Charlotte Sometimes

by Penelope Farmer

  The door opposite had been fastened by all imaginable means, with a bar to be lifted off, a chain to be unhooked, bolts at the top and bottom to be heaved back with difficulty, and finally a key to be turned. The noise this made drowned all the other sounds that had seemed so noisy earlier, was so loud that it worried even Emily, but Charlotte by now was numbed enough by fear to be almost beyond worrying. She pelted blindly up the basement steps, across the gravel, and out at last into the freedom of the road.

  It was cold tonight, a little frosty—both were glad of their thick school coats. Charlotte wore gloves, too, but Emily had flung hers down unthinkingly the night before and had been unable to find them in the dark. When she complained that her hands were cold, Charlotte handed over her own gloves and huddled her hands in her pockets.

  The streets looked strange, lightless, save for the moon, which gave them no glitter or shine but a texture more, a kind of silver fuzz on everything, eliminating roughness and curves. Even the blackest shadows seemed muffled, their blackness of velvet rather than of polish or paint. As they went farther from the house, still meeting no one, Charlotte’s guilty fear started to fade away, and she felt excited, almost exhilarated by this empty world. These streets, the ones that they walked along each morning and afternoon and yet quite different, had their own kind of separate breathing life that the country always has but that towns do not by day. Even her footsteps did not seem to belong to her. The night seized and transformed them, just as it had transformed the greenhouses they passed from useful places for growing things into cold night palaces.

  Once they thought they heard footsteps and dived behind some convenient trees. But the footsteps, if that was what they were, had died away at once, and they emerged, giggling at each other with the nicest sense of conspiracy, Charlotte as much as Emily. Not long afterwards, though much too soon for Charlotte, they reached the spiked school gates. They were firmly closed. The moonlight had drained all the color left in the faded Union Jacks. Behind them, to one side of the drive, the lodge stood, but its lodge-keeper they knew to be quite old and deaf, which tonight was just as well.

  Charlotte began to climb first, her nervousness returning. The gates, though high, were well ornamented, the loops and curves offering footholds for smallish feet. She put both their coats to pad the topmost spikes and used for a final step the wooden board that announced the name of the school. From there she lowered herself cautiously, but Emily scrambled like a monkey after her, clinging with hands and feet till barely halfway down, then launching out to jump the rest.

  “Bother,” she said from the ground. “Bother, I forgot the coats,” and climbed up again to fetch them. She was still poised, trying to free one from the spikes, when there were more footsteps, this time unmistakably drawing nearer. Emily wrenched at the coats, tearing one a little, the sound quite clear in the frosty air, and then threw herself violently from the gate. As she picked herself up, Charlotte grabbed the coats, and they both ran furiously over the grass into the deeper shadow of the wall. Behind them the flags still shivered, and the gates still shook from Emily’s jump.

  It was two policewomen who came, walking rhythmically. They shook the gates almost before looking at them, so disguising any movement that might have remained for them to see. They peered through but did not seem to notice Charlotte and Emily crouched against the wall, shivering and breathing heavily. When they had shaken the gates again still harder, they passed on, their footsteps fading evenly. It was minutes before the two dared to move, drag on their coats, and set off surreptitiously over the grass.

  “Gosh,” said Emily. “Gosh, we’d have been for it if they’d seen us.”

  Charlotte’s elation had suddenly disappeared. She was terrified again, wishing only that she was safe in bed. Every upright tree and bush held in its shadow a Miss Bite, a Nurse Gregory, or a Miss Wilkin, ready to jump out at them. Each cabbage in the vegetable bed, each leafy potato plant had its own shadow and watchfulness. She began to hope that someone would have discovered the window latch undone and shut it properly again. They would have to go back home then, to Flintlock Lodge, without more dangerous ventures.

  But Emily whispered, as if thought-reading, “If it isn’t open, I think we should break it to get in. It would be silly to come all this way for nothing.”

  “It’s all very well for you,” Charlotte allowed herself to think, though not to say. “It’s not you, Emily, that’s got to climb in and do the really dangerous part.”

  The window was in the corner of an arcade and not overlooked by any bedrooms. It was round, like a large porthole, and stood just out of reach of Charlotte’s hands, so that she had to lift Emily awkwardly to test whether it remained unlatched, her arms feeling as though they would break.

  “It’s all right,” said Emily at long last. “It’s all right, it’s open; we won’t have to break in after all.”

  It was her turn to heave Charlotte now. Charlotte’s feet scrabbled against the wall; her hands clutched at the slippery window ledge; her arms somehow pulled her high enough for her to get first one elbow, then the other across the sill, and so to haul herself through at last, grunting furiously and kicking up her feet behind.

  Then awkwardly she turned and knelt on the drainboard by the cloakroom sink to look down at Emily.

  “Well done, Clare, oh, well done,” she was saying in her whisper that was louder than most people’s shouts. Charlotte felt triumphant, too, for all her fright, for all the burning of her scraped knees and elbows and the dent in her stomach made by the sharpened windowframe.

  “Hey, Clare,” Emily was hissing now. “Hey, Clare. What if you do get into that bed again? You won’t come back, but I can’t wait here till the morning.”

  If this difficulty had crossed Charlotte’s mind, it had not really entered it or concerned it, for she had never believed they would get even as far as this.

  “Well, if I don’t come for ages and ages, well . . . you’d better just go home,” she whispered lamely, wondering what Clare would do when and if she woke, for she would have no idea at all where she ought to go to find Emily.

  Outside the cloakroom with its carbolic reek, the corridors were dark and stale smelling, quenching any triumph that was left in Charlotte. Moonlight edged in a little here and there, and she had to fumble along the wall, farther and farther away from Emily and safety. The stairs creaked and were still more dangerous; at the top of them the corridor was lit, the light, though dim, bright-seeming now to Charlotte’s unaccustomed eyes. The walls were drab with their shiny brown paint and bare, without any place to hide, the dents made by the doorways too shallow to give cover.

  Day girls were forbidden to go upstairs. Charlotte had not been there at all since she and Emily left for Flintlock Lodge, and so she saw the corridor at first quite newly, strangely; her eyes taking time to fit it to the usual pattern. She stood for a long time, numbed by the closeness and nostalgia of what she saw, feeling both so near to her proper self and existence and yet so far away.

  Then, when she did remember what she had to come to do, it seemed so dangerous that she considered turning back at once, telling Emily that there was someone in the bed already who refused to move, without venturing to find out if this was so. But she did not think this honorable, did not think that she could lie convincingly. Besides, the door of the room was tantalizingly near, just a few yards down the corridor and across. There was no sound except the tiny sounds she made herself, breathing and gripping the stair rail. No one came. She took a deeper breath, made a kind of tiptoed dive for the door, pushed it open, fell inside, closing the door behind her silently, in her haste more by luck than skill.

  The blackout covered the window. The room was like a cave. One light burned there, a nightlight by the very bed that she had come to find, making within the larger cave of darkness a little cave of light. It looked the reverse of moonlight, warm and mobile, rounding things, making shadows move. In all the other beds forms lay still, asleep. B
ut in that bed, the one with little wheels, someone propped up on pillows stirred and coughed and moaned.

  Charlotte took this in; then footsteps sounded. They were like echoes of her own at first, surprisingly delayed, but grew quickly louder and more purposeful. Click, click, click they went, slap, slap, slap, daytime footsteps seemingly, not muted in respect for the night, pausing at last outside this very door. The handle turned smartly. Something rattled against glass. In came a tray, someone carrying it. She looked, as always, sharp-edged, as if night was as normal as the day to her, sounded, as usual, like a sailing boat in a small wind, shoes creaking, stiff apron flapping, the liquid slapping in a small glass to add to the effect. It was Nurse Gregory.

  Chapter 12

  AT THE first sound of footsteps, Charlotte had flung herself into the only hiding place she could see: the small space between the big white cupboard and the end wall. Since she and Emily had left, a chest of drawers had been moved in, just behind the door. This helped to shelter her if she crouched right down, as did the shadow of the door, which Nurse Gregory had left open, lightening a little the rest of the room but dimming the corner more.

  For the moment Nurse Gregory’s back was turned. She was briskly telling her patient to sit up, and after that Charlotte heard a kind of spluttering, as if the girl had not expected medicine to reach her mouth so fast.

  Terror made Charlotte feel remote, like an audience at a play or a film. Crouched right down, she could not see much that was happening in the area of light, but she could see the shadows bumping and jumbling on the ceiling. Nurse Gregory’s shadow was elongated, huge, stretching right across the room. The shadow that her arms made rose and fell from the larger one like claws or branches.

  Suddenly Nurse Gregory turned away and advanced toward the door. For one horrible moment she paused again. Charlotte wanted to leap up, jump out, and explain herself at once before being dragged forth ignominiously. It was only the knowledge that she could not explain anything convincingly that prevented her. In any case, Nurse Gregory merely tucked in a trailing blanket and moved on with an intolerably loud rustle and hammer blows of feet until at last, still loudly, she closed the door behind her.

  In other beds figures began to stir. The girl in the bed with the wheels shook her head from side to side and cried, “No, no,” as if, too late, to Nurse Gregory. Charlotte moved her feet, which had been cramped unbearably, to find them riddled at once with pins and needles. After a while she stood up. She was trembling all over. She did not know how she would dare leave the room again, let alone the school.

  She strained her ears, listening, thinking all the time that she heard the sound of Nurse Gregory’s feet. But she heard only the stirrings in the room.

  She grabbed enough courage at last to make what seemed the most difficult move in all her life and crept to the door, opening it the smallest crack. She saw nothing, heard no sound. Hesitating still, she glanced back into the room to see eyes open suddenly in the nearest bed and a face look at her in astonishment—the face of Bunty’s friend Ruth.

  Charlotte ran then, not even shutting the door behind her; out the empty passages, plunging a moment later into the black darkness of the stairhead. She did not even look back to see if anyone was coming. Her heart felt like a rod in a machine, going strong and hard, thump, thump, thump.

  How she got downstairs and out of the window she could afterwards scarcely remember. She found Emily indignant and seemingly little disappointed at seeing her.

  “You were ages,” she said. “I’m as cold as ice. I was jolly nearly going home. I thought you must have got into the bed, you were such ages and ages.”

  “Was I?” said Charlotte, astonished. “It didn’t seem like any time to me.”

  When they looked back after climbing the school gates, the moon was already much lower, but two brilliant tubes of light swung about the sky, advancing, crossing each other, like a dance.

  “Searchlights,” said Emily, “to catch airplanes, you know. Gosh, suppose there’s an air raid now; that would finish us, wouldn’t it?” But she sounded quite happy about it. Charlotte was too dazed to care. She must have been mad to do what she had just been doing. It seemed impossible, an uncomfortable dream.

  On Monday, when they went back to school again, there were still footmarks up the wall by the day-girls’ cloakroom. No one seemed to notice them except Charlotte and Emily, but then no one else would have expected to find them there.

  The day after the expedition Emily had been morose, silent. Charlotte, exhausted, thought that probably she was just tired, too. By today, though, she was normal again and cheerful, not morose at all. She had not mentioned their failure the whole weekend, nor did she mention it now.

  •

  In 1918 Clare had always been a kind of skin about her, Charlotte thought, containing what she did and said and was. The skin thickened imperceptibly the longer she stayed in the past. After their expedition it began to thicken more rapidly than ever, pressing that part of her which still thought of itself as Charlotte tighter and smaller until it lay deep down in her like a small stone in a large plum.

  One day recognizing a certain picture on the walls of Miss Bite’s room of two women in flowing robes and with faces smooth as angels’, she could not think at all where she had seen it before or when—in the present or in the past. When her memory struggled to disentangle its two lives, she caught herself wondering even if it was something to do with Aunt Dolly’s house, then remembered immediately and with a shock that she had never been to Aunt Dolly’s house or seen Aunt Dolly.

  “I’m going to have six children when I grow up,” said Bunty that day in respect of nothing very much. “How many are you going to have, Emily? How many are you going to have, Elsie Brand?”

  Emily said nothing. Elsie merely grunted.

  “I expect Elsie will have ten, won’t you, Elsie?” cried someone else. “And they’ll all eat sausage and be called things like Fritz and Gretel.”

  Everybody giggled, except for Charlotte, who cried indignantly but hopelessly, “Don’t be so horrid. They’ll have ordinary names like John and Susan, won’t they, Elsie?” But Elsie did not reply. She looked as blankly, dully, at Charlotte as at the rest.

  “How many children will you have, Emily?” asked Bunty, once again.

  “I’m not going to have any children.”

  “Aren’t you going to get married then?”

  “Oh yes, I might get married. But I shan’t have children all the same.”

  “Emily, whyever not?” The voice sounded almost shocked. “Everyone has children when they get married.”

  “Not everyone does. And I won’t. I won’t.”

  “But whyever not?”

  “Because, because it’s so awful for them. I mean it would be if I died and they had nowhere to live, and they had to go round and stay with all sorts of people who didn’t want to have them.”

  “Why,” said Bunty, quite gently for her. “Why, Emily, is that what happens to you and Clare?”

  Emily did not reply. Bunty looked at Charlotte and persisted.

  “Is that what happens to you and Emily, Clare?”

  Emily usually answered all such questions, even those addressed to Charlotte, but still she answered nothing at all. Everyone except Emily was looking at Charlotte now. She blushed and cleared her throat and scratched at the desk with her fingernail, but the odd thing was that once she had started to speak, she knew it all so well that she might have been talking about Emily and herself and not about Emily and Clare.

  “We do stay with a lot of people, I suppose. Aunt Dolly likes having us, but she’s ill sometimes, so we have to go away. But of course people don’t really mind having us. It’s very kind of them, too—isn’t it, Emily?—Aunt Dolly always says.”

  •

  It was after this that Charlotte began to dream she was fighting to stay as Charlotte, and one night woke from such a dream struggling, even crying a little. When she was calm again
, she did not feel sleepy at all, so she lay still, carefully and deliberately making herself remember Aviary Hall, object by object, room by room. Also she made herself remember things that had happened to her as Charlotte, but it was alarming how the details seemed to slip away from her. Even when she tried to conjure up her sister Emma’s face, she kept on seeing Emily’s.

  Then she found herself thinking about Agnes’s brother Arthur, instead, about his room and all the things Miss Agnes had told her about him. She did not try to stop these thoughts because they seemed safe and comfortable, making a third and separate existence in which neither as Charlotte nor Clare was she involved.

  When she fell asleep again, she dreamed about Arthur, both the boy in the tinted photograph and the man with the big moustache. He climbed the monkey puzzle tree and banged his soldier’s drum. He wore a soldier’s uniform and sat in a muddy field, and then suddenly he was setting out his soldiers on the dining-room table and she sat beside him, watching him as if she were his sister Agnes, too.

  Chapter 13

  ONE WEDNESDAY afternoon the school had a half-holiday, and Miss Agnes took Charlotte and Emily across the river to do some shopping. They had to go by the station to fetch a parcel, and they found a small crowd gathered outside and, all along the road, lines of white ambulances, each with a red cross painted on its side.

  “The hospital train’s just in now, lady,” the woman at the ticket office said. “You’ll have to wait a bit till we let the wounded through.”