The Song of Mat and Ben

by Joan Aiken

  I nodded. They were two clubs in the town who played a very wild, fierce game once a year trying to get a home-made football over a boundary line. Historians said that in the old days, before the Romans came to Cornwall for tin, the ball used had been a human head. Nowadays the two groups just had fights on street corners – if there was nothing better to do.

  ‘They’ve taken sides about it,’ said Aunt Lal. ‘Some Pernel, some Hardisty.’

  So – I wondered – why should I be expected to make sense of this spooky state of affairs? I hadn’t even seen the twins, except in a dream. But, as if I had spoken aloud, Aunt Lal went on, ‘It’s because I had that dream about you and the twins – finding their music book.’

  ‘Did I find it? In my dream they just asked for it.’

  ‘You found it and gave it to them,’ said Aunt Lal. ‘And besides – you did help me before.’

  A couple of years ago I had helped her get free from a kind of spell that had been laid on her. But at that time I myself had been helped by a strange boy called Eden, who had given me a key. I had met him on the train when visiting Aunt Lal. He told me he lived at Wicca Steps, farther along the coast, but Uncle Adam said there was no such place; it had fallen into the sea two hundred years ago. Since then I had had a few odd glimpses of Eden, as if he and I met on some different wavelength.

  Remembering that, I looked up at my Perdidas jacket, which Aunt Lal had hung on a coat-hanger from a hook in the mantelpiece. Absently, I stood up and rummaged in its pockets.

  ‘I emptied them out,’ said Aunt Lal. ‘There was only a handkerchief and a two-penny piece. You’ll find them on the shelf.’

  ‘You missed this,’ I said.

  I pulled out a key. It was the one that Eden had given me. From time to time I lost it. But it always turned up again, as if it were part of some plan that was not yet complete.

  ‘So what do you think I should do?’ I said.

  ‘We have to study what has happened to you,’ she said. ‘Somebody didn’t want you to come here, that’s plain. You will have to keep an eye out. They may try to stop you again.’

  ‘Stop me?’

  ‘Like by drowning you in a ditch,’ Aunt Lal said calmly. ‘Let’s think now – we might be able to get advice.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘One way is to switch on the radio and listen to the first thirteen words – I find that useful at times…’

  She pressed the radio button and at once a voice said, ‘Woe unto you, lawyers! For ye have taken away the key of knowledge.’

  The door opened and Uncle Adam came in with Nibs the cat, who went everywhere with him. They were both coated with snow.

  ‘It’s coming down like mashed potato,’ said Uncle Adam. ‘I think we may have Ned with us for quite a while.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  AFTER UNCLE ADAM had made fragrant fish soup for supper (he always did the cooking, Aunt Lal was quite useless in that department) and we had all eaten the soup, including Nibs, I went to bed. I was dead tired. And my own clothes would not be dry till morning.

  I went to sleep at once. And, helter-skelter, as if I’d stepped on to a moving walkway, I began to dream.

  The twins were there, Mat and Ben. Mat was the one who thought he was a dog and ran around on all fours. His brother was very patient with him.

  ‘It was their Aunt Alida’s fault,’ the boy who lived next door to the twins told me. ‘After she came to look after the twins, she used to punish Mat by making him go in the dog kennel, out in the back garden. If you treat a person like a dog, they’ll end up acting like one.’

  ‘Why was their aunt in charge of them?’

  ‘She and her brother came when their sister died. Pernel was rich, he had a big house, he was famous already. So they moved in. He was often abroad, playing in concerts. Mark and Alida treated the boys badly. I used to see them crying in the garden.’

  ‘Aren’t you Eden? Who gave me the key? Why did you live next door to the Pernels? I thought you were miles away along the coast in Wicca Steps?’

  ‘That was before we moved,’ he said. ‘The twins were a lot younger than me. They used to be sent out even when it was bitter cold. Their uncle stuck the dog kennel up in the big cherry tree and told them to take shelter in that if they were chilly. If I went to play with them he threw stones at me and told me to get back over the fence. Mind you don’t lose that key I gave you. You’ll need to use it at least twice more.’

  ‘How can I help the twins?’

  ‘They want their father. And he wants them. But they are lost.’

  Mat and Ben were running along the street. Ben was howling miserably, and Mat was calling out, ‘Dad? Dad? Where are you, Dad?’ in a thin hopeless voice.

  Their Uncle Mark came out and furiously dragged them back indoors. I saw him aim a kick at Ben, who let out a yelp. I saw that he was the man who had given me the lift. He had not drowned in the ditch, it seemed.

  ‘What can I do?’ I asked Eden.

  ‘You can help the boys by remembering the tune their dad wrote for them,’ Eden told me.

  ‘What tune?’

  He whistled a lively quick scatter of notes, and then sang:

  ‘This is the song

  Of Mat and Ben

  It rattles along

  Without where or when

  Oh, when, oh, where, oh, where or

  when

  Will the poor twins find their dad

  again?’

  A skinny lady came walking along the street. She carried an umbrella with ribbons tied to the handle and aimed a whack with it at Eden, who slipped through the door.

  ‘Don’t lose the key!’ he called to me. ‘Don’t forget the tune! It’s in the key of D!’

  The tune was very like one I had made up for singing in the bath when I was a lot younger:

  ‘My bath is as wide as the Bristol

  Channel,

  I’ve lost the soap,

  I’ve lost the flannel…’

  I’ll easily be able to remember it, I thought. The last thing I remembered was Aunt Alida saying, ‘Stop singing that vulgar tune!’

  Then I woke up and found that the cat Nibs was sitting on my chest and trying to open my eyes by gently dabbing them with his paw, which was a habit he had when bored by his own company and eager for breakfast.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE SCENE OUTSIDE my bedroom window was white and silent. Snow had stopped falling, but the sky was still heavy with it. The only sound came from the grey-and-white sea, lurching and slapping against the rocks of the point.

  I went downstairs, and found my clothes which had dried overnight. Adam and Lal were still asleep, so I fed Nibs, ate a piece of bread and marmalade, and went out into the hushed, empty world. Nibs took one look at it and turned back indoors. I walked down to the point and watched the waves tipping to and fro and the white gulls rocking on them, staring at me haughtily with their pale cold eyes, as if they knew a secret that I didn’t. They were like Mark Hardisty and his sister, I thought, with their mean expressions and curved cruel beaks.

  The terrible thing was that I had forgotten the tune. In my dream the notes that Eden whistled had come through quite clear and plain – it was a quick, catchy tune. I had felt quite sure of remembering it – but now it was clean gone, the corner inside my head where bits of music were stored and brought out when wanted felt like an empty dustbin. I could remember ‘God Save the Queen’, I could remember ‘Ten Green Bottles’ but ‘This is the Song of Mat and Ben’ was null and void as the dinosaur or the dodo. I couldn’t even think of my own tune that was similar to the one I wanted – sometimes you can rescue an escaped tune that way, by starting off with something that has a similar pattern of notes; but no – this one had gone right out of reach, into hollow nowhere.

  I had been straining my ears – the way you do when you are trying to fetch a tune out from where it is hiding – and now I caught the sound of voices fiercely shouting. The noise came from the direction
of the main quay, so I walked that way, to see what was going on.

  My fingers found the key in my pocket and I thought, later I must go and hunt through the books in Adam’s shop, perhaps there really is an old music book there that once belonged to the twins, with the tune in it – but the shop will be locked up at this time of the morning. Then I turned a corner, by a pub called The Hornpipe Cat – The sign showed a cat dancing on hind legs – and came out on to the Town Quay. This was a wide flat space at the head of the harbour, with the lifeboat in its shed at the top of a ramp on one side and the harbourmaster’s office on the other.

  In the middle two groups were hurling snowballs at each other. One lot wore red caps, the other had blue. Some of them were shrilly whistling tunes.

  The fight may have started in a friendly way, but I could see that it was turning nasty. Stones were being loaded into the snowballs, I caught a glint of knives and knuckledusters, there were splashes of blood on the snow. A policeman over on the far side of the harbour had loudly blown his whistle and was now talking urgently into his mobile phone.

  Stay away from trouble, Aunt Lal had said. There was absolutely no sense in getting mixed up in a rough-house between the Hellwethers and the Tollmen – and I was about to turn and go back the way I had come when a rock-loaded snowball smacked me on the side of my head and I passed out cold. Next thing I knew I was being dragged towards the jetty and voices were shouting:

  ‘Toss him overboard! Dump him in the briny! Who needs his rotten tunes? Chuck him in! Murderer! Child killer! Did in his own kids!’

  I began to protest and struggle. ‘Let me go! Leave me alone! I’m not a murderer…’ and suddenly found that I was looking up into the faces of Inspector Mutton and a policeman in a helmet.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, keep calm. Take it easy! No one’s calling you a murderer!’ they were saying.

  I felt a fool.

  I sat up and saw that I was nowhere near the harbourside. I was in fact still outside The Hornpipe Cat; and the two policemen hoisted me up and took me into it and bought me a cup of hot chocolate.

  ‘You were only knocked out for a moment – Dan here saw you cop one, and drop, so he came and helped you up.’

  I apologized confusedly. ‘I thought they were dragging me across the quay and were going to drop me into the harbour.’

  ‘You took quite a bash on the head. You’ll have a black eye tomorrow, likely.’

  ‘Best go home to your aunt for now.’

  ‘What happened to them – all the chaps who were fighting?’

  ‘Oh, they run off, soon’s I blow my whistle. We know them! Hellwethers and Tollmen. Happen we’ll run a few in, time they start another of their scrummages.’ Dan grinned at me and said, ‘Your aunt’ll want to put a bit of beefsteak on that eye.’

  ‘I’ll walk you back there,’ Inspector Mutton said. And he did so. I felt even more of a fool. Here I was, invited to St Boan to put right trouble in the town, and as soon as I stepped out of doors, had to be escorted home like a child.

  But Aunt Lal took it with her usual calm. She inspected my bruised forehead, wrapped a bit of snow in a handkerchief, and said, ‘Hold that there for half an hour and I don’t think it will be much.’

  When Inspector Mutton had left, I asked Aunt Lal: ‘What happened to Carl Pernel? After his house burned down?’

  Suddenly she looked very tired. She said, ‘That is the worst part of the story. People in the town accused him of leaving his children to die in the burning house. So one day an angry mob chased him and stoned him and threw him into the harbour. His head hit a rock and he drowned.’

  ‘That was it,’ I said slowly. ‘That’s what I was remembering. After the stone hit me.’

  ‘You hooked on to his mind for a moment. Poor man,’ Aunt Lal said.

  ‘You said he was a rich man. What happened to his money after he died?’

  ‘It went to Mark and Alida Hardisty – his wife’s brother and sister. They rebuilt the house and lived there. And with some of the money they endowed a school. There’s a big memorial to them in the church, and a big tombstone in the graveyard.’

  ‘Nobody ever suggested that they might have done away with the twins?’

  ‘No. But they came to a queer end.’

  ‘Why? What happened to them?’

  ‘You know the cliff path runs westward from here, all the way along the coast to Land’s End. And before you get to the ruins of Croopus Castle there is Cold Point where the land runs out, and there’s a flattish bit of ground which is quite dangerous because of a deep hole going down to a tin mine that’s all worked out. Five years ago they built a shed round the hole with signs saying DANGER, but back in those days that wasn’t so. Well, one night a man called Rumpot Roche (because of the amount of liquor he used to put away) was walking home along the cliff path from visiting his lady-friend at St Clew, and he looked down and saw the Hardistys. The cliff path does some zig-zagging there, and they were down below him on a lower bend. It was a summer evening, not full dark, and he could easily recognise them because of the black suit Hardisty always wore and a kind of ostrich-feather tippet Alida had round her neck…’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And she carried an umbrella.’

  ‘The queer thing, Roche thought, was that they were being led. Two little lights went on ahead of them flickering like candle-flames. He couldn’t see who or what was carrying them, but they were low down, at knee height. Then, when they got to where the deep hole was, they all vanished, the Hardisty couple and the lights too. Next day Mark and Alida were found at the bottom of the hole with broken necks. It was the day they were supposed to open the new school.’

  ‘So all of them died,’ I said. ‘Everyone in the story. Pernel and the twins and Mark and Alida. Is Pernel buried in the churchyard too?’

  ‘Yes. They put up a stone to him with his name and history, but people kept defacing it and writing ‘Murderer’ so now there is just a simple slab with his initials. One rector said there should be a tablet in the church. Pernel was one of the town’s most famous inhabitants, but other people said no, look what he was accused of doing. So nothing was done.’

  ‘It’s a bit sad.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Uncle Adam came downstairs. ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘been in the wars? Do you want to come along to the shop and look for a book?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  On the way to the shop Uncle Adam asked me, ‘Seen the twins yet, have you?’

  ‘Only in dreams. Not while I was awake. Have you seen them, Uncle Adam?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. But lots in the town have. And nobody likes it. Think they’re going to come down with meningitis or Mad Cow Disease as a result of seeing the boys. Stupid. But that’s how people are. My helper in the shop, Mrs Fearon, she’s seen the twins several times around the town and she won’t come to the shop any more. Says she’d drop dead of fright if they walked in the door. So your aunt is quite right. Something’s got to be done about them.’

  ‘Well, I wish I could see them.’

  ‘Maybe you will by and by,’ he said encouragingly.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  UNCLE ADAM’S SHOP was very dusty. I supposed that was due to Mrs Fearon’s absence.

  I started on the top shelves, taking out each book in turn, leafing through it, shaking it to make sure nothing was tucked between the pages. After a couple of hours I had gone through one set of shelves and found nothing at all. Adam and I were both coughing and sneezing from all the dust I had dislodged. When we went home at lunchtime he said, ‘You’d better take a walk this afternoon, young Ned, and get some fresh air into your lungs.’

  ‘Why not visit the museum,’ Aunt Lal said. ‘They’ve got Pernel’s manuscripts there, and one of his instruments.’

  I’m not crazy about museums. I’ve seen too many dusty old pots and rusty old billhooks on school expeditions. I thought I would go to the graveyard first. St Boan graveyard is on a steep bit of h
illside, practically one-in-three up above the town. A path leads directly to it from Uncle Adam’s house. So up it I went, and soon had a fine view of all the snow-capped headlands along the coast, and the slate-coloured sea, white and frothy at the edges, tossing against cliffs.

  The graveyard was full of Hardistys and Trelawnys and Treffrys and Pengellys. And a big handsome granite memorial to Mark and Alida Hardisty, founders of the Hardisty School.

  At last, right up at the top, I found a single stone, no bigger than a milestone, with C.P. on it and his dates. Most of the other graves had bunches of snowdrops and daffodils and greenhouse hyacinths, now half-covered in snow, but this one had nothing. And somebody had hacked away half the lettering with a chisel. And somebody else had dumped some garbage beside the stone. It would be easy to do this, for the grave was just within the boundary wall, and a road ran on the other side.

  I felt sorry for Pernel. Poor man, what had he done to deserve all this hate and scorn? Only saved his precious instrument, which was the mainstay of his living. And he had searched for the twins first. I wondered what Pernel had looked like. I had a clear notion of Mark and Alida, the unkind brother and sister, and of the twins, queer little brats, – but nobody had given me a description of Pernel himself. As I stood thinking this, a boy shot past me on a bike, on the other side of the wall. He was whistling a very familiar tune – I just caught a snatch of it, and then he was gone and the tune with him…

  The boy had the look of my ghost friend, Eden. Sometimes I don’t see Eden for months. And then he will turn up in a dream, or a glimpse in a crowd. Sometimes he gives me good advice.

  Mist was rising all around and the boy and the bike disappeared into it.

  Then I noticed something odd. A lot of the tombstones in this part of the graveyard had plainly been made by the same stonemason, who had a fondness for a stone with a curved top decorated by a pair of plump cherubs sitting at ease on the lower end of the curve. Now – out of the corner of my eye – I thought I saw two of those cherubs jump nimbly down off a headstone and scamper away downhill into the mist. I gave my head a bit of a shake and stared hard – but they were gone, out of sight. They must have been a couple of gulls, I decided, which would be about the same size.