by John Harding
I made sure the coast was clear and sped down the staircase to the first floor, along the main corridor, and threw the blankets over the barrier at the bottom of the tower stairs. I had just hauled myself up onto the outside of the stairs when the door to the main corridor opened. No time to wait! I hurled myself head over toe over banister rail and onto the stairs, where I crouched behind the barricade, hoping for unseenery through the gaps.
‘Oh my goodness, what was that!’ It was Mary’s voice.
‘Ghosts most likely,’ said a voice I recognised as belonging to Meg. ‘They say Blithe is full of ghosts.’
‘Tch! You don’t believe in that nonsense, do you?’ Mary’s voice betrayed a certain lack of confidence in the words it uttered.
I spyholed them through the barricade. Meg raised an eyebrow. ‘I reckon I’ve worked here five years and seen many things. When you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll know, you’ll know.’ And she opened the door to the main corridor again, picking up a dustpan into which she’d evidently just swept something. She disappeared inside; before Mary followed her, she pulled a face at the older woman’s retreating back.
So here I was, princessed in my tower, blanketed at my desk, shivering some when the wind blew, but alone and able to read, at least until it twilighted, because I could have no giveaway candles here. I suddened a twinge, thinking – I knew not why just then – of Giles, away at his school, in turn thinking perhaps of me, and I wondered if he was happy. It brought to mind how I had once torn in two a playing card – the queen of spades it was – straight across the middle, thinking to make two queens from one, the picture at the top and its mirror image below, but found instead I did not even have one, the separate parts useless on their own, and it struck me this was me without Giles, who was a part of my own person. How I longed for his holidays to begin so I could show him our new kingdom. This was all I lacked for happiness, for Giles to be here to share it with me.
It was not to be. And so I started off on my new life. I morninged in the library and afternooned in my tower. I reasoned early on that it would be foolish to keep returning books to the library after finishing my day in the tower; carrying them about increased the likelihood of being caught. This meant that if I were reading something in the morning, I could not continue with the same book in the afternoon. I resolved therefore to make a smugglery of books in the tower (where there was little chance of detection anyway), which would remain there until they were finished, and for my reading day to be of two separate parts. I libraried the mornings away on solid books, philosophy, history and the like; I also began to teach myself languages and to work up a passable knowledge of French, Italian, Latin and Greek, although I would not vouch for my accent in the two former, never having heard either of them spoke; the afternoons were my fantasy time, appropriate for my tower. I indulged myself in Mrs Radcliffe, ancient myths and Edgar Allan Poe. The only fly in my ointment here, though, was that I must never let my concentration lapse, must never surrender myself too much to the words that swam before my eyes and in my head and distract myself to my doom.
On the day after I first occupied my tower, I morninged out up the drive, measuring how long it would take Theo Van Hoosier to walk its length, from the moment he first visibled from the tower, to the moment when he vanished from view under the front porch of the house. How did I work out the time, I who had no timepiece? I counted it out, second by second, and to make sure my seconds were all the right length I figured them thus: one Shakespeare, two Shakespeare, three Shakespeare. In this way I reckoned that young Van Hoosier would be in view for four and a half minutes. Thus, when I set out for the tower room after lunch I would first sneak into the drawing room, which has a direct view of the drive, and make sure Van Hoosier was not in view. If he was not, then I had four and a half minutes to get to the tower, otherwise, if I took any longer and he should appear unviewed at the precise moment my back was turned when I set off, he could have reached the front door and be out of view again before I was at my post and so occasion all the dangerous calling and searching for me. Let me tell you, it was a stretch to make it to the tower in that time. If I happened to meet John or Mary or Meg or Mrs Grouse and they delayed me for even a few seconds it impossibled my journey in the allotted time and so meant I had to go back and check the drive and start once more from the beginning. Not only that, all the while I had to be one-Shakespearing-two-Shakespearing and if someone should speak to me and I should lose my number, then it was back to the drawing board – that is the drawing room – all over again.
By the time I reached the bottom of the tower staircase I was usually up to two hundred-Shakespeare and it was touch and go whether I could climb the outside of the staircase, haul myself over the banisters, take off my shoes (for fear of my running feet booming out on the uncarpeted treads) and get to the tower room in time. On one occasion I just made it, peeped through the window and saw Van Hoosier’s hat disappearing under the front porch, so that I had to tear back down the staircase, haul myself back over the banisters, climb down the outside bit and get myself into the main corridor all over again before they started hollering for me. But then, no one had ever told me having a secret life was going to be easy.
4
That first day when it snowed I figured myself likely weather-proofed against the Van Hoosier boy, but I had made the very mistake that all too many people made with me (who would have thought I had two book nests? who would have thought I Frenched and Shakespeared?), namely I judged him by appearances. I figured him a spineless sort of tall weed, who would buckle in two without his starched shirt to hold him upright. So I grudged an admiration for him that day when I upglanced the drive from the drawing room (I had not then found my tower refuge, of course) and saw him Wenceslasing his way through the drifted snow. A dogged and doglike devotion to me, I realised, worth so much more than his doggerel could ever be.
Mrs Grouse told me to wait in the drawing room. I heard her open the front door and invite him to shake the snow from his boots, followed by an interval of quite prodigious stamping. Shortly afterward, the door to the drawing room opened and Mrs Grouse said, ‘Young Mr Van Hoosier to see you, miss,’ as though we didn’t both know I was sitting in there waiting for him and as if, too, I were much used to visitory. In this, and in adjectiving our guest as young, Mrs Grouse showed that she herself didn’t know how to behave, that she was a housekeeper and childminder, not a hostess. When she shut the door behind him, I noticed she had even neglected to relieve Van Hoosier of his hat.
I invited him to sit down. I had positioned myself in an armchair so as to preclude any possibility of him nexting me and he couched himself opposite, folding himself as though he were hinged at the knees and hips. We sat and smiled politely at one another. I did not know what to do with him and he did not know what to do with his hat. He sat and Gargeried it, twisting it this way and that, rotating it with one hand through the thumb and forefinger of the other, flipping it over and over. Finally, after he’d dropped it for the third time, I upped and overed to him. I irritabled out a hand. ‘Please, may I take that?’
He gratefulled it to me. I outed to the hall and hung it with his coat. But when we were seated again I realised I might have removed the hat but I had not removed the problem. Indeed I had exacerbated it, for now he had nothing to fiddle with. He was forced to fall back on cracking his knuckles, or crossing and uncrossing his legs, this way and that. I hard-stared his shins and he caught my gaze and, uncrossing his legs, put both feet firmly on the floor. He looked scolded and in that moment his face so Gilesed I twinged guilt.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘here we are.’
‘It would appear so,’ I frosted back.
‘It is very cold outside. The snow is deep.’
‘And crisp and even,’ I said.
‘What?’ He knew he was being made fun of, but could not quite figure out how.
We sat in silence some moments more. Then he said, ‘Oh yes, I almo
st forgot,’ and began patting the different pockets of his jacket and pants in an unconvincery of unknowing the whereabouts of something. Finally he pulled out a folded paper and began to unfold it. ‘I wrote you another poem.’
The look I gave him was several degrees colder than the snow and like enough to have sent him scuttling back out into it. ‘Oh no, it’s OK; you don’t have to entertain a kiss this time. There’s no question of any kissing being involved.’
I thawed my face and settled back in my chair. ‘Well, in that case, Mr Van Hoosier, fire away.’
Well, the least said about the second Van Hoosier verse, the better. The best you could say was that it was nowhere near as bad as the first, especially as it didn’t carry the threat of a kiss, although, then again, I wasn’t too impressed by the final rhyme of ‘immense’ and ‘Florence’; fortunately the reference was to the supposed number of my admirers, not my size.
When he’d finished reading it, Theo looked up from the paper and saw my expression. ‘Still not the thing, huh?’
‘Not quite,’ I said.
He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust it into his pocket. ‘Darn it,’ he said good-naturedly, ‘but I’ll keep going at it till I crack it, you see if I don’t. I’m not one for giving up.’
In this last he proved as good as his word, not just in the versifying but in the snow trudgery too. It didn’t matter if it blizzarded, or galed or howled like the end of the world outside, he Blithed it every afternoon for the next couple of weeks. After he’d visited with me a few times I began to see that, like his verse, his lanky body rhymed awkwardly and scanned badly. His long limbs didn’t fit too easily into a drawing room, where it seemed one or other of them was always flailing out of its own accord, tipping a little side table here or tripping a rug there; he was like a huge epileptic heron. It impossibled to comfortable him indoors, so on the fourth or fifth visit, when he suggested we take ourselves outside, I was somewhat relieved, for if we stayed in it was only a matter of time before china got broke; not that I minded that, for there was nothing of value at Blithe and no one to care about it anyhow, but I could imagine how distraught he would be. It was only as we put on our coats that I second-thoughted. Was it really safe to have him clumsying about on snow and ice? Would not his parents blame me if it were one of his arms or legs, rather than china, that got broke? God knows, there was enough of them to damage.
‘Is this wise?’ I said, as he mufflered himself up.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, your asthma and all. Taking it out into the cold.’
‘Not at all. It’s the best thing for it, a nice bright frosty day like today when the air is dry and clear. It’s the damp dreary days that get on my chest and set me to coughing.’
So out we went and, to my surprise, my very great surprise, we funned it for a couple of hours. It was not that Theo lost his awkwardness in this new element, but rather that this element was so bare and empty of obstacles that he had nothing to do but fall over on the ice, which he did time and time again. When he went you had to stand clear as his great arms windmilled fit to knock your head off if you should happen to put it in the way of them and his legs jerked up like a marionette’s and then everything collapsed like a deckchair and left a dead spidery bundle on the ground. It was so comical that the first time I burst out laughing before I could help myself and then, when the pile of his bones didn’t move, rushed to him, fearfulling what I would find. But he always pulled himself up with a smile and so after a while we got to making snowballs and throwing them at one another, at which he took a terrible pasting because his own throws were so bad he was as like to hit himself as put one on me. And then he suggested we make a snowman, and we started but we had only got halfway through fashioning a sizeable head when it reminded me of the winter before, how I’d done this with Giles, and it guilted me. I thought of him classroomed somewhere while I was still here enjoying myself and not thinking of him for a single moment for two whole hours together, and all at once I was chilled to my core and couldn’t unchatter my teeth, so that Theo, seeing this, insisted we repair indoors.
As if my thoughts had either been stirred by those of Giles himself or themselves stirred him, next day there was a letter from him. He was not a great correspondent, lacking as he did my facility with the written word, although I had done my best to teach him to read and write. Mrs Grouse, who totally ignoranted this, of course, thought it a marvel how quickly the school had taught him to write, although his letters were so badly formed it took me a great while to figure out even this short epistle. Before I had the letter to myself, though, I had to listen to Mrs Grouse’s guesses as to what Giles’s mangled hieroglyphics might mean, for, of course, I was not supposed to be able to read them for myself. The poor woman, who was, I suspected, as literate, or rather illiterate, as my brother himself, could make a fair fist of only three-quarters of it and more or less guessed the rest. But when I had it to myself, I managed by long study, and knowledge of Giles, to pretty much figure it out.
Dear Flo,
I am to write home every other Sunday. We have a time for it and all the boys must do it. I hope you are well. I hope Mrs Grouse is well. I hope Meg and Mary and John are all well. I am very well thank you. I am not homesick. I am very slow with my lessons but I don’t mind. The other boys laugh at me for this, but I don’t mind the laughing so much. I will close now.
Your loving brother
Giles
What did it mean, ‘I don’t mind the laughing so much’? So much as what? Were there other things that he minded more, physical intimidation perhaps, some kind of pinching or hitting or hair-tugging or fire-roasting? Or was it merely a figure of speech, a way of saying he wasn’t greatly bothered by it? And why did he talk about not being homesick? Why mention it at all, unless perhaps he was and had been instructed not to worry those at home by writing them about it. The letter weeped me and that night in bed I puzzled over it again, then pillowed it, wanting thereby to feel close to poor Giles.
5
You should not deduce from that afternoon in the snow with Theo Van Hoosier that I was all joy unalloyed at his visits. There was plenty to alloy my joy, but nothing more so than the disturbance to my reading. It was not simply the long and often untimely interruptions the visits occasioned. It was also all the moments when he unappeared. You will recall that whenever I was towered I had to check the drive once every four and a half minutes. To leave margin for error this meant once every four minutes. But, of course, I was untimepieced and I didn’t see myself hauling no grandfather clock over the banisters and up the stairs. The only way I could judge the time, therefore, was by the turn of my pages, the pace at which I read. So before taking each book from the library I timed myself reading a few pages by the grandfather clock, to determine exactly how far four minutes would take me. If it were three and a half pages, then up in the tower room I would have to look out the window at every such interval. I cannot begin to tell you how annoying this was. It was like trying not to drop off to sleep; all the time, as the book drew me in, as its author surrounded me with a whole new world, some part of me was fighting the delicious surrender to such absorption and saying, three and a half, three and a half, three and a half. Sometimes I’d sudden I’d forgotten, that seven or eight pages, or even ten or fourteen, had passed with no looking up. When that occurred I had no way of knowing whether Van Hoosier had all unseen upped the drive during my relapse, and so there was nothing for it but to down book and clamber all the way down the stairs, and run along the corridor to check out the hall and drawing room and then, if they were un Hoosiered, upglance the drive, and if that were likewise Theo-free, make the mad dash up to the tower again. On a good book such as Jane Eyre I might be up-and-downstairsing four or five times in an afternoon.
One day in the tower, I lifted my eyes from my book, resenting this crazy, jerky four-minute way of reading and, through the window, saw a rook pecking at something in the snow. The scene wa
s the perfect picture of a new state of mind I realised I had reached. The perfect white snow, the black rook a nasty stain upon a newly laundered sheet; for the first time I understood that there was nothing wholly good and nothing wholly bad, that every page has some blot, and, by the same token, I hoped, every dark night some distant tiny shining light. This hoped me some. The rook on my landscape was Giles, and all the suffering he might be going through, and all the suffering I endured from the great hole inside of me where he should have been. But the rook was one small black dot and the rest was all white. Did that not offer the prospect that most of my brother’s school life might be happy and carefree, with perhaps one or two small things he did not like? And yet, why had he mentioned not being homesick, except to reassure me? What could it mean but that he was?
Anyway, there were the Christmas holidays to look forward to when Giles would be home and I would be able to worm the truth from him, although what good that would do me I couldn’t be sure. Meanwhile I read all the mornings and some of the afternoons and then Van Hoosiered my way through the rest. Because of his restless and wayward limbs and the need to keep them from fine china, Theo was always up for getting out in the snow. One day I looked out my tower window and saw a bent figure trudging up the drive and almost went back to my book, for I thought it must be some delivery man and could not be he. This fellow appeared to be a hunchback with a great lump on his spine, but it fortuned me to watch him a bit longer and then the hump moved, leapt off his back and dangled from one of his hands and the rest of the shape organised itself into the unmistakable gangle of Theo and I was off, leaping the banisters and racing the corridor.
