Charlotte Sometimes

by Penelope Farmer

  Charlotte took to reading the books that had gold-edged pages rather tarnished. They had mostly belonged to Arthur, for they had such titles as With Nelson at Trafalgar or With Wellington at Waterloo or With Clive in India and told of battles of brave drummer boys and midshipmen, who defied whole armies and navies, so saving the day for everyone. Charlotte was stirred by them, made to feel brave herself or else sometimes very small and cowardly. Arthur, who’d become a soldier, must have been very brave, she thought. Most people must be much braver than she, especially boys and men.

  Once Mr. Chisel-Brown left his newspaper in the dining room, and Charlotte looked at that instead, at its terrible long lists of soldiers killed in the present war. It made her start to worry about Emily’s father, wondering if he would get killed, too, wondering what would happen to Emily if he did, Emily having no one now that Clare was gone. But of course there was Bunty’s father also out there in France and lots of other people’s fathers.

  Some nights that week, Charlotte had dreamed the oddest, muddled dreams: rooms at Flintlock Lodge shifting into rooms at Aviary Hall; Grandfather Elijah appearing with Mr. Chisel-Brown’s moustache; the “Mark of the German Beast” picture containing the faces of people that she knew from every time and place. It was annoying that her sleep should be so confused because sometimes, by day, she had felt oddly peaceful and calm, relieved to be one person all the time, instead of two, even though it was, so worryingly, the wrong person.

  •

  On Saturday morning Mr. and Mrs. Chisel-Brown went out for a drive with a friend; Miss Agnes went up to the hospital to read to wounded soldiers; Charlotte and Emily went for a walk with the maid. The weather had been violent for several days, strong winds and gusty rain, the bursts of sunlight in between making colors violent, too. But it was calm and fine today, with a softer sun. The wind was so light that when Charlotte held up a wetted finger to find which way it blew, she scarcely felt any coldness on her skin. Along the road the remaining leaves were as palely delicate as they would be in spring. But if it had been spring, thought Charlotte, last spring, she would not have been here at all. She hoped desperately she would not still be here next spring.

  Systematically, deliberately, Emily maddened Ann the maid. She kept stopping to peel leaves from the pavement, plane leaves with many corners that left their damp shapes perfect on the stone. She insisted, too, on kicking a pebble wherever they went, stopping to retrieve it from the gutter or from behind the trees. As a result Ann brought them home again almost at once and retired to her basement, slamming the door.

  “Right,” said Emily with satisfaction. “I know where the ladder’s kept.”

  It was a long ladder, much longer than they needed, and very heavy. They carried it, panting, from behind a garden shed, breaking leaves and twigs in their maneuvering of it, between shrubs and bushes, onto the lawn. When the ladder had been propped against the monkey puzzle tree, its top well above the lowest branches, Charlotte tested carefully to make sure that it was firmly wedged. Then she propped herself up against the old trunk, fingering its roughness and scraping bark dust into her fingernails, while Emily’s feet went pounding up the rungs. She could both feel and hear the ladder’s shake, but did not want to watch. Just as she had been alarmed to see Emma climb fearlessly, in case she fell, so now it alarmed her to see Emily. She wondered if Clare would have worried, too. Emily had not mentioned Clare all this week, and if Charlotte mentioned her, Emily had pretended not to hear.

  “Clare . . . Clare . . . look at me.” Charlotte craned upwards to discover Emily almost at the top of the tree.

  “Mind . . . oh, mind out . . . don’t go too high.”

  “I’m all right. It’s easy. It’s ripping up here. I can see the river—oh, I can see everything. Why don’t you come up, too?”

  Charlotte looked up doubtfully, wondering why, as she grew older, she seemed to be more afraid of things, not less.

  “Just come to the top of the ladder,” Emily was shouting. “That’s quite all right, really it is.”

  Even to Charlotte ladders were safe, comforting things. Feet, hands gripped tight, moved evenly. Up, up she went until she was within the bowl that the branches made, hanging down all around, the patterns they formed turning the world to Chinese puzzle shapes. But still she felt quite safe and confident. On, up she went. It was trickier here. Though still on the ladder, she had to edge her way round an awkward branch and felt sickened and horrid as she always did, conscious of the height that there was to fall, trying to make herself think about the time when she would be safe again, about Miss Agnes’s brother Arthur, who would not have been at all afraid.

  When it was over, she grasped the top rung thankfully and looked up into the tree. She could see Emily’s feet so much nearer now, but well above her still, Emily’s legs and body tapering up, her face flat because bent to peer down through the branches amid the sun’s small dazzle of light. She started to descend the tree toward Charlotte, showering dust and little twigs into her eyes. Charlotte turned her face down and away and found herself looking through a bedroom window almost on a level with her head. She saw a mahogany dressing table with an oval mirror, and on the wall behind, a framed photograph of a cricket team, men with caps on, standing like clothes pegs, arms folded, legs planted well apart.

  Emily looked scraped and breathless, her clothes and legs, just above Charlotte, black with the dust of the tree.

  “Gosh, it was easy,” she said. “Like a ladder, but spikier. I said it would be easy, didn’t I?”

  “Look.” Charlotte pointed. “Look, I’m sure that must have been Arthur’s room. There’s a cricketing photograph.”

  Emily bent and peered. “It might be something to do with Mr. Chisel-Brown. We can easily find out, though. We can ask Ugly Aggie.”

  “No, don’t let’s do that.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “I just think she mightn’t like us asking questions all the time. It seems awfully rude. And perhaps she minds because he’s dead.”

  “You would say it was rude, but I think she likes us asking. I’ll ask her anyway.”

  There was a scare then, for they thought they heard wheels bearing home the Chisel-Browns. They scurried down the ladder, Charlotte almost forgetting to fear the awkward place in her greater fear that they would be discovered. This turned out a false alarm, but they had barely returned the ladder to the shed when the grownups did return, all three at once, to scold them, but only for being dirty (Mr. Chisel-Brown, that is, via Miss Agnes Chisel-Brown) and not for the more serious offense they would have discovered five minutes earlier when the girls had been up the tree.

  They were both quite excited and giggly as they went upstairs again.

  “Did you see Ugly Aggie’s face?” cried Emily.

  “Emily, you mustn’t call her that,” said Charlotte rather feebly. “She’ll hear one day. And besides . . .”

  “It’s not . . .” said Emily naughtily.

  “It’s not . . .” said Charlotte more feebly.

  “It’s not . . .” cried Emily, flopping on her bed. “It’s not Christian.” And they both burst into giggles, growing wilder and wilder, Charlotte, once she had let herself start laughing, finding that she could scarcely stop. But she caught herself, made herself stop, and tried to make Emily stop, too. Clare wouldn’t have behaved like that, she told herself severely. “But then I’m not Clare, I’m not,” she cried inside her head, taking a hairbrush and starting firmly to brush dust and twigs out of her hair.

  •

  Much later, in the dining room, Charlotte suddenly said, astonished, “Emily, you called me Clare when you were up the monkey puzzle tree.”

  “Did I? Don’t I always?”

  “Only in front of other people. Not always then. You don’t call me anything.”

  “They’d think it funny, wouldn’t they, if they heard me shouting Charlotte at you? Someone might have heard. Anyway,” added Emily after a longish pause, “anyway, yo
u seem like Clare now.”

  “Do I really, though I’m not?”

  Emily nodded but did not look at her. She had the checkers out this evening: making a tower on the table with them, black and white alternately, so that the tower was thickly striped.

  “Of course you want Clare back again. I feel awful sometimes being here instead of her. I mean, it must be horrid for you.”

  “How can she come? You haven’t any ideas how to get her back, have you? Ones that you haven’t told me?”

  Charlotte had to admit that she had thought of nothing.

  “Well then, you see? Will you play checkers with me now, Clare? I bet I’ll beat you, too.”

  Checkers needed a different skill from spillikins, less concentration of fingers or even of eyes than of mind, making pictures for itself of moves far on ahead. Emily was much better at this than Charlotte, especially as Charlotte’s brain had been made to churn once more round its usual problem: how to get back into her own time.

  Halfway through their third game, Emily said casually, not looking at Charlotte but at the board, “I did have one idea, actually, to get Clare back, I mean. I thought you could creep out of here one night and climb into school by the day-girls’ cloakroom. And then you could climb upstairs and go to sleep in that bed.”

  It was Charlotte’s turn to play, but she stared hopelessly at the checkered board, her brain furred.

  “But there are people in that room with flu. I couldn’t very well turn someone out of bed, could I, to sleep on the floor?”

  “You could explain what was happening.”

  “What about the blackout? How could I see my way without any lights?”

  “You could go on a moonlit night. Oh, hurry up and play now; it’s been your turn for ages.”

  Charlotte hurriedly moved the checker nearest her, seeing the mistake at once, for Emily, in triumph, made another king. She was certain to win the third game now as she had the other two.

  “I might have known,” she said, “you wouldn’t want to try. It doesn’t matter anyway. One bossy sister’s much like another, don’t you think? What difference does it make which one of you is here?”

  On their way to church the next day, Emily asked Miss Agnes about the room they had seen from the monkey puzzle tree.

  “Oh, that’s Arthur’s room,” Miss Agnes replied, seeming pleased that they were interested, as Emily had said she’d be. “I used to have the room next door to it, where you and Clare now sleep. Would you like to see it? I haven’t time to show you this morning because of lunch, but perhaps this afternoon . . .”

  In the room, its windows tightly closed, lingered some smell that Charlotte had known when she was a little girl, though till now she had quite forgotten it: a faint, sour man’s smell. She remembered it in her father’s cupboard among his best silk handkerchiefs, where she used to bury her face because they felt so comforting and cool, like water on her skin.

  Arthur Chisel-Brown had a cupboard like her father’s, its narrow compartments still full of collars, handkerchiefs, and socks, while beneath them sat a row of polished shoes and a pair of well-whitened cricket boots.

  “We’ve left everything, you see, just as it always was,” explained Miss Agnes. “Even the bed’s made up. Mr. Chisel-Brown would have nothing changed. I dust in here myself each day. If Arthur came home tomorrow, we should be ready for him. Look, there are even biscuits in his tin.”

  What Charlotte and Emily both liked best was something that hung upon the wall: a drum, a full-sized soldier’s drum, not a toy at all, its sides striped diagonally in green and gold, its skin kept taut by narrow cords. Charlotte rolled her fingers across it experimentally, finding it almost furry to touch, not smooth as she had expected. Then Emily tapped lightly with her fingers’ ends. The noise was surprising for such moderate strokes, still thrumming and rolling a little when she had taken her hands away.

  “Sssssssh . . . carefully, Emily,” said Miss Agnes, turning round in alarm. “Mr. and Mrs. Chisel-Brown may hear if you do that.”

  “Why,” asked Emily. “Wouldn’t they have wanted us to come in here?”

  “Of course I should not have brought you if it meant displeasing them,” Miss Agnes insisted hurriedly, though pink spots had become noticeable in her cheeks.

  “Why did he have a drum?” asked Emily.

  “It’s a soldier’s drum. He was interested in soldiers, as you know.”

  “He must have wanted to be a soldier. He was lucky to become a soldier when he grew up, wasn’t he?” said Emily.

  “He didn’t become a soldier till the war though, dear. Mr. and Mrs. Chisel-Brown wouldn’t hear of it earlier. They said it wasn’t safe enough. I wonder if you are both too young, Clare and Emily, to remember those posters early in the war—Lord Kitchener pointing with such a fierce, dutiful look, while underneath it said, ‘Your Country Needs You.’ They moved dear Arthur so that he said to me one day, ‘Aggie, I must join up, though it will upset dear Mother dreadfully.’”

  “And did he like it, fighting in the war?” asked Emily.

  “I expect so, dear.” But after a minute Miss Agnes added less brightly, “It wasn’t like his books, he said, like the battles he fought there. He said it was so muddy, I wouldn’t believe.

  “Look, dears,” she said, moving hurriedly to one of the photographs that hung all round the walls, of cricket, football, and tennis teams. “Look, there he is. That’s my brother Arthur.”

  The photograph was dated 1913, the year before the war began, but the photographer might have been the enemy already, the way Arthur glared at him. He was a small man, smaller than most on his team, with thick eyebrows like Miss Agnes’s and the largest moustache in the group by far. He wore a striped cap and what looked to be the same striped blazer as hung in the cupboard now.

  “Goodness, he did look fierce,” said Emily.

  “He wasn’t fierce really, dear, he wasn’t fierce at all, though sometimes he pretended to be.”

  •

  One evening in the back of the toy cupboard Charlotte found an old exercise book and asked Miss Agnes if she might look through it. It had a story in it, some bits of other stories, also drawings, rather brown and faded looking now because done by Arthur when a boy. The story had only four chapters, and it was easy to see where Arthur had found his plot, for it was about a brave drummer boy, whom everyone called a coward at first but who saved them all in battle and died nobly. The other stories were about battles, too, about drummer boys or midshipmen. The drawings were mostly of soldiers or guns, but there were some odd-looking animals, horses, elephants, and lions. Charlotte found it hard to associate such things with the baleful-looking man in the cricketing photograph.

  That evening and most evenings now, Miss Agnes came and played games with them, card games, old maid, rummy, or demon patience. She also talked, usually of her brother Arthur. Whenever she had excuse to, she talked about him briskly, eagerly, excitedly, and sometimes defiantly: how handsome he was, how clever and bright, how naughty, but how brave.

  Miss Agnes, Charlotte thought, was a bit like Clare and a bit like herself, with a naughty younger brother instead of a sister to keep in order. Suppose she were to change places with her, become Arthur’s older sister instead of Emma’s or Emily’s? It was an easy thought, Charlotte decided, because quite impossible.

  Chapter 11

  NIGHT after night, Charlotte lay in bed with her eyes open to the dark, thinking up wild and yet wilder schemes for getting herself back to school by night to sleep in the bed with wheels. The trouble was that, as Charlotte, she was not someone who did wild things, except in extraordinary circumstances; and as Clare, she could not imagine herself doing anything wild at all, certainly nothing so wild as going out at night. But she reckoned in this without Emily.

  That week, Emily became interested in the night sky. Each evening when their light was out, she craned her head from the window to see, complaining the first night because the moon was so small.
She was even more disappointed the next four nights because the clouds were too thick for her to see the moon at all.

  On Friday night, a clear night—she said with satisfaction, “Just as I thought. The moon’s coming up now, and it’s going to be full. We’ll be able to see quite easily.”

  “Be able to see what?” asked Charlotte, still unsuspecting, which she realized a moment afterwards was stupid of her.

  “See to get to the school, of course. I thought tonight you could try to sleep in that bed.”

  Charlotte was horrified. “Emily,” she said sternly. “Emily, I told you it wouldn’t be any use doing that. Supposing we’re caught. We’d probably be expelled, and that wouldn’t help at all.”

  “Well, I’m going anyway.”

  “But whatever’s the point of your going alone?” Charlotte did not add that Emily could not get Clare back by herself because it seemed too unkind.

  Emily said, “I know I can’t get Clare back by going, but I’m going anyway. If I’m caught, I’ll get into trouble for nothing. If you come, at least there’s some point in it.”

  Charlotte saw the logic in this, so gave in at last reluctantly. But whether the decision arose from her greater adventurousness as Charlotte or from her special sense of responsibility as Clare toward Emily, she never knew.

  “How are we going to get in if we do get to the school?” she asked.

  “I’ve opened the window in the day-girls’ cloakroom every day this week. At least, I only turned the catch, so the window still looks quite shut. Don’t you remember, I’ve kept on forgetting things and going back when everyone else has gone?”

  Emily woke Charlotte sometime before midnight. They dressed themselves hurriedly in the dark and then crept downstairs to the kitchen. The opening of the basement door would be less likely to be heard, they thought, than the opening of the front door one stair flight higher. Charlotte was in terror of being caught; horrified by every creak the stairs made; appalled by all the kitchen sounds—clickings, rustlings, the sudden, urgent crackle of the kitchen stove, the ponderous metal ticking of the clock. The two clock weights hung in shadow, but the pendulum on its narrow rod swung past them from light to light, from one moonlit square to another, reflecting silver and not its usual warm brass wink.