The Mennyms

by Sylvia Waugh

  “No need for that,” she said tartly. “Soobie did tell me that you could talk now. He didn’t tell me how cheeky you were, or I might have stayed away!”

  Pilbeam was not Appleby. She was born knowing how to say sorry and to feel ashamed of her bouts of bad temper.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a genuine voice, “but I did want you to be surprised and pleased, and he has spoilt it.”

  “I am pleased,” smiled Vinetta, “and a bit surprised too. I like the way you’ve done your hair. Soobie never mentioned that. It looks much better than those braids.”

  “Do you think so?” asked Pilbeam eagerly, glancing at herself in the mirror.

  “Yes, I do. You have lovely hair.”

  “But Appleby has red hair. You told me she had. And she’s pretty. Is her hair nicer than mine?”

  “No,” said Vinetta, stroking the black hair affectionately. “You both have lovely hair and I couldn’t choose between you. Not that life is a beauty contest, though you might think so from some of your magazines.”

  After that they sat down together, Vinetta in the rocking chair now and Pilbeam on the footstool, each doing her share of the talking. Vinetta gave all the news, even telling about Appleby’s treacherous lies and the meeting that was going to take place that very evening to bring her to book. Pilbeam asked question after question.

  “You could come down and meet everyone,” suggested Vinetta.

  “No,” said Pilbeam, shutting up a like a clam, so that the satin stitches on her pink lips began to look unreal. Vinetta looked anxious.

  “I don’t want you to live in the attic all the time and meet nobody. Miss Quigley’s living in a cupboard is bad enough. There’s a nice room downstairs next door to Appleby’s.”

  “No,” said Pilbeam again, and the satin lips closed firmly together so that Vinetta feared that it might be the last word she would ever say. She was very careful not to convey her fears to her new daughter.

  “Is that all you can say?” she bantered as heartily as she could. “I thought you liked talking now you’ve discovered how. I thought you were going to turn out to be a real chatterbox. Come on, what’s the matter?”

  Pilbeam relented a little.

  “I’m not ready yet,” she said. “Besides, I don’t want to come downstairs till the trouble with Appleby’s sorted out. What would she think if I appeared on the very day you all turn on her and face her with her wicked deeds? One way and another, I have waited forty years to become one of you, or so you tell me. A day or two longer, or even a week or two, is neither here nor there. I’m reading Bleak House. The time soon passes.”

  “You’re probably right,” sighed Vinetta, thinking with a sad heart of the coming confrontation. She looked down at her wristwatch.

  “Goodness!” she exclaimed. “Is that the time? I’m going to be late for the meeting!”

  26

  * * *

  Sunday Morning

  VINETTA DID NOT sleep at all on Saturday night. She lay in the darkness, with her bedroom door ajar, straining to hear any sound. She thought Miss Quigley was right. Appleby should be allowed to creep back into the house and go to her own room without anybody noticing. But her mother desperately needed to know that she was there, and safe. So she lay awake and listened.

  And she did hear sounds. Houses by night click and shuffle and groan from time to time. Sleepers turn in their beds. But from midnight till dawn not a door opened, no foot was heard to tiptoe up the stairs. As usual, there was a dim light on the staircase and another in the hall. The darkness was relative not absolute. But no shadow crossed the shaft of light that shone in at the narrow opening in the door.

  As soon as the palest daylight showed through the curtains, Vinetta crept from her bed, leaving Joshua blissfully sleeping as if nothing were wrong. She went up the short flight of stairs that led to Appleby’s room and gently pushed the door open. The bed was still neatly made and unslept in. On the floor, Vinetta could just make out the shoebox full of photographs and the open album. Habit is strong. Vinetta was used to tidying up after everyone. She picked up the album and closed it carefully. Then she put both box and album on the desk by the window. That done, she sat down on the empty bed and sobbed.

  “Perhaps she needs more time,” said Soobie’s voice.

  Vinetta, startled, looked up to see her son standing silhouetted in the doorway. With the hall light behind him, he looked tall and strong.

  “Why did she do it, Soobie? Why?”

  “Run away?” he queried, not sure what the question meant. “I think she ran away because she was too proud to admit to all her lies. She is a very proud person. It would be very difficult for her to own up and say sorry for something so outrageous. She knows that.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said his mother. “Why did she tell all those lies in the first place? Why did she write those letters and make up all those stories about Albert Pond? It is still incredible to me that he doesn’t exist. I almost wish he did.”

  Soobie came into the dark room and sat in Appleby’s basket chair.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. Perhaps she grew sick of shadows, like the Lady of Shalott. Maybe she is fed up with celebrating her fifteenth birthday over and over again. It could be her way of rebelling against being a rag doll.”

  “I don’t see why she should rebel. She gets everything she wants. She gets her own way all the time. I constantly make allowances for her immaturity.”

  Soobie’s blue face could not be seen clearly in the dull light of early morning, but it took on a look of controlled anger.

  “She could resent that,” he said in tones as neutral as he could manage. “After forty years she might prefer to be regarded as mature.”

  “Then she should behave in a mature way,” said Vinetta sharply, appreciating all too well the undertones.

  “Don’t you see?” said Soobie more gently. “That is the trouble, Mother. She can’t. We are all caught in our own warp of time. She can never be other than adolescent.”

  It was growing lighter. From the room below, Poopie’s room, there came the sound of movements. Vinetta paused and listened before answering.

  “You are only a year older than she is, Soobie. And you are mature enough. Even your grandfather says you have an old head on young shoulders. Why can’t she be more like you?”

  “I would say I’m different, but that is not fair. Everyone is different from everybody else. Kate must have had her own reasons for giving me a blue face. But here I am, the blue Mennym, who thinks too much. In my own way I am no more mature than Appleby. I haven’t reached contentment with my lot. And I never will.”

  Just then, Poopie came in and sat beside his mother on Appleby’s bed. He was still dressed in his red striped pyjamas. His hair was more tousled than ever and he looked much younger than his ten years. He cuddled up beside Vinetta, looking for comfort in a strange situation, minding terribly the upset in his family.

  A few moments later, Wimpey came in, still in her nightdress and carrying the American doll she got for Christmas.

  “Would-you-like-a-Chocolate-Milk?” asked the doll.

  Poopie, with the short memory of childhood, giggled, and then looked guilty. Vinetta sighed as she remembered Appleby chanting those very words last December.

  Hearing the commotion, Tulip came from her own room and said briskly, “Is this a private party, or can anybody join in?”

  Vinetta smiled wanly and got up from the bed. She knew what Tulip meant and she knew that Tulip was right. Gathering together in Appleby’s room could only lead to weeping and wailing, and that would do nobody any good.

  “Go back to your own rooms, children,” she ordered. “It’s much too early for you to be out of bed.”

  “Where’s Appleby, Mother?” asked Wimpey. “I came to look for her. Miss Quigley said she would come home.”

  “I don’t know where she is,” sighed Vinetta. “I wish I did.” />
  The day was lighter now and the rain of the night before had mercifully stopped.

  “She’ll probably come back some time today,” said Soobie as hopefully as he could, but not really convinced by his own words. “At least it isn’t raining now.”

  27

  * * *

  Sunday Night

  IT WAS NO ordinary Sunday. Every single pretend was abandoned. They did not gather to sit down at the white cloth and enjoy the illusion of a Sunday dinner. There would have been a space at the table and nobody could bear that.

  In his bedroom, Granpa Magnus had no Sunday newspapers because Appleby was not there to fetch them. In front of him, on the portable desk, was a sheet of blank paper. He could not think of a thing to write.

  “Can I get you anything?” asked Tulip three or four times in the space of half an hour.

  “No,” Magnus kept answering absently. “No. Thank you.”

  Tulip turned her attention to the rest of the room. She opened the curtains a little wider. She straightened the lace runner on the dressing table. She moved her own armchair slightly to the left. She moved the ottoman a little closer to the door.

  Magnus watched her, growing irritated, but when he spoke at last his voice was old and weary, not the irascible roar that usually expressed his irritations. Even his purple foot hung limp.

  “Leave it, Tulip,” he said. “Stop fussing with the furniture.”

  “I wish she would come back,” said Tulip, getting to the heart of the matter. “There’s none of us will be able to settle to anything till she does.”

  Miss Quigley’s cupboard in the hall was high and narrow and empty except for the cane-seated chair on which she sat and slept. It was under the stairs, next to the much shorter, wedge-shaped cupboard where the meters were. At some stage in the house’s history the two cupboards might well have been one. Was the cupboard made for Miss Quigley, or Miss Quigley for the cupboard?

  On this Sunday, Miss Quigley sat on her cane-seated stiff-backed chair but she did not sleep. Instead she kept her ear close to the thinnest part of the door panel. Listening.

  And hearing Poopie and Wimpey, who spent much of the day sitting on the bottom step of the staircase within sight of the front door.

  “She might come in the back door,” said Wimpey at one stage.

  “If she does, she’ll still have to pass us to go upstairs, stupid,” said Poopie. His Action Man was hanging by a very long rope from the banister above. Wimpey had her knitting with her. The ‘rope’ was really a length of Wimpey’s red wool. She had been induced to part with it when her brother explained that Hector, the Action Man, needed it to climb a mountain. To stop pretending altogether was impossible for the younger members of the family.

  Joshua, Vinetta and Soobie spent most of their day in the lounge. For Soobie it was the natural place. If he had not been on the look-out for Appleby, he would still have been watching the world from the window. Not that there was much world to watch. The rain had stopped for the time being, but the sky was overcast and the air was raw. It was still just the beginning of October but it could as easily have been a December day.

  Vinetta was sewing. Joshua was sitting still, looking uncomfortable, staring in front of him. He missed his pretend dinner and pretend tea and he longed for the comfort of holding his pipe and pretending to smoke. Joshua had very little imagination. His pretends were limited, but very durable.

  “I’ll have to get ready for work,” he said at last, relieved to see the clock on the mantelpiece tip him the wink.

  “You’re surely not going to work?” said Vinetta in angry tones. “Not whilst Appleby is still missing?”

  Joshua felt embarrassed but he stuck to his guns.

  “I’m doing no good sitting here,” he insisted. “Besides, I might see her on the street somewhere. I’ll be looking all around me as I go. You can depend on that.”

  “And if you meet her,” snapped Vinetta, “what will you do? Tell her you can’t stop or you’ll be late for work? Ask her nicely to go home on her own?”

  It was Joshua’s turn to be angry.

  “Of course I won’t. What do you think I am? If I see her I’ll be only too glad to fetch her home, work or no work.”

  With that Vinetta had to be content.

  It grew dark. Tulip drew the curtains in the big front bedroom and switched on the light. Sir Magnus was startled from a twilight reverie. He looked at Tulip intently for a few moments. She had stayed with him practically all day; knitting, accounts and breakfast-room business were all neglected. Whether to give sympathy or to seek comfort, her husband did not know – probably a little of both.

  Suddenly Sir Magnus saw where he felt his duty lay. For the first time in forty years he swung round on the bed and put both purple feet to the floor.

  “What are you doing?” asked a startled Tulip.

  “I am going to look for my grand-daughter. Nobody else seems to be bothering,” he answered with determination. He took hold of his stout stick and stood up. Then he walked stiffly, but holding himself admirably straight, to the wardrobe. In forty years he had never worn, nor even seen, his naval uniform. That wardrobe door had never been opened. But Magnus had been born knowing what was inside.

  “Straighten the bed covers,” he ordered Tulip. She obeyed him instantly, but she still did not know what he was planning to do.

  From the wardrobe he took the white uniform, with its gold braid and tasselled epaulettes, and laid it neatly across the bed.

  “Now leave me,” he said and Tulip obediently went into the little room next door.

  Sir Magnus was wearing one of his many nightshirts. He normally wore a fresh one at least twice a week. This particular nightshirt had broad grey and yellow stripes and reached down to the middle of his calves. All that could be seen beneath it was a pair of purple feet.

  With a bit of a struggle, Magnus pulled on the dazzling white uniform trousers with the braces hanging from them. Then he removed the nightshirt and put on his dress-shirt, managing the buttons and the neck-tie as if he had done it all his life. There was quite a professional touch also in the way he flicked his braces into place. Next came the shoes and finally the jacket.

  “You may come in now,” he called to Tulip.

  He put on his peaked cap and pulled it well down over his black button eyes.

  The sight took Tulip’s breath away.

  “I’m ready now,” said Magnus. “I am going out there,” (he gestured towards the window in the manner of a great explorer) “to seek and find the missing Appleby.”

  “You can’t walk down the street looking like that,” cried Tulip in a panic.

  “And what is wrong with the way I look, madam?”

  Sir Magnus surveyed himself proudly in the long wardrobe mirror.

  “You look wonderful, Magnus,” said his wife. “It is just that everyone will look at you. If you were flesh and blood dressed like that, they would look at you. It is dangerous. You look too . . .” she sought the right word “. . . too magnificent.”

  Sir Magnus sat down heavily on his bed. He felt exhausted. He was, after all, not a young man and his sedentary habits had not equipped him for strenuous exercise.

  “Perhaps you are right,” he said, panting a little.

  “I am,” said Tulip firmly.

  “Leave me,” he said again, the white moustache quivering.

  When Tulip was summoned to return half an hour later, Sir Magnus was back in bed, wearing his grey and yellow striped nightshirt, one purple foot dangling disconsolately from beneath the counterpane. The uniform was nowhere in sight.

  Meanwhile, Soobie had seen the darkness creep across the front lawn and the raindrops begin to crowd onto the windowpanes. Joshua had gone to work, but Vinetta was still sitting with her sewing on her lap. She wasn’t sewing now, just sitting, rocking slightly from side to side and looking intensely miserable. Soobie stood up and, without a word, he left the room. Vinetta barely noticed him go.
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br />   He went to the little cloakroom in the corner beside the front door. A pair of blue wellingtons was his first find. After some further searching, he found the dark blue, hooded coat that Vinetta had bought for him thirty years before. He had never worn it. He had never left the house. He had never intended to leave the house. But now, for his mother’s sake, he had a job to do that made an excursion necessary. How he was going to do it he did not know, but he knew he would find out by trying.

  “Where are you going?” asked Vinetta in amazement when he looked in again at the lounge. In his hand he was carrying a huge golf umbrella.

  “I have come to tell you to stop worrying. I am going out to look for Appleby,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “No,” he said, “that’s not right. I am going to find Appleby and bring her home.”

  Vinetta, seeing the look of determination on her son’s face, was torn between confidence in his ability to do what he said he would, and fear for one who had never before left the safety of the house. Her own expression betrayed her anxiety.

  “Don’t go too far,” she said, “and don’t stay away too long.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Soobie with a wry smile. “I am the sensible, dependable Mennym. I’ll keep calling home to tell you where I’ve been – that is if I don’t find her within the first two hours or so. But, whatever happens, I’ll go on looking till I find her. She won’t be all that far away, you know.”

  Vinetta went with him to the front door. The street was dark and deserted.

  “Take care, Soobie,” she said anxiously. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  “Yes,” said her son. “I will take care. I will be all right. Don’t worry about me.”

  He unfurled the umbrella and went out into the stormy, squally night.

  28

  * * *

  Monday Morning

  SOOBIE POSSESSED GREAT coolness of character. As he stepped out of the front door for the very first time he felt no fear and no trace of excitement. He was sixteen years old. This was his home town, and the mysterious memory with which he had been endowed made him instantly aware that he knew the place like the back of his hand. Turn right and you come to the High Street and the shops. Turn left and you pass three churches of different denominations before you reach the public park.