Then Miss Bowser took her hands off the table, let her smile break out again.
“Well, Charlotte, I think that’s quite enough lecturing for now. Let’s have no more trouble, eh? I like these classes to be a pleasant time for everyone. I don’t like trouble any more than you, you know. Eh, Charlotte?”
“Yes, Miss Bite,” observed Charlotte, head bowed over A New Anthology for the Middle School.
“I think for a start you might get my name right, Charlotte,” cried Miss Bowser, forgiving her with a jolly laugh.
Everyone was subdued for the rest of the session, not just Charlotte. Afterwards people crowded round. But though they were all sympathetic then, later, upstairs, Charlotte heard Vanessa whispering to Janet how it wouldn’t hurt goody Charlotte to be given a proper ticking off like that, she was so snooty and standoffish usually.
•
That evening, Charlotte was lying on her bed reading and trying not to think about what had happened in the morning, when all three of them came to her, Janet, Vanessa, and Elizabeth. They stood accusingly round the bed.
“It’s not kind,” said Janet.
“It’s beastly,” added Vanessa.
“Look, you can’t say you’ll be someone’s best friend and then just not speak to them,” put in Elizabeth indignantly.
“Poor Susie’s terribly upset,” explained Janet.
“I mean, if you don’t want to be friends with her, you must tell her,” cried Elizabeth.
“We don’t mind if you don’t speak to us,” said Vanessa, “but you must talk to Susannah, you really must.”
“It isn’t fair not to talk to her,” said Janet, “now that she’s your best friend.”
Charlotte had been too preoccupied lately to think much about Susannah. But she was overcome now with guiltiness, remembering that Susannah had looked unhappy and knowing that she had kept on forgetting to tell Clare they were supposed to be such friends.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry,” she said. But before she or the others could say any more, Susannah herself appeared, rather red about the eyes, making Charlotte feel guiltier than ever and setting the rest to give her meaning glances in place of words.
That night when the lights went out, Charlotte lay in bed trying not to cry because everything, everyone, even Elizabeth whom she liked, seemed to be against her now. Poor Clare, she thought, must be as confused and miserable, for it followed that they all would be against Clare as well.
She was certain what she wanted now. All this confusion came from the double life they led, so she longed quite certainly for it to end. She longed for Friday and normality, and though she was sad when Thursday came because she would never see Emily again, it was a kind of numb, remote sadness that stayed outside, unsinking in her mind.
Before they went to sleep that night, she asked Emily the question she would never have another chance to ask.
“Emily—are Clare and I—are we so very alike?”
Emily did not answer at once.
“If we’re not,” Charlotte said, “I can’t understand why no one noticed that I’m not her and she’s not me.”
“It’s funny,” Emily said. “I don’t think you are so alike. At least, not in some ways. It was just that . . . well, you see, I just expected to see Clare, and so I thought it was. And of course you pretended you were Clare.”
“I didn’t pretend exactly. You kept on calling me Clare, and I didn’t see how I could explain I wasn’t.”
“Then you did pretend,” said Emily provokingly.
“You wouldn’t have believed me if I had told you—” Charlotte grew annoyed, to her own surprise, because she did not mean to feel annoyance. “You didn’t believe it for ages, even when you knew something funny was happening. Oh, I’m sorry, Emily, I didn’t mean to quarrel, not tonight.”
“I wasn’t quarreling,” said Emily. “I didn’t say anything.”
“I know, it was just me, really, getting cross,” said Charlotte apologetically.
Emily said, “I don’t suppose I ever looked at you properly or Clare. I mean I knew you—her—too well, at least I thought I did. Perhaps that’s why I never noticed you were different.”
Perhaps we never look at people properly, Charlotte thought. And she remembered looking in a mirror once and trying to draw herself; how, after she had been staring at her features for a little while, they seemed no longer to make her face or any face. They were just a collection of eyes and nose and mouth. Perhaps if you stared at anyone like that, their faces would disintegrate in the same way, till you could not tell whether you knew them or not, especially, of course, if there was no reason for them not to be who they said they were.
And, she thought, uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel, like Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that?
The next day felt strange, a kind of unwinding and relief. But though Charlotte was certain she would not go back in time again, she felt curiously flat as well as relieved, anxious to grab at anything to remind herself of Emily and Clare. She was delighted when the school walk that afternoon set off in the direction of the church by the river, to which she had never been in her own time, for the school had had a chapel built since 1918 and all the Sunday services were now held there. She had liked the church with its plain round-topped windows and blue starred ceiling and found the thought of its continuity comforting today.
Vanessa and Janet and Susannah were playing games that afternoon, and so Charlotte walked with Elizabeth, of whom she still felt shy, especially after Monday’s lecturing. Elizabeth had holes in both her stockings and white marks on her skirt.
When they came to the river, the island looked like a ship moored upon it with golden trees growing round its decks. There was the little dock, too, just as Charlotte remembered it, with its barges and small squat crane. There was the church. . . . She looked for it eagerly and found the shape ahead of them, but, drawing nearer, saw to her horror that it was no longer the whole, roofed-in, solid church, but walls and a few distorted beams. The doors had been boarded up, and willow herb and thistles grew round. She stopped abruptly to stare at it. Elizabeth stopped, too, and so did the couple behind them. Charlotte said, almost in tears, “But I thought . . . I didn’t know it was like this. I thought . . .”
“What did you think?” asked Elizabeth. They had begun to walk again, slowly, lagging behind the rest.
“It had a roof—I mean it was a proper church. Not like this.”
The bricks were blackened where the roof had been. There was jagged, blackened glass round the edges of the windows. On some, the frames were still more or less complete.
“But it’s been burned down for years,” Elizabeth said. “Oh, for ages, I think.”
“But I saw a roof,” cried Charlotte, “and it was all blue with little gold stars on it.” She did not think about betraying herself, and briefly she did not care. After all, it did not much matter now.
“But you couldn’t have seen a roof,” Elizabeth was saying hotly. “It must have been burned long before you were born; so you couldn’t have seen it, could you, not possibly, not unless you’d been alive before . . .”
Elizabeth was joking, Charlotte thought. She could not have meant that seriously. Yet it gave her the chance to tell, and suddenly she wanted to; but she could not, could not frame the words. Suppose Elizabeth did not believe her? She might think Charlotte had gone quite mad. So she quickly lost the courage for it and said, lamely, “Someone must have told me—about the gold stars, I mean. Or . . . or perhaps I dreamed it. I don’t know.”
Elizabeth said, “Hm. Hmmm.” She stared at Charlotte then intently, while Charlotte went on pretending not to know she stared, looking straight ahead of her, though she was beyond thinking of something nonchalant to say.
&nb
sp; “I can’t make you out. Look, why are you so strange? Why do you say such odd, such peculiar, things? As if you never listened, never noticed anything that went on. Honestly I wonder about you sometimes.”
She stopped, staring at Charlotte, fiddled about with her untidy hair, making it untidier; pulled her skirt round and tried to rub the white marks off it with a wetted finger.
“There is something, isn’t there—something odd? Look, look, why don’t you tell? I wouldn’t tell anyone else, I promise, if you told. Honestly I wouldn’t, look, honestly.”
Charlotte, stunned by now, shook her head, still not looking at Elizabeth, who would have argued more. But to Charlotte’s great relief the prefect in charge called out and, walking back to hurry them, became involved in some other argument with Elizabeth that they carried on all the way home. Between Charlotte and Elizabeth nothing more was said, though Charlotte thought a great deal. The church still upset her considerably. She found she did not want to talk about it to Elizabeth or anyone.
•
That evening in their room they had a pillow fight, started by Elizabeth. All of them joined in, even Charlotte, free of Clare, of solemn Clare, but still tentative, being out of practice at fooling about. Susannah was excited, jumping up and down, yelling for the pillow to be thrown at her, missing it usually if it was thrown, and giggling almost too much to throw it back. Elizabeth swung alive in her sudden astonishing way, pretended to dance with pillows or box with them, throwing wildly with Indian calls, knocking ornaments and photographs off the chests of drawers. Janet and Vanessa, on the other hand, threw with as careful, deadly accuracy as if they were playing school games.
In the middle of the fight, the door opened, and Sarah walked in, to lecture them coldly, Charlotte like the rest, without sign of friendliness—which hurt Charlotte a little. But as Sarah went out of the room again, she had a sudden wild, extraordinary idea about her. Nor could she imagine why she had never thought of such a thing before.
“Elizabeth,” she asked, “Elizabeth, what’s her name?”
“Sarah, of course, idiot.”
“No, silly, her surname, I mean.”
Elizabeth was reading again and did not answer at once. Charlotte almost brought an answer out herself, had the name ready on her lips. “Moby it was, for that name would explain everything.”
“Reynolds,” said Elizabeth. “Her name’s Reynolds; didn’t you know?”
Charlotte had known, of course, had just lost the name temporarily. Had it been Moby, she would have noticed at once on school lists, she realized, as she had noticed Reynolds, though the name Reynolds meant nothing to her. Five minutes before she had not been excited or expectant at all; but now she felt as hugely disappointed as if she had waited a week for Elizabeth’s answer, expecting to find out from it why Sarah’s mother knew her name, and even a little about Emily or Clare grown up.
•
When she thought about it, Charlotte half dreaded the ordinariness of waking next to Susannah for the second day running. She found herself still dreading it the next morning as she swam up out of sleep; so lay for a moment with closed eyes, the sunshine rosy on her lids, until suddenly she realized there should be no sun and felt after all a kind of wild hope. Perhaps she and Clare would continue to change after all on alternate days, lodgings or no lodgings. But when she opened her eyes, she saw the cedar tree as before and the 1918 school bedroom. She started up abruptly.
Emily lay beside her, but at Charlotte’s movement she, too, awoke and sat up blinking, gazing at Charlotte first with bewilderment and then, increasingly, with horror.
“But I thought . . .” Charlotte said. “I thought . . .”
Emily spoke in a small, flat voice.
“We didn’t go into lodgings yesterday after all. We’re going today.”
Part Two
Chapter 8
AFTER a long pause Charlotte said, “Why, Emily?”
“They didn’t say why. They just said we were going on Saturday after all, not Friday. They just said it.”
“Did Clare . . .?”
“Clare tried to sleep in another bed, to stop her changing with you. But Nurse Gregory caught her. Clare had a fearful wigging. She hates rows, and she said she’d better wait a bit before trying again. I suppose she must have just gone to sleep. You and she have been very sleepy, haven’t you, all this week.?”
“Perhaps we’ll go on changing, lodgings or no lodgings . . .?”
“I don’t believe that. I don’t. It’s silly.”
“I should have slept on the floor or something, just to make sure,” said Charlotte desperately.
“Oh, don’t be silly.”
“Perhaps they’ll hold us up again—and we’ll—you’ll stay here till tomorrow.”
“Of course we’ll go today. They said we would.”
“Oh, Emily, please don’t cry.”
“Leave me alone, oh, leave me alone. I don’t want you to talk to me.”
After breakfast the trunks were brought out. Clare’s was an old black tin one with brass studs round the edge, its paint chipped, its tin dented. Emily’s was brown with a wooden frame and looked as if dust had settled on it years ago and stuck. Nurse Gregory stood over them while they packed, her arms folded in like steel rods, not seeming pleased to have her sickroom empty after all, for almost the only thing she said apart from telling them how badly they packed was what a pity it was they were going because they badly needed the discipline only she could give.
The school pony trap came for them sharp at eleven o’clock. Nurse Gregory stood in the portico to see Charlotte and Emily go, granting each a ration of her steely smile.
•
In almost any other circumstances, Charlotte would have enjoyed the drive to Flintlock Lodge, watching the swaying shiny quarters of the pony, catching the wind’s small bite upon her face while the trap creaked and jiggled under her. But she was much too worried to enjoy anything now. She was worried about Emily, who sat white and fixed looking, staring ahead, and who, since they first awoke, had scarcely said a word. It seemed wrong that a girl of ten should be so coldly and silently controlled. But she was worried, too, about her own predicament, increasingly desolated, wondering if she would ever see her sister Emma again, or her Grandfather Elijah, or her home, Aviary Hall. If she stayed in this time as Clare and grew up as her, she would be a woman of nearly sixty when Emma was still only twelve. Emma would never recognize her grown so old, might not want to recognize her, thought Charlotte miserably.
Somehow they would have to change places again, she and Clare. She would have to sleep at school in the bed with the little wheels. But how? But how? She looked at Emily, still staring rigidly ahead, and tried to will the idea into her that all would be well eventually, that Clare would return to her. But Charlotte did not at this moment feel much hope herself. Emily’s face never stirred. And Clare, Charlotte wondered, what about Clare? Whatever was she feeling now?
Flintlock Lodge was not a house to make anyone feel more cheerful. Tall and thin and gray, it had a pointed gable to one side of it, a big bay window jutting out below. It needed paint like all the other houses around, and its garden needed pruning like the other gardens and like the trees that stood along the road. At the back stood a monkey puzzle tree, taller even than the house.
Inside, the house was less shabby than outside, but very dark because of the trees and creepers crowded outside and because the furniture was all so dark, blackish even, but with a dim shine on it like treacle. It was huge, too, chests and cupboards and cabinets for giants, a clock like a church tower, ticking like a drum. In the dining room the chairs were so huge and cold and slippery that Charlotte felt like Goldilocks on Father Bear’s outsize chair. She needed to wriggle to make herself comfortable but did not dare. A great black dresser stood opposite her place, angled and bracketed all over, with more black things standing on the brackets and some green and pink and turquoise vases of glass with fluted edges. Between two
of these she saw a photograph of a boy, slightly tinted and in an ebony frame.
She wondered who the boy was. Indeed, she stared at him during most of the meal, for there was nowhere else for her to look. Emily just turned her face away from eyes. The shiny cat and little hairy dog lay hidden beneath the table, breathing wheezily, and it seemed rude to stare at Mr. and Mrs. Chisel-Brown or their daughter Miss Agnes Chisel-Brown.
Mrs. Chisel-Brown, however, had stared at Charlotte and Emily. She stared without saying a word until the food came in, when she stared at that instead, craning round to see Miss Agnes dish it out, and then pursuing the plate with her eyes from the sideboard to her place. She ate so quickly that Charlotte had barely touched her plate before Mrs. Chisel-Brown’s was empty, showing a crack across it, glued, also clamped with little metal claws.
“Too much salt, Aggie,” she said in a fat white voice, wiping a napkin across her mouth. She wore a black dress with a shine on it almost like the furniture’s. “Poor mutton, too.”
“It’s the war, you see, Mother. Meat is very scarce, you know, and the butcher did save this particularly.”
“The war, the war. What will they do afterwards to excuse poor mutton?”
“Up at the hospital yesterday,” ventured Miss Agnes, “they were saying I told you, the news is quite hopeful now of peace.”
“Damned peace talk, damned conchies, hun-lovers, should all be hanged, I say,” said Mr. Chisel-Brown. He had white hair, white brows, and a white moustache struck across his bright red face, like a Christmas parcel with white ribbon around. He looked and sounded a military man, more colonel or major than plain Mr. Chisel-Brown. He did not speak to Charlotte and Emily at all, conveyed messages merely through his daughter, Miss Agnes.
Charlotte Sometimes Page 6
