in the sand she plunged into the shade of the seaward-leaning palms, making her way towards the bungalow where, since the death of her native mother, she and her father had lived alone.
She collected her bathing costume, from which a nesting weaver bird had removed a sizable chunk and wandered down to the village square. There, in front of the fire-engine shed, a number of planks had been laid over packing-cases, producing a kind of ramp around which half a dozen girls were standing.
‘I hope it’s not injections,’ said Manai, whose father kept the liquor store.
‘Or head lice,’ said Tepee, who was still at school.
But it was neither. It was, for some mysterious reason, a beauty competition and one in which Gussie, in deference to her father’s status and the high esteem in which the MacLeods were held, came third.
An hour later, taking tea with her lepers on Fara atoll, she had forgotten the whole thing. The lepers were disgruntled. Long since cured, they had led under Gussie’s guidance a peaceful existence stringing shells into necklaces which they sold to cowed tourists on the twice-monthly boat from Samoa. But the previous week an occupational therapist, newly trained in Brisbane, had flown out and opened up for them a whole new world of raffia mats, cane baskets and poker-work fire screens – a veritable hive of organised handicraft in which they, the lepers of Toto, would play a leading part. Then, as is the way of visiting experts, she had gone away again, leaving Gussie to take the rap. For Toto was short on raffia, poor on cane and practically devoid of pokers.
Gussie had just begun to soothe them by reading aloud for the fifteenth time the last chapter of Love Story, when the silence of the lagoon was broken by the chug of a motor-boat from which there presently emerged Gussie’s father and the Mayor himself, a corpulent copra grower, now ripe with importance and almost fully dressed.
And the news that this dignitary brought was that Gussie, as a result of the morning’s competition, had been selected as Miss Toto Islands to represent the newly independent federation at the Miss Galaxy Contest to be held in London in July.
‘But that’s ridiculous!’ wailed Gussie. ‘I didn’t even win. Manai did.’
A few words from her father informed Gussie that Manai was pregnant and that the runner-up had been removed by her irate father to the safety of the interior.
‘I can’t go. People will die laughing if they see me in a Beauty Contest!’
The Mayor demurred politely, but he saw her point. In Gussie MacLeod the genes had not so much mingled as tangled. Her father’s bright red hair, cropped to a cockatoo’s crest, topped her native mother’s large, dark eyes; freckles rampaged across the bridge of her sawn-off khaki nose; she was so thin that the beating of her heart seemed likely to displace her rib-cage altogether. And he sighed, for he would have liked to do better for the Toto Islands.
‘I think you should go, Puss,’ said Dr MacLeod. ‘ London’s not like Inverness, of course, but there must be some good things left … fish and chips and the Wren churches and the Turners at the Tate. You might even like it enough to stay,’ he added, turning away his face, for the t
hought of life without his daughter was almost unendurable.
But it was a gnarled and fierce old lady, stepping out of the circle of interested lepers, who settled Gussie’s fate.
‘In London,’ she said firmly, ‘ will be raffia. And pokers for making the works.’
Dr Richard Whittacker’s reaction to being told by the president of the Galaxy Chemical Company that he was to organise the Miss Galaxy Contest was the same as Gussie’s. He was convinced that he was the victim of an uninspired and tasteless joke.
He had been summoned from the Research Laboratories of which, though absurdly young for such a responsibility, he was the head, and whisked by private lift to the thirtieth floor from which, flanked by picture windows, Mexican breadfruit plants and tropical aquaria, the ‘Old Man’ ruled the most powerful chemical combine in Britain.
‘But I can’t do that, sir! I’m a chemist,’ said Richard, whose response to girls in bathing costumes and high heels was to turn the television off – and fast.
The Old Man looked at him. Young Whittacker had come to them after getting the best First in Biochemistry which Cambridge had produced for twenty years. Even his Ph.D. had thrown out some enormously interesting angles on the isomorphism of oxonium compounds. Since then he had done extremely well for Galaxy and the tragic ending of his marriage, regrettable though it might be in itself, had produced an output of work that was remarkable by any standard. The way to the thirtieth floor and a place on the board was undoubtedly open to young Whittacker. If, that was, his academic background did not conceal an inability to deal with the seamier side of things: with pressmen and pressure groups and the lunatic fringe. Ordeal by fire commonly faced those seeking the higher path. Ordeal by beauty competition, as the Old Man proceeded to make clear, now faced Richard en route for the board room.
