The Borrowers Collection

by Mary Norton

  “No,” whispered Peagreen, “only that one, for the moment. But there’s another one across the valley. This one will call again. In a minute or two, you’ll hear the female answer.”

  It was just as he said: the owl near them hooted again, and after a few tense listening seconds, they heard the distant reply: a faint echo. “This can go on for quite a while,” said Peagreen. It did, a weaving shuttle of sound above the sleeping fields. Or were they sleeping? Had the night things begun to come out? Arrietty thought uncomfortably of foxes. “It’s a blessing,” whispered Homily, “that we don’t have to cross all that grassland.”

  “There he goes . . .” said Peagreen. Had Arrietty seen that noiseless shadow, or had she imagined it? Pod had seen it: that was for sure. “A tawny owl,” he said, “but a big one.” He stood up. “Now we can get going.”

  Peagreen stood up, too. “Yes,” he said, “he won’t be back before dawn.”

  “If that’s his ladylove across the valley,” said Homily, letting go of Arrietty’s arm, “I wish he’d move in with her.”

  “He may,” said Peagreen, laughing, as he helped her to her feet.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mr. and Mrs. Platter had also seen the moon. They were busy in the kitchen, preparing for their second night’s vigil. Mrs. Platter had finished making the sandwiches and was sitting down waiting for the eggs, boiling noisily on the stove. Mr. Platter, opposite her, was oiling a pair of wire cutters. “We can put the picnic in the cat basket,” he said.

  Mrs. Platter blew her nose. “Oh, Sidney,” she said, “I’ve got a dreadful cold. I’m not sure that I’m fit to go.”

  “There won’t be any rain tonight, Mabel. You’ve seen the sky. And you’ve seen the moon.”

  “I know, Sidney, but all the same . . .” She was going to add that she was not exactly built for sitting in a small boat, hour after hour, on a narrow wooden seat, but thought better of it; she knew it would not move him. Instead she said, “Say you went on your own, I could have a nice hot breakfast ready for you in the morning?” Mr. Platter did not reply: he was busily shutting and opening the wire cutters. So Mrs. Platter, greatly daring, went on, “And I have a feeling that they won’t be there tonight.”

  Mr. Platter carefully wiped the wire cutters with an oily rag and laid them down on the table beside the cat basket. Then he sat back and looked across at her. His eyes were steely. “Why should you think that?” he asked coldly.

  “Because,” said Mrs. Platter, “they may have come and gone. Or—”

  Mr. Platter took up a blunt-nosed chisel and ran a finger along its edge. “We’ll soon find that out,” he said.

  “Oh, Sidney! What are you planning to do?”

  “Take the roof off their house,” he said.

  It was Mrs. Platter’s turn to stare. “You mean go right up into the model village!”

  “That’s what I mean,” said Mr. Platter, and he laid down the chisel.

  “But you can’t walk about in that village,” objected Mrs. Platter. “Those silly little streets are too narrow: you couldn’t get one foot before another!”

  “We can try,” said Mr. Platter.

  “We’d be sure to break something. The public views it only from that concrete catwalk . . .”

  “We aren’t the public,” said Mr. Platter. He laid both hands firmly on the table and leaned towards her, staring with a cold kind of anger into her dismayed face. “I don’t think, Mabel,” he said, “that even now you begin to understand the real seriousness of all this: our whole future depends on our catching those creatures! And I shall need you beside me, with the cat basket open.”

  “We managed all right before we had them . . .” faltered Mrs. Platter.

  “Did we?” said Mr. Platter, “did we, Mabel? You know the Riverside Teas were falling off and that most of the tourists were going to Abel Pott. Said his model village was more picturesque, or some such nonsense. Ours was far more modern. And, as you noticed yourself, there haven’t been many funerals lately. And no new houses built since we finished the Council estate. The only job on our list at the moment is clearing Lady Mullings’s roof gutters . . .”

  There was something about Mr. Platter’s expression that really alarmed Mrs. Platter: she had never seen him quite so disturbed. It could not be only because he had taken so much time and trouble in constructing the beautiful glass-fronted case in which he had hoped to exhibit such rare specimens; there was something coldly desperate about his whole attitude.

  “We’re not exactly in want, Sidney,” she reminded him. “We’ve got our savings!”

  “Our savings!” he exclaimed scornfully. “Our savings! What are our puny little savings compared with the kind of fortune we had here in our hands?” He opened his hands wide and then dropped them again. Mrs. Platter looked more and more alarmed: their savings, to her certain knowledge, amounted to several thousand pounds. “You get this into your head, Mabel,” he went on. “No one in the whole world believes such creatures exist—not until they see them, with their own eyes, walking and talking and eating . . .”

  “Not going to the lavatory, Sidney: you made them a little bathroom. But—” she repeated the word, “but you must remember that they may huddle in that back place all day and never come out, like some of those animals in the zoo.”

  “Oh, I’d think of something to make them come out—at least in front of the public. Something electric, perhaps. After midnight, I don’t care much what they do so long as they’re on show in the morning.”

  “But how can we hope to find them, Sidney dear?” She still found his mood rather frightening. “Say they’re not in the model village? Five or six inches high, they could slip into any corner.”

  “We shall find them in the end,” he said slowly, stressing every word, “however long it takes, because we are the only living people who know of their existence!”

  “Miss Menzies knows of their existence.”

  “And who is Miss Menzies? A foolish spinster lady who could not say boo to a goose!” He laughed. “And even if she did, the goose wouldn’t take any notice. No, I’m not frightened of Miss Menzies, Mabel, or any of her ilk.” He rose from the table, and she was glad to see him calmer. “Well, we’d better get going. It’s a mild night . . .”

  He put the wire cutters and chisel into the cat basket. Mrs. Platter added the sandwiches, the eggs, and a bottle of cold tea. “Would you like a piece of cake?” she asked him. But he did not seem to hear her, so picking up her coat, she followed him quietly out through the front door.

  In spite of the mild weather, the tranquil moonlight, and the uneventful run downstream, the Platters’ evening did not turn out to be a particularly pleasant one. First, they had to wait for Abel Pott to put his lamp out. “Staying up late tonight,” muttered Mr. Platter. “Hope he hasn’t got visitors . . .” Then, on the upper road behind Mr. Pott’s thatched cottage, they saw a figure on a bicycle. As it passed by, too slowly for Mr. Platter’s comfort, he recognized the tall headgear of a policeman. What was Mr. Pomfret doing out so late? Mr. Platter wondered.

  “Perhaps,” said Mrs. Platter, perched uncomfortably on her narrow seat, “he takes a look round like this every evening.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Mr. Platter, as the bicycle passed out of sight, “we can get on quietly with the wire cutting.”

  Their boat was moored to an iron upright, against which the wire fencing had been stretched and secured to a formidable tightness. At the first cut, the wire flew back with a loud ping. In the utter quietness of that peaceful night and to the ears of the Platters, it sounded as loud as a pistol shot. “Better we wait until his light’s out . . .” whispered Mrs. Platter.

  Mr. Platter sat down again, nervously tapping the wire cutters against his knee, his eyes on that unwelcome light in Mr. Pott’s window. “Say we had our little bit of supper now?” suggested Mrs. Platter in a whisper. “It would leave us a bit more room in the cat basket.”

  Mr. Platter nodde
d impatiently. But even the unwrapping of the sandwiches (cold fried bacon tonight) created a rustle and a stir in the uncanny moonlit silence. Mrs. Platter had forgotten to bring a cup, so they drank their cold tea from the bottle. They would have preferred something hot, but Thermos bottles, only just invented, were expensive items in those days—bound in leather, with silver-plated tops. Mr. and Mrs. Platter had not yet heard of them.

  Still the light glowed on. “What can he be doing at this time of night?” Mr. Platter muttered. “He’s usually in bed by eight-thirty at the latest. He must have visitors . . .”

  But Mr. Pott did not have visitors. Had they but known it, he was seated quietly at his worktable, his wooden leg stretched out before him, peering down in his short-sighted way at the delicate work in hand. This was the repainting of the tiny wicket gates, all of different shapes and sizes, which led into the miniature front gardens of his beloved model village. At Easter, he would reopen the village to the public, and by that time every detail needed to be perfect.

  At last, after what seemed hours to the Platters, the gentle lamplight was extinguished, and after another cautious wait, they both felt free to move. Mr. Platter, fast and expert, soon freed the wire from the post. As it loosened, it did not ping so loudly, and he was able very soon to fold a section back.

  “Now!” he said to Mrs. Platter. And taking the cat basket from her, he helped her up the bank. It was slightly slippery from last night’s rain, but at last she was through the wire, and they could survey the miniature village by the light of the brilliant moon.

  Mr. Pott had set it on a slight slope, and the whole layout was spread on the rise before them. The lines of the model railway glistened in the moonlight, and so did the slated roofs. The thatched roofs were a little dimmer, but the tiny, winding roads and lanes were snakelike chasms of blackest darkness. However, from where they stood, they could plainly see Vine Cottage, the house Miss Menzies had once fitted out for the borrowers. The question was, How best to get to it? “Follow me,” said Mr. Platter.

  He chose roads wide enough to take the width of one foot if each foot was placed carefully before the other. It was a finicky business, but at last they stood beside the tiny house from where, six months ago, they had so heartlessly stolen the “little people.” History was repeating itself, thought Mr. Platter complacently as he carefully inserted his chisel under the eaves of the roof. It came off surprisingly easily. Somebody must have “been at it,” Mr. Platter decided as he stared down inside. He produced a torch from his pocket to see better.

  The house was empty, abandoned. On the night they had captured the borrowers, it had been fully furnished: chairs, dressers, tables, cooking utensils, clothes in tiny dollhouse wardrobes. Now there was nothing except the fixtures—a cooking stove and a tiny porcelain sink. Mrs. Platter, peering down beside him, saw a scrap of white beside the closed front door. She picked it out gingerly. It was a tiny apron, one that Homily had discarded in their rush to get away. She put it in her pocket.

  Mr. Platter swore. He swore quite loudly and rather rudely, which was quite unusual for him. He straightened up and stepped back angrily. There was a tinkle of breaking glass: he had put a careless heel through one of Mr. Pott’s miniature shop fronts.

  “Hush, Sidney,” pleaded Mrs. Platter in a hoarse whisper. She looked about her in a frightened way, and then she gave a gasp. “Look! Abel Pott’s put his light on again! Let’s get out of here . . . Come, Sidney! Come quickly!”

  Mr. Platter turned sharply. Yes, there was the light—growing brighter every minute as Mr. Pott turned up the wick. Mr. Platter swore again and turned towards the river. In his disappointment and anger, all the houses between him and his boat seemed just a jumble to him now. He no longer bothered to seek out the roads. And Mrs. Platter, feeling about for the cat basket (it might, one day, be evidence against them), heard tinkles of breaking glass and sudden falls of masonry as Mr. Platter made his clumsy way down the hill. She followed him, panting and crying and sometimes stumbling.

  At last they reached the opened wire. “Oh, Sidney,” sobbed Mrs. Platter, “he’ll be out in a minute. I heard him unbolting the front door!”

  Mr. Platter, already in the boat, put out a hand—less to help her than to drag her in. She slipped on the mud and fell into the water. It was very shallow by the bank, and she soon climbed out again. But she had not been able to repress a slight scream. Mr. Platter was fumbling for oars and took no more notice of her as she sat dripping in the stern. “Oh, Sidney, he’s coming after us! I know he is . . .”

  “Let him come!” exclaimed Mr. Platter fiercely. “What do I care for old Abel Pott with his wooden leg? People have been found floating in the river before now.”

  And with that he began to row upstream.

  Once safely back in her own house, Mrs. Platter went straight through to the kitchen and pushed the large teakettle onto the hotter part of the stove. She raked up the embers beneath it until they began to glow red. Her cold felt much worse, and she wondered if she had a temperature. She drove a hand into her coat pocket to find her handkerchief but pulled out Homily’s rather grubby little apron instead. She tossed it on the table and felt in her other pocket. She found her handkerchief, but it, too, was soaking wet.

  “Would you like tea or cocoa?” she asked Mr. Platter, who had followed her in. “I’m going upstairs now to get into something dry.”

  “Cocoa,” he said, and picked up the little apron. He eyed it curiously. “Oh, Mabel,” he called out just as she was reaching the door.

  She turned back unwillingly. “Yes?”

  “What did you do with that other stuff they left behind upstairs?” He had the apron in his hand.

  “Threw it away, of course, when I cleaned out the attic: there was nothing worth keeping.” And before he could speak again, she had made her way towards the front hall.

  Mr. Platter sat down slowly. He was looking very thoughtful. He spread the small apron before him on the table and stared at it musingly.

  “Lady Mullings . . . ?” he murmured to himself, and slowly, almost triumphantly, he began to smile.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Arrietty was to look back to that spring as one of the happiest periods of her life. Life seemed full of excitement and interest from that first night in their new home under the window seat when, worn out with carrying, they had slept at last in their own little beds among the cluttered piles of stacked furniture, to the week-by-week improvements instigated by Pod.

  His inventiveness knew no bounds. He had his old tools and he constructed others, and as Arrietty had foreseen, the jumble in the old game larder provided him with an almost endless supply of wonderful odds and ends, more than even he could make use of or need.

  The first priority was the construction of a kitchen within a kitchen for Homily. She hated cooking in that shadowy vastness, where, she said, she felt as though she never knew what might be coming up behind her. First, he and Spiller and Arrietty moved the distant shelves nearer to the grill and replaced the pronged fork with a brass wheel (from the discarded grandfather clock in the game larder) set on a pivot so that Homily could turn it, varying the degree of heat from the embers below. On the outer rim, she could simmer; towards the spokes near the middle, she could grill. A battered old tobacco tin, once he had loosened the hinges and supplied it with a handle, scoured out and hammered straight by Pod, provided a Dutch oven. He found two white tiles and constructed a small table to fit them. Homily was delighted with this: it was so easy to wipe down.

  But how to wall it, this kitchen? How to enclose it? This was Pod’s great puzzle. There were plenty of strong old cardboard boxes in the game larder: tea chests, lengths of plywood, and similar bits and pieces. But there seemed no way of introducing any large flat object through the very small openings that led into the chimney. The passage under the floorboards (now scrubbed and fresh-smelling) was far too narrow for any object large enough to serve as sides of a wall. The hard covers of two
large atlases, such as Pod had seen on one of the library shelves, would have been ideal. But how to get them in? Except, perhaps, by climbing on the roof and dropping them down the chimney. But the getting of them up the side of the house onto the roof seemed too much labor to contemplate at this juncture. Besides, the chimneys themselves, where they emerged on the roof, might turn out to be too tall.

  It was Peagreen who solved the problem in the end. “Supposing,” he said to Pod, “you constructed a little cardboard shelter in some dark corner of the game larder? Then took it to pieces again, and I soaked the pieces in the birdbath, and when they had softened, we could roll them up, tie them with twine into . . . well . . . cylinders, you might say. We could then take those cylinders in through the grating and push them along the passage under the floor. Then build your little kitchen again round the fire in the old hearth. Keep a good cooking fire up for a day or two, and your walls would soon be stiff again.”

  Pod was delighted and very impressed. “We’d have to flatten them out first, though,” he said.

  “That’ll be easy,” Peagreen told him. “They’ll be soaking wet. They’ll almost flatten themselves out under their own weight of water. We can lay down that bookend—the one that covers the hole to the steps—and walk about on it, say any of the cardboard started to curl up . . .”

  Arrietty and Homily had been given the job of cleaning up the ancient hearthstones of the old chimney, chopping and stacking the untidy piles of wood, sorting the tin lids and screw bottle tops in which, it seemed, the Wainscots had done their cooking. It was just a happy chance that Peagreen happened to be beside Arrietty when she was about to throw away a large charred tin lid containing something that looked like stiffened treacle. “Don’t throw that away!” he almost shouted. “Let me see it first.” Distastefully, Arrietty handed it over and was surprised to see a slow smile spread over Peagreen’s face as he stooped to smell the horrid-looking contents.