by Joan Aiken
The Dorset rectory, though cold as any of its predecessors, was handsome, and the country round about had such bewitching unspoilt charm that even Papa, it seemed, was not wholly unaffected. Or perhaps he was getting through to God at last.
For a short time life seemed reasonably normal and happy.
VII
“I LIKE HER,” Elspeth said. “She seems responsible. Wouldn’t you say? I wonder why in the world she married Fauntleroy?”
“Usual reasons, I suppose. Liked him. He’s got a lot of charm.”
“Hmn.” Elspeth’s expression was dubious. Leafing through a dahlia catalogue she remarked, “I was never so hundred-per-cent for him as you.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to marry him! Even if he asked me.”
“And if you didn’t happen to be twice his age.”
“But his heart is in the right place, Bets. Look at what he’s done here. Think what a horrible squalid dump this area was before. And he’s done a lot of good elsewhere — quite unobtrusively too — donations to charity, to the arts —”
“He can afford to.”
“You’re in a crabby mood this morning.”
“You always think, because somebody’s efficient at getting things done, that their heart is in the right place.”
“Well,” said Pat with conviction, “the world is so full of fools — sitting on committees, loving the sound of their own voices, muddling about, procrastinating, frustrating everybody else — that, when you meet someone who sees what needs doing and damn well goes ahead and does it — how can you help liking them?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Elspeth. “It seems to me very odd that he should let that girl come down here, on her own, in the state she’s in, with no one to look after her, so very soon after they got married. Why, they were still on their honeymoon! No — say what you like, it’s odd. And — I heard something rather queer and nasty about him —”
Olga Laszlo put her head round the door without knocking, inquired, “Darlings, can I use your phone?” and came right in.
“Of course. Help yourself.” Pat’s expression appeared a little less cordial than her voice. She put on her tweed jacket, said, “Anything need to be bought in Dorchester, Bets?” to Elspeth, who shook her head, then walked rapidly out.
Elspeth, having written her order and put it in a stamped envelope, began sorting seed potatoes for planting. She had them in boxes all over the room, on chairs, tables, and the counter, among the permanent clutter of books, dishes, and piles of catalogues. As she examined them she unabashedly listened to Olga’s conversation.
“. . . Swit? Could you be a love and get my key back from Gretl — who must have had a stroke or something — and go round to Lexham Gardens and, if there’s a phone bill, pay it — and see if some transparencies have come — those fools at Tagus must have sent them there for they haven’t arrived here—what? Gretl’s in Paris—? But — well then — well, see if Mervyn has the key, would you, there’s a love? But do pay that phone bill, I’ll let you have — yes, I’m not going to be here very long, only another week or so, I devoutly hope—Oh no, I’m not precisely starving but you know what it’s like in the backwoods, nobody one can really talk to —”
Elspeth gave herself a small grim appreciative nod, working away at her potatoes. Olga’s telephone conversations had become her daily pleasure.
Presently Shuna wandered in.
“I’ve finished Mr Frisby’s calculus work. And done the grammar lesson and learned Kubla Khan. Shall I say it to you?”
“In a minute.” Elspeth had one eye on Olga. “Can you first give this plateful of scraps to the birds? Put them right up on the top level of terracing at the back — so the birds won’t have to come too close to the house.”
“Then we shan’t be able to see them very well.”
“Yes, but more birds come and get the benefit.”
Shuna returned from this errand just as Olga, winding up her final telephone conversation, replaced the receiver. She greeted the child with effervescent enthusiasm.
“Hallo my darling! How are you today? What’s that you have there?”
“A map.”
“Let me see? What map is this?”
Shuna handed over the sheet of paper. “It’s a map of Fridayland,” she explained.
“Fridayland, my angel? Where is that?”
“It’s where the Toes live.”
“But why Fridayland? Why not Thursdayland?”
“Fridayland is better. Friday’s yellow, don’t you see? — a good, bright yellow; Thursday’s only grey, like Tuesday. Thursdayland is a misty kind of place; no Toes would want to live there.”
“And what do they do, these Toes, in Fridayland?”
“The usual sort of things,” replied Shuna, in a tone of surprise. “The usual things that Toes do.”
“Such as?”
“Building castles — fighting battles — playing in symphony orchestras —”
“This child’s imagination is so wonderful — !” Olga burst out in a ferment of rapture. Shuna looked at her with a vaguely puzzled expression, taking back the map from Olga’s unheeding hand. In one corner she wrote CAR PARK, as if this necessity had just occurred to her.
“Shuna,” said Elspeth, “could you run up with this packet to Lady Fortuneswell? It’s marked Pyramid TV, so I expect she ought to have it right away. You can recite your Kubla Khan to me when you get back. And just make sure Odd Tom’s not being a trouble to her, will you? He does seem rather inclined to hang round her house — I’m not quite sure why.”
“I think it’s because Arkwright likes her,” Shuna said, putting down her map and taking the envelope the postman had left.
Olga gazed after the child, obviously half inclined to accompany her. But, to Elspeth’s relief, she decided to stay for a gossip.
“Was it ever known who her father was?”
“I really couldn’t say.” Elspeth’s face and voice were both expressionless.
“What a dreadful, dreadful pity about her poor mother! What a shattering thing to happen! Such a waste! When she had been so brilliant! One can quite see where the child gets it —”
Elspeth opened her mouth to speak, then checked herself.
“The poor girl would have been so proud, so happy,” Olga declared mournfully.
“No doubt.” Elspeth was noncommittal. She began working over another box of potatoes.
“There was never any follow-up from those people? In that place where she had been?”
“Somebody seems to be at the front door,” said Elspeth. “Could you open it? My fingers are all earthy.”
The somebody proved to be Sophie Pitt. Elspeth greeted her with considerable warmth.
“Sophie, my dear! What can I do for you? Do you want the phone?”
Sophie, even with no make-up, grizzled dishevelled hair, and dirty jeans, never looked less than a duchess.
“No, not the phone,” she said grandly. “I just came because I have finished learning my part, so I’m inviting the whole village to a soirée.”
“A soirée!”
“This evening at six. I intend to tell everybody’s fortune. And there will be punch.”
“Telling fortunes? But how wonderful!” breathed Olga. Her eyes shone. Her smile would have melted icebergs: Sophie, who rather disliked her, for no particular reason since they had hardly exchanged half a dozen words, overcame her reluctance and said, graciously, “I hope you will be free to come?”
“I shall make a point of getting back from the theatre in plenty of time,” promised Olga. “But now I had better get off to my work or they will be wondering what has become of me. Staying here, engrossed in gossip! But you always have such interesting things to tell!”
With a chiding, reproving smile for Elspeth, she took her depart
ure.
“Grubby little bitch,” remarked Sophie, lighting a cigarette and helping herself, uninvited, to coffee.
VIII
AS I MAY have mentioned before, I have a passion for paperclips, which I collect.—That gives a wrong impression. I don’t spend my days in stationers’ buying box after box, like the man who had trunks full of pancakes under the bed. But I do like to pick them up, from the floors of concert halls, offices, trains, restaurants; from streets and pathways, from churches, elevators, and escalators, from stages, studios, and art galleries. I have found paperclips in the Louvre, St Paul’s, and even the Parthenon. To pick up three in a day is a sign of good luck. That seldom happens. One is the norm, and two reasonably frequent. Sometimes, in seasons of scarcity, I will leave a clip lying for a while, confident that I can come back to it on a meagre day and refurbish my luck; so you can imagine my chagrin last October on planning to reclaim one, a reliable clip that I had noticed for weeks, lodged in a pavement crack just outside Broadcasting House, the front entrance, to get there and find it gone . . . Hair grips are quite as common as paperclips, but I’ve never had the least wish to pick them up. There is something sordid about a hairgrip, something greasy and personal, whereas a paperclip is shining, symmetrical and extrinsic, a friend to man to whom it says . . . What do I do with my collection? They are housed in a small tin chest-of-drawers, once given me by Fitz; and the interesting (and wholesome) feature of my hobby is that the paperclips slide out of my keeping quite as quickly as they slide into it, on letters, on acting parts, recipes, copies of songs, I hardly know what; they come and go at an equal rate, there is a continual flow.
So it was really singular to find myself housed in a little dwelling that contained not a single paperclip, not one. In the course of orienting myself I went over Number 1? Glifonis pretty thoroughly, as you may imagine, but I did not really expect to find clips in drawers or cupboards and so was not unduly disappointed. This just was not paperclip territory. I tried to scold myself into commonsense but did, in consequence, feel faintly anxious, ill-at-ease, unsettled. I was also (apart from my fractured wrist and wrenched ankle) feeling ominously healthy; the cancer symptoms in my spine and chest had temporarily abated, the spots before my eyes had reduced in density, and even a very alarming recent symptom, of what felt like broken-off eyelashes gouging holes into my left eyeball, all these had been alleviated in a way that did make me wonder if they were subsiding together before the advent of the real killer.
Anyway, apart from being a bad omen, the lack of paperclips about the house was a real nuisance. One needs paperclips for so many things. Why had not Ty thought to set up a village shop in Glifonis? Or at least a taverna? The poor Greeks had to travel five miles for a beer, over to Toller Asinorem. It was queer, I thought, that Ty, such a careful planner, had not anticipated this basic need.
I was pleased, therefore, when the child Shuna brought me a thick packet from Pyramid (which proved to be the extra scenes written in to Rosy and Dodo so as to satisfy the accountants about the need for returning to Knoyle) because Randolph Grove’s covering letter was fastened to the stapled text by a big, comely brass paperclip. And I was furious at the mocking malignity of Providence when, on my extracting the thick wad of paper from its envelope, the paperclip flipped off the top and spun away through the sunlit air, to fall somewhere on my terrace.
“Oh, damnation!”
“I’ll find it!” said Shuna, and skipped off eagerly searching between the marble flagstones and along the edge by the cupressus hedge. The cat Arkwright accompanied her, thinking it was a game, pouncing on shadows.
But even Shuna’s sharp young eyes failed to find the paperclip.
“Oh well. Never mind. Thanks very much. I’ll manage without it. I just like to collect them.”
“Tom used to collect matchboxes,” she said. “He had nine hundred and three when their house was taken away. But after that, he said he couldn’t pick up the interest to start again.”
I had heard the story of Tom’s house from Shuna, and wondered with a deep worry where the house had been; but that Shuna did not know.
“How are things going in Fridayland?”
“The rebellion has been put down. Marshal Toe is back in power.”
“What happened to all the majors?” It was the majors who had organized the uprising in Fridayland, I knew, and after their coup, had even run the country for a few weeks; I suspected that Shuna was secretly on their side, though she claimed total impartiality.
“Oh, they were all executed.”
“Good heavens!”
“Marshal Toe said there was no place in Fridayland for people who could not be trusted.” Shuna’s face was perfectly calm, but I thought she sounded a little sad. She had written a poem about the colonels and the majors and Orpheus which appeared to show a fondness for the majors; it also, I thought, demonstrated a remarkable poetic gift in someone who was also deeply interested in the number of integers that could be crammed between one and one-point-five; an infinite number, she thought, and I saw no reason to doubt her.
“Well — perhaps the Marshal is right. But to execute them all — Couldn’t he have deported them?”
“Where to?”
“I suppose, a penal colony. Thursdayland?”
“But then they’d just hate him from there until they were strong enough to make ships and come back like the Normans.”
“I’m afraid you must be right.”
“I’ll think about it some more,” she said, sounding like Pat.
Sophie Pitt arrived with a loaf of bread.
“Hallo, my loves; I’ve been baking.” She put the bread on the table.
“Delicious it smells!”
“Goodbye, Cat. I have to go and say Kubla Khan now.” Shuna skipped away. Then she came back to say, “Aunt Elspeth told me to make sure Odd Tom wasn’t being a trouble to you.”
“No trouble at all. I see quite a bit of him, wandering around; he seems to be looking for something. But he never comes within talking distance.”
“He wouldn’t hurt you,” Shuna assured me. “I think he left something by mistake in your house that he wants to pick up again. A note or something. But he’s very kind.” Off she went again.
“Funny little thing.” Sophie looked after her. “She’s a genius, they say.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” I said absently, thinking of Odd Tom. Had he left UR2 Dye?
Sophie said: “I’ve come to invite you to my conversazione. I thought all we Glifonis incomers ought to get together. Tonight at six.”
“Gracious. We’ll be rather an ill-assorted group, I should think?”
“So much the more interesting.” Sophie stubbed out her cigarette in a pot of geraniums; whatever the house lacked in furnishing it lavishly made up for in plant life — all Miss Morgan’s work I imagined.
“Who else will be there?”
“Zoë. She’s coming to stay with me today.”
“Oh, good. I like Zoë.”
“And Miss Laszlo. I gather she’s a friend of yours.”
“I know her,” I said cautiously. “I’m not sure that ‘friend’ quite covers it.”
“And the Goadbys.”
“The sad-looking fur-coated wife and grey-faced husband?”
“That’s them. They lost their child in some tragedy, poor things. And old Laurence Noble — if he can tear himself away from Eine Kleine Neapmusik. And the Pools.”
“Don’t know them.”
“He’s an architect. Friend of the Greek guy who designed the village. Elderly man. Much younger wife. Teenage son.”
“Haven’t seen any of them.”
“Well you don’t get about much, do you? They are in the house at the bottom. The husband and son stay indoors all the time. Wife and guest walk along the cliffs.”
“What a lot you know, So
phie.”
“I keep my eyes open,” she said darkly. “I like to know what’s going on. That’s how I get good parts. I’m always just outside the casting-room door.”
“It’s a lucky talent.”
She had a part exactly suited to her in Rosy and Dodo—a shrewd, County parson’s wife, managing to a halfpenny on her husband’s scanty stipend, keeping all the parish in order. Masha would have enjoyed her performance very much, I thought.
“Okay, so I’ll hope to see you at six. Shall I send old Laurence to wheel you down the steps?”
“No, I can manage, thank you. I’m getting reasonably agile on my crutches. Or I’ll ask a Greek.”
Later in the day, however, I went to see old Laurence Noble on my own account.
I had tried first at the house of the Ladies (I could not help thinking of them as the Ladies of Glifonis, like the Ladies of Llangollen) but they were out. It would be hopeless hunting among the clutter in their kitchen; anyway Olga Laszlo was on the telephone to the unlucky Swit, and made big eyes at me but did not stop talking. I had not the least wish to become further involved with her and made haste out of there, and across the road to Mr Noble’s house. I could see him through his front window, wandering about, hands behind back like Beethoven, so tapped with diffidence on the door.
He did not appear to recognize me at all when he came to open it; stared, frowning, through narrow eye-slits.
“Hallo Mr Noble; I’m your neighbour from up the road. You saved my house from burning the other night.”
“Oh?” he said vaguely, “Yes? yes?” waiting for me to go away.
“I’m so sorry to trouble you — the ladies were out — I wondered if you had such a thing as a paperclip?”
“A paperclip?”
“It’s my part that I’m trying to learn, you see. — I’m an actress —” as he continued to look forbiddingly blank and unreceptive. “It was stapled together, and the staple has come out — there were so many pages — you know how staples do come out —”
