Black Maria
Page 20
George bent his hatted head and stared, grudgingly. “Think you could make it pearls instead?” he said. “More natural and easier to sell, those are.”
So Antony Green ran the handfuls of jewels through his hands again and they rattled down like peas, only pinkish and whitish and nacreous. (Now there’s a good word! Only a genius would have used nacreous.) We left George sorting them out into sizes after we landed and walked back along the sea front to Aunt Maria’s house. Antony Green, a bit to my surprise, came with us, and we met the Phelpses on the way. Miss Phelps was very cheery, but Mr Phelps was long-suffering. “Pity you can’t stay,” he said stiffly.
We all came up the street together. And it was lucky that Aunt Maria’s house didn’t have a garage at one side the way the Phelpses did across the road. Aunt Maria’s house was not there any more. There was no gap. Elaine’s house was up against the house on the other side of Aunt Maria’s. Mum’s rattlebang little car was parked in the street between the two.
“Oh dear!” said Mum, thinking of all our clothes that seemed to have gone for good.
“I rescued one or two important things,” said Miss Phelps.
She had, sort of. Mum’s pea-green knitting was on the bonnet of the car with Chris’s guitar and his sacred work books. My precious locked book slithered off the bonnet and fell in the road as a desperate grey cat jumped off the knitting and ran towards us, mewing for help and comfort.
“Lavinia!” cried Mum. “I’d clean forgotten about her.”
Lavinia instantly lay soppily on her back on the pavement, waving paws in the air. Antony Green said, in a tired way, “I’d better see to her too.”
He squatted down and put his hand on Lavinia’s squirming chest. She most ungratefully dug all her front claws into him and treadled his hand with her back ones. She squalled and tried to bite him. Antony Green’s hand was in a worse state than Mr Phelps’s cheek by the time he had forced the grey cat to spread into woman shape. He had to keep forcing, too. Every time he relaxed, Lavinia shrank back into a grey fluffy cat.
At last, he forced her head at least to appear as a flat-faced old woman’s head with wild grey hair. “Don’t you want to be turned back?” he asked the face.
“No,” said Lavinia. “Let me be a cat. Please. So much more restful.”
He looked up at us. Mum said, “I bet Auntie led her a dreadful dance.”
Chris said, “Running in the night was fun.”
“I loved being a cat,” I said. “Let her, if she wants.”
So Antony Green took his hand away and Lavinia shrank gladly into a cat again.
“She had next to no brain, poor woman,” Miss Phelps said when I kissed her goodbye for rescuing my book. Miss Phelps had saved all the right things, whatever Mum says.
Mum, naturally, took Lavinia back to London with us in the car. Now she runs adoringly after Mum whenever Mum is in. Chris and I treat Lavinia with the contempt a pyjama-case cat deserves, but I suppose she cheers Mum up during the times Antony Green disappears. Antony Green begged a lift with us to London. Then he went away. He said he couldn’t bear to be under a roof for a while.
He had other troubles. He turns up every so often, sometimes exhausted and shabby, sometimes ordinary, and once looking very smart saying he had just flown from New York on Concorde. And he talks and talks to all of us. One of his troubles is that poor Zoë Green killed herself that morning they ploughed up the mound. Antony is sort of resigned, because he thought he had been underground for about a hundred years and had got used to the idea of never seeing his mother again. But he keeps wondering, the way things worked in Cranbury, whether she didn’t give her life instead of him.
I tell him it is just a stupid waste. If only we’d met her earlier, or later – when we were time-travelling anyway – we could have shown her he was alive. And I can’t think how she missed seeing him when he was capering round the town. But I am glad Mum didn’t go dotty that way when Chris and I were missing.
Antony Green has trouble adjusting to losing twenty years too. He says things have leapt onwards, and he goes to all sorts of classes and lectures to catch up. When he comes to see us, he sits leaning over our telly as if it was a teaching machine. But his worst trouble is dreaming about being buried. We all know how that feels. Mum says she doubts Antony will ever be quite normal again.
I sometimes wonder if Chris will be either. He seems quite usual. But sometimes he gets a wistful wolf-look in his eyes and talks about how marvellous it is to run in the night. “Yes, but think of when it rained,” I say. And Chris says, yes, he knows, but he has decided not to be a genius at maths any more. He’s going to make films of wild life. Mum had buy him a ciné-camera for his birthday and she says it nearly broke her.
P.S. That was all six months ago now. I have spent the time rewriting this autobiography and doing to the end. Sometimes I have added bits and sometimes I have cheated a bit so that it looks as if I wrote more than I did. Chris says if I really wrote that screed at Aunt Maria’s I wouldn’t have had time to do anything else. But I want it to be good when I finish it. And I want to finish it soon because when Antony Green comes to see us, when he’s in a good mood and we all go out together, things always happen. I want to put those in a book too.
The divorce came through. Dad rang up yesterday to say he had married Zenobia Bayley. The silly fool.
Antony Green has just turned up again. Mum and he came in while I was writing my P.S. and made their Special Announcement. Chris looked up from his stack of animal photographs and we both made faces. I said we must be the only people in the world whose mother is going to marry an ex-ghost.
Chris says that’s another thing to blame Aunt Maria for. But I don’t think he meant it.
Other Works
Chrestomanci Series
Charmed Life
The Magicians of Caprona
Witch Week
The Lives of Christopher Chant
Mixed Magics
A Tale of Time City
Howl’s Moving Castle
Castle in the Air
The Homeward Bounders
Archer’s Goon
Eight Days of Luke
Dogsbody
For older readers
Fire and Hemlock
Hexwood
The Time of the Ghost
For younger readers
Wild Robert
Copyright
First published by Methuen Children’s Books Ltd 1991
First published in paperback by Collins 2000
Published by HarperCollins Children’s Books
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Text copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1991
Illustrations by Paul Hess 2000
The author and illustrator assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work.
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