The Mystery of the Cupboard

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Everything I write here will be read to her. I am to write nothing behind her back, and add and alter nothing after she dies. That is our agreement.

  She asks me to write something of my childhood, but I cannot bring myself to do it. I did not start living until I became independent, when I was about twenty-three. Following my mother about during her so-called stage career, and living, in between, in a dismal succession of sordid lodgings and rooms blighted my childhood.

  I acknowledge that my mother made many sacrifices for my education, but the school she sent me to at such expense was - though for some childish reason, I never told her till now — a place of loneliness, hardship, and suffering, where I was brutally beaten for trifles, half-starved, and bullied. As for college, I consider it taught me nothing of any practical value. My real school was the school of life and of business.

  I entered the metal trade as a young man. I started — I am not ashamed to say it, though my mother, who had expected me to enter one of the professions, was scandalised at the time - as a scrap-metal dealer, later getting work at a foundry, where I soon became a supervisor and later, manager of the plant.

  By the time I was thirty-seven I had my own small factory. I made what were commonly called “tin soldiers” (in fact, made of lead) and many other metal toys. (My mother has just drily suggested that I was in search of my lost childhood. Poppycock. I was in search of a respectable livelihood.)

  On the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the government ordered me to turn my factory over to the production of ammunition for rifles. I did not want to do this. I was keenly interested in the toy business. But it would be useless to deny that from a commercial point of view, the war was very good for me. With state money I was able to enlarge my premises. Raw materials were no problem. I had an abundance of cheap labour, mainly women, and once they were trained they were very capable, and patriotically eager to work hard. Of course everything we produced was instantly bought by the armed forces.

  By the time the War ended, I was well-off. Some called me a war profiteer. Poppycock again. I did essential war work. Could I help it if the deprived conditions of my early childhood had made me unfit for active service?

  When the government informed me that I might once again return to peacetime operation, I had no thought but to go back to manufacturing toys, as I had before. It was not to be.

  I had been so taken up with my war production that I had not kept up with the times. In particular, I was unaware that a new material had reared its ugly head, which was about to revolutionize the toy industry, and bring me and my business to ruin.

  I refer, of course, to plastics.

  My mother wants me to admit that my attitude to this accursed new material was in some way exaggerated. I do not admit it. I do not approve of anything, especially emotions, being overblown. Anyone in my position would have been bitter and angry to have his livelihood ruined by this cheap and nasty stuff.

  I will acknowledge that I hated it. I hated it in all its forms, and I never have, do not now, nor ever will in the future, have anything made out of it in my home. When I encounter it, I turn away my eyes. Metaphorically I spit on it. The only time I ever handled it unnecessarily was when, exasperated by my mother’s inability to understand my point of view, I brought her some early plastic model toys to compare with those I used to manufacture before the War.

  My workers were craftsmen. Each soldier’s uniform, gun, horse, and flag was hand-painted. The moulds for them were made from miniature sculptures, modelled in clay in intricate detail by dedicated artists.

  These beautiful and realistic little lead models were heavy to the hand, well-balanced, infinitely rewarding to set up — and to knock down in the excitement of mock battle, when children’s voices would bring the little cannons to life, marbles flew for cannonballs, and the bright, sturdy ranks were scattered in a scene of realistic carnage… Those were true playthings, bringing joy and education to a thousand thousand young ‘generals’…

  One day my models will be found in museums and be collectors’ pieces. Even now they grow rare. They are becoming too valuable to be played with — they must be sheltered behind glass, or buried in boxes and drawers. And those who made them are ruined, cast aside, their skills displaced by - what?

  By cheap, mass-produced, ugly, lightweight rubbish. Trash. Cast from carelessly made moulds, many of the figures not even coloured, their density so low they need no more than a tremble of the floorboards, the vibrations from a child’s shout, to topple them. A sneeze can blow them over! Children play with them — yes. They know no better. There is no comparison! I pity them.

  My mother has noticed my slight agitation. She bids me be calm, and keep to my narrative. “Tell the tale, Frederick,” she says in her husky voice out of her face like a skull… I confess I find it hard to look at her now. She used to be a fine looking woman.

  I have turned the cupboard away. It does her no good to keep looking at her face in its mirror. She insisted on locking it first with that strange little key she keeps round her neck on a red ribbon… She lies now as white as her pillow, the two ends of red ribbon vanishing into her fist where the key is clutched… And there is something else, under her pillow, that she keeps reaching her free hand up to touch. When I ask what she hides there, she murmurs, “The little people”. Ah, yes, of course - the fairies! The poor woman’s mind is wandering…

  Yes, Mother, very well. The tale.

  There is not much more to tell, of myself. I went bankrupt, but they could not keep me down. I could have gone two ways — I could have capitulated and gone into plastic toys (never!) or I could have gone back, in a humble way at first, to honest metal. And that is what I did.

  I joined a firm making metal boxes of all kinds: filing cabinets, small medicine cupboards, document boxes, trunks for travellers to the tropics, cake and biscuit tins, and cashboxes. I am proud of my products, and in no way ashamed of my life. It was not my destiny to marry and have children. Considering my own beginnings, I am not sorry. A man who had no father to pattern himself on cannot be a good one.

  I have read the above to my mother. After all, a few tactful omissions were necessary.

  She is not satisfied. She insists that I tell about a certain foolish action she persuaded me to. The only irrational act of my life.

  I have asked what this writing is for, who will read it. I do not wish to make a fool of myself in the eyes of some stranger. But she has sworn that no one shall read it till after my death. Well then, what do I care? We all have our follies, even the most sane of us. I will do as she wishes.

  All my life I have been embarrassed by my mother’s interest in the occult. This fortune-telling nonsense grated on my nerves. I know it paid for my schooling, which made it worse, but worse still was her insistence that I had inherited some of her ‘Gift’ as she calls it - her supposed supernatural powers. Poppycock.

  After my toy business crashed, a great, consuming rage came upon me. It seethed within me, demanding an outlet. It kept me awake at nights, and even by day I felt it, gnawing on my mind like a rat. I lost weight, I lost concentration, no doctor could help me. And when my mother said she had a remedy, in sheer desperation I said I would put myself in her hands.

  This was her bizarre advice.

  “You must put your anger into something. Make a container and put your anger into it, shut it and have done with it.”

  Absurd! Ridiculous! I mocked her then, and I mock myself now for failing to resist the urge to try it.

  Nevertheless I made the cupboard.

  It was a plain thing like many hundred others the factory was turning out at the time. The difference was, I made this one with my own hands. Cut out the sheeting and welded it and fitted the shelf and the mirror and the handle. My mother said, “Good. But it must have a keyhole and a lock or your anger will escape.”

  Poppycock! I cannot repeat it too often!

  But I did it. God knows why. I did it.

&nbs
p; And I brought it to her. And she said, “Give me the key to the lock,” and I gave it to her, and what should she do but throw it away! Then she said, “Now, Frederick, scrape your head and heart clean of all the anger that is in them against this material you hate.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Any way you can,” she said.

  So I shut my eyes and imagined a pail of clear water. I imagined (what folly! I blush as I remember it) that I took out my brain and washed it, and took out my heart and scrubbed it, and the water floated with repulsive little globs of plastic in brown and yellow and blue and black. And solemn as a priest, I gathered the awful stuff in my two hands and threw it into the interior of the cupboard.

  And though all had been imaginary - I who flatter myself I have no imagination but am a practical man - the gesture of throwing the plastic pieces into the cupboard was real. And my mother slammed the door, and locked it, not with its proper key belonging to the lock I had fitted, but with a key I had not then seen before. The one that she now clutches in her wasted hand.

  “There,” she said very quietly. “You are free of it.” And she took the cupboard and put it away.

  I seem to remember I was ill for some time after this incident. I don’t know what was the matter with me. I was weak and sick, assailed with trembling, and I had no appetite. My mother nursed me herself and did not call a doctor. She said it was natural and would pass.

  It did. One morning I woke as usual at six a.m. and felt my old self. A lingering loathing for all things plastic remained, and has remained. But it no longer consumed me.

  Honesty, and my mother’s relentless insistence, have obliged me to record this childish happening.

  Interestingly, I recognized the cupboard I had made in the one I found by my mother’s bedside, and turned away so that she may not see her face in its mirror. I had not seen it since. But I knew it was the same because I recognized some little details of its making. Some weakness made me unwilling to open it, but I forced myself, half expecting to find - what? I don’t know. At all events, it was quite empty.

  Personally I have no doubt my own strength of will was the real cure for whatever temporarily troubled me.

  10

  Patrick

  Patrick arrived at lunchtime the next day.

  His mother had driven him to London and put him on the train at Waterloo to travel alone, the first time he had gone on a long journey by himself, so he was full of his adventures, and for some time after Omri and his father picked him up at the station, no one else got a word in edgeways.

  “There was this woman, like she had these three awful kids with her and they made such a row I wanted to move but the train was practically full, I could only find a seat in the smoking section. Then I was with these three fellows who were like all swigging cans of beer and smoking their heads off. One of them kept telling stupid stories and roaring with laughter so it almost made you deaf. The stink of smoke was awful, I kept coughing and after a while one of them said why didn’t I push off and find another seat, but I couldn’t, so they started trying to get rid of me, this big guy kept sort of moving in on me till I had hardly any room to sit, and the others were breathing smoke in my face on purpose, honest they were like really grotesque…”

  Omri sat in the back and said nothing. He wasn’t listening. What he was doing was trying to come to terms with one of the greatest disappointments of his life.

  Frederick’s account had brought the writing to an end.

  The only other thing that was written in the notebook - though he had turned every remaining page almost frantically - was two lines, in yet another handwriting quite different from the other two. It was roughly written in blunt pencil, and just said:

  “Missus Driscoll died Oct. 30th 1950, leaving instructions in confedance which will be follered to the letter.”

  There were scribbled initials. They looked like two Is or two Ts. Or maybe one of each.

  Nothing about the cashbox. Nothing about the little people. (Fairies indeed! That was just like Frederick, to think his mother was seeing ‘fairies’!) The ‘Account of a Wonder’ was not there! She had not lived long enough to write it.

  Omri had been more and more certain, as he read, that in the end Jessica Charlotte would reveal that she had brought little people to life through the key and the cupboard, just as Omri had years later. He was still certain, from hints in the notebook, that she had discovered its secret. But how she had used it, who her little people were and how they had comforted her, had gone with her to the grave.

  Still, despite its cut-off ending, the Account had unveiled a lot of other secrets - secrets he was bursting to share with Patrick. But obviously for that he had to have him all to himself, which didn’t happen for a frustratingly long time.

  Gillon’s friend Tony had already arrived by car when they returned, together with his parents (friends of the family), so they had to have tea in the garden. It was no longer strewn with old thatch, which had all been taken away, but the men were still working on the new roof. Omri’s family had got quite used to watching them now, but the newcomers were fascinated, especially Tony’s father who was a journalist and part American.

  He was full of questions and said he might do an article on thatching for an American magazine, especially when he heard about the bottle. He pored over the photocopies Omri’s dad had had made of the various bits of paper. He was quick to spot the possibility that some of the last-time thatchers were still alive.

  “I’d love to interview them!” he said wistfully.

  “Why not?” said Omri’s father.

  He spoke to the head thatcher, who said, “If you was to be stopping over, you might speak to old Tom tomorrow lunchtime at the pub. I told the lad,” - and he indicated Omri.

  This was the first Omri’s parents had heard about this - Omri had hoped - private arrangement. Nothing seemed to be private any more, and Omri gritted his teeth. So much for the quiet talk he had hoped to have with Tom Towsler tomorrow. Tony’s parents promptly decided to spend the night at a bed-and-breakfast place.

  After tea, Omri was just trying to cut Patrick out of the group to get him up to his room, when his mother gaily suggested that Omri and Gillon take Patrick and Tony on a tour. This took ages, because, maddeningly, Patrick was really interested and kept exploring and asking questions, especially about the hens. He was absolutely fascinated about the fox.

  “But the henhouse shuts, how did he get in to kill them?”

  “Through a bit of a tear in the wire. There, see, where Dad mended it?”

  “But he couldn’t have got them out through that!”

  “He didn’t. He just killed three, ate one on the spot and left the others.”

  “Wow. How did they look, dead?”

  “Horrible. No heads. BERLUD everywhere,” said Gillon with some relish.

  “Grotesque!” (This was evidently Patrick’s current favourite word.) Then he said, “Hey, Omri, where’s your cat?” There was a silence. “Don’t tell me the fox got her, too!”

  Omri said, “I don’t know. We don’t know what’s happened to her. She’s been missing ever since we got here.” He had a pang of disloyalty because he actually hadn’t thought about her much since he’d been reading the Account.

  “Tough luck. Sorry,” said Patrick. “Poor old Kitsa.”

  Omri, thinking the ‘tour’ was over, opened his mouth to suggest they go up to his room to talk, when Patrick said, “Did you say the wood by the river was yours too? Excellent. Let’s go down there and explore!”

  “Yeah!” chimed Tony, and the two of them took off across the yard like a pair of foxhounds on the scent.

  Gillon echoed Omri’s sigh.

  “Just a pair of townies,” he said sadly.

  “Patrick’s not. He’s lived in the country for two years.”

  “Kent,” said Gillon. “Flat. All orchards and stuff, no wild parts. Not Dorset. You can’t blame them really.”

  Omri s
tared at him. “You like it here now then,” he said in surprise. Not much more than a week ago Gillon had still been moaning about leaving London.

  “Don’t be a dork,” said Gillon obscurely. “Come on, let’s show them that climbing tree with the old rooks’ nests. Do you think Dad’d let us take the blow-up dinghy on the river?”

  What with one thing and another, it was bed time before Omri got Patrick alone. The two boys were sharing Omri’s room, while Tony was to sleep in Adiel’s.

  “We’ll have to talk quietly,” said Omri. “The walls are very thin, you can hear everything.”

  Patrick looked at him. “Oh - yeah!” he said, evidently remembering for the first time that Omri had something to tell him.

  He picked up the rucksack that contained his few things, mainly two sets of spare trainers, his Walkman, and almost no clothes, and from a side pocket extracted a small plastic bag with some cotton-wool inside. Out of a bed of this he carefully unwrapped the figure of a cowboy on a black horse. The little man, seated on the high-pommelled Western saddle, wore a plaid shirt and chaps, boots and spurs, but no hat.

  Patrick fingered him lovingly. “Hope he got his hat back,” he said.

  “Remember at his wedding, when he said you couldn’t be legally married without a hat?”

  The boys stifled fond laughter. “He’d lost his nerve!”

  “He got it back again.”

  “I do wonder how they’re getting on! Emma thinks Ruby Lou might have had a baby by now.”

  “Pretty quick if so, they’ve only been married ten months.”

  “Eleven.”

  “Isn’t Ruby Lou a bit old?”

  “I don’t think she’s more than about thirty.”

  “Do you think Boone still drinks whisky?”

  “He said he’d stop.”

  “Bet he didn’t.”

  “What do you reckon’s happening to Little Bull and Twin Stars?”