But Ruth rushed over to her especially. “Do you know, Clare,” she cried, “do you know, when I was ill, I had such a funny dream. I dreamed I woke up and you were standing there, and you looked so real that it might really have been you. Wasn’t that funny?”
“Yes, wasn’t it?” said Charlotte, blushing still more, but much relieved, the thought of Ruth having pursued her uncomfortably for weeks. It was good to go to bed that night without the picture called “Mark of the German Beast” glaring at her so horribly. It was good altogether to be going to bed back in the school. The lightness and joyfulness she felt made her aware of how worried she had been. Suspense and uncertainty still remained of course, because although at school, she was not in the right school bed. Such a mixture of feelings made it hard for her to sleep that night.
•
Elsie Brand slept in the same room. The ending of the war seemed to have lessened no one’s dislike of her—perhaps her being half German had been, after all, merely an excuse. Certainly she was the hardest person to like that Charlotte had ever met, though she still tried her best. One trouble was that Elsie never seemed to notice any difference between friendliness and enmity, responding to neither.
Much of the time she was ignored. But sometimes the others teased her, jointly or singly. Two nights after Charlotte and Emily came back to school, Elsie had only just slipped the ribbon and barrette from her long braid when Bunty, rather excited for some reason, snatched both from her and threw them onto the glass roof outside their room.
This roof, over a big veranda, sloped downward but under their window and along the wall, its top was flat and about three feet wide. Bunty and the others had often boasted they could walk on it, but it did not look particularly strong, and no one much wanted to plunge through to the stone floor beneath. So no one till now had done more than talk.
Elsie stared at the window for a moment woodenly. Then she slowly moved over and leaned out of it, looking for her ribbon, which the weight of the barrette had taken far beyond arm’s reach.
“Why don’t you go out and get it, Elsie?”
“She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. All Germans are cowards, didn’t you know?”
Charlotte said indignantly, “Of course Elsie isn’t a coward. How can you all be so beastly?”
Elsie said nothing. She stared on, dumbly, helplessly, at her ribbon.
“Well, she is a coward unless she goes out and gets her ribbon. It’s her ribbon, after all.”
“Cowardy, cowardy custard,” shouted Emily. “Cowardy, cowardy custard.” She seemed to be taking her mood from Bunty, was very loud and overexcited. “Cowardy, cowardy custard,” she cried, making Charlotte all at once extremely angry. She, too, cried out.
“Elsie isn’t a coward. She isn’t. You’ll do it, won’t you, Elsie, walk out there? And I’ll come with you to keep you company.”
Somehow after a scramble they were both on the glass roof, Charlotte ahead, Elsie following, dazed-looking, as if she had been floated out on Charlotte’s rage and did not know where she was, let alone why she should be there. Charlotte was still angry, beginning to be frightened, but curiously exhilarated. Looking down through the blurred tinted glass was like looking down into the sea. The shapes of heaped old chairs and tennis nets might have been rocks or weeds or fish. The air felt cold as water on her face. When she turned her head, she saw that Elsie was quite white now, her face curiously flat-looking, edgeless even. Charlotte began to urge her along, to help to calm her own rising fear. The fury that had gotten her out onto the roof still made her forget to be as frightened as she would normally have been.
“Come on, Elsie. Look, it’s all right—the glass is quite strong. It must be or it would have cracked by now.”
The glass looked like ice but felt much smoother to walk upon and less cold, though icy enough to bare feet, which grew to a point of ache when left more than a moment in one place. Sometimes her feet met the thin raised hump of the leaden joins, which felt more impressive to feet than they looked to eyes. Hands scraped along warmer, rougher brick.
Ahead, where the roof began to slope, the ribbon blew about a little on the glass. Charlotte, leading, bent to pick it up, very slowly and gingerly, but even so, as she pulled herself up again, she swayed briefly, grabbed at air, the breath lurching in her till her hands returned to the comfort of the brick. For a moment she stood to regain her calm. Then she gave the ribbon to Elsie, and they both began edging carefully back the way they had come, left hands to the wall now instead of right. In front of them the heads of Ruth and Bunty poked from the window anxiously. Immediately before Charlotte’s eyes Elsie’s untied braid unraveled a little and blew toward her in the wind. So near safety, Charlotte was at last quite terrified.
“Elsie, are you all right?” she asked, with a small shake in her voice, which she could not prevent. “You’ll have to get in first. I’ll wait.”
Elsie said nothing. She scarcely moved herself but was heaved by the others over the sill, her feet tilting, her skirts tumbling up.
Then it was Charlotte’s turn. She gave her hands to Ruth and Emily and pushed with her feet. In her relief she must have pushed too hard because the glass immediately exploded behind her—her head jerking round at once, she had the impression of seeing it crack, the crack spreading out as if someone invisible drew a line across. Then she, too, tumbled forward into the room away from the glass. But the soles of her feet remained for several minutes afterwards as cold as if still clamped to it.
Charlotte was very contrite afterwards, her anger gone. She had been well scolded for an action so stupid and dangerous and was well aware how dangerous it had been.
“Honestly, I’m sorry, Elsie,” she said, “making you do something so silly. It was very silly of me. I don’t know what came over me, honestly. Well, we got your ribbon back, anyway.”
“It didn’t matter. I had another ribbon,” Elsie said. Her taciturnity did not appear dented in the least.
Emily said to Charlotte, “Clare wouldn’t have done that.”
“Wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she really?”
“She’d have stood up for Elsie. She might have gotten very angry. But she wouldn’t have done anything suddenly like that. Clare doesn’t do things suddenly. Sometimes I get awfully cross with her for being so cautious. It’s not that she isn’t brave of course,” Emily added in a rush. “She’s fearfully brave.”
There was silence briefly. Then she said, even faster, so fast that Charlotte only just caught what she said, “I’ll miss you, honestly I will, though I want Clare back.”
“Will you?” Charlotte blushed with pleasure and delight. “Will you really, Emily? But I’ll miss you, too.”
“Of course you’d rather have Emma than me, wouldn’t you? Because she’s your sister.”
“Yes, she is my sister,” said Charlotte cautiously. It would be lying to say she would not take Emma, if she had to choose, but she had grown extremely fond of Emily, besides not wanting to hurt her.
“Well, Clare’s my sister, isn’t she? But I think I might miss you all the same,” said Emily, in her funny, abrupt manner, and giggled off, as if it did not matter what she said. She reminded Charlotte suddenly and painfully of her own sister Emma.
•
If Miss Bite had intended at first to show extra strictness to Charlotte and Emily, and even more so when the roof was broken, this turned out to be impossible. Not only more and more girls but more and more teachers were going down with flu, and the remaining teachers spent much of their time in the sickroom helping Nurse Gregory. The sickrooms were crammed, and there seemed little hope immediately of Charlotte’s departure. But once in the school, she was prepared to wait a while, and so apparently was Emily.
Charlotte was surprised by her own patience. She thought it must be because now, within reach of her own time, she felt apprehensive about returning to it. So much would have happened she would be expected to know about but would not know, and there was no one to
help her in that time as Emily helped her here. Also, she was so used to trying to behave like Clare that she could scarcely remember what it was like to behave like Charlotte. She scarcely seemed to know even who Charlotte was. What Emily had said after she had fetched Elsie’s ribbon from the glass roof had encouraged her only for a little while.
This was altogether a strange, separate time; the fog had closed down outside, making a little box of time all on its own. Even more than usual the school was a little, boxlike, separate place with its own pleasures and concerns, no grass, no trees, no streets, no traffic to be seen beyond its walls, only the yellow, flannelish wall of fog.
School became like a game, a picnic, because of the fog, the ending of war, the flu. Lessons were improvised in the day. They did more dancing than history or arithmetic, the dancing mistress being well, the others ill. In the evenings they were able to play wild games, piling all the mattresses on the floor in their bedroom and jumping from the tall white cupboards; playing leapfrog, backs bent, the length of the long room; playing sardines and murder in the dark, bodies squashed into the big white cupboards, unseen but creepy, suffocatingly heavy and warm. No one came near to find them out, except one night when the murder victim screamed too loudly, too realistically, and brought Nurse Gregory running in.
Charlotte for this little while was happier than she had ever been in Clare’s time; warm and contented. She almost wished it would go on forever, that nothing would change at all. When the chance did come for her to return to her own time, if it ever did, she was afraid she might have been gone too long and that if she did sleep in the bed with the little wheels, the magic would not work again. Perhaps it was the same contentment and the same fear that made Emily patient, too; but Emily did not say.
The chance arrived at last, so calmly and easily that it seemed odd it had never come before. Emily caught the flu and went to bed. After three days a note was smuggled from a sickroom by someone just recovered. It was written on a piece of exercise book paper, rubbed and grubby and folded so minutely that it took Charlotte a frustratingly long time to unfold.
“I’m in the room,” it said, “next to the bed. It will be empty tonight if no one else gets flu. Better come tonight. Love, Emily.”
All the rest of one day, despite excitement and pleasure, Charlotte was filled with a kind of huge nostalgia. That night happened to be her bath night, and she lay in the bath in the miserly inches of lukewarm water that was all they allowed, listening to the gaslights fizzling on the wall, holding in her hands a brown, translucent cake of soap that smelled glum and parsimonious. She was trying to glue it all into her mind—how the past looked and sounded, at its wartime bleakest as at its best. This room, partitioned in her own time into a row of narrow bathrooms, was still one big room with a row of baths, each with a curtain round it. Behind the next curtain she could hear Bunty splashing and singing; even Nurse Gregory’s voice, sharp as glass, telling them to hurry and dry themselves—even that seemed something to cling to and regret.
In bed Charlotte put hairbrushes on her pillow, one on each side of her head, to stop herself falling asleep. She did sleep once but, rolling over, grazed her cheek on the prickles of the brush and awoke, startled, but half dreaming still, imagining a hedgehog in her bed.
There was a little gleam of light through the glass panel above the door. When her eyes had grown used to the darkness, Charlotte could see enough by this to climb out of bed, put on her dressing gown, and creep out of the room without knocking into anything.
The passages were as long and empty as they had been before, the light as dim. The strip of matting down the center felt unfriendly to her bare feet, yet Charlotte only vaguely noted it, for, creeping along, she began to realize properly that she would never see anyone again, Bunty or Ruth or even Elsie—unless, of course, she saw them grown up.
She heard Nurse Gregory’s footsteps once and the clatter of her starched clothes; more sounds she would never hear again; if the bed were empty, if its magic worked.
Inside the sickroom she thought for a horrid moment that the bed was not empty, that someone was lying there, but it proved only a rounded shadow after all. The bed awaited her, and so did Emily, still wide awake.
“I thought you were never coming,” she whispered accusingly as Charlotte groped her way across the room, stubbing her feet painfully on the iron wheels of the bed, which was nearer than she’d judged.
“I went to sleep by mistake. I had hairbrushes by my head, though, and they woke me up all right.”
“Thank goodness for that,” said Emily in a heartfelt voice that hurt Charlotte a little, although she had felt the same herself.
“Other people have slept in your bed,” Emily went on, “and they’re always just the same in the morning. So it must be something special to do with you and Clare.”
“Unless the bed doesn’t work any more,” Charlotte thought, but she did not say it. She asked instead, “Are you better, Emily? How’s your flu?”
“Oh yes, they say I’ll get up soon. I haven’t had it badly at all. I’m glad, I’m sick of this bed and Gregory’s horrid powders, whatever they are, and medicines.” After a long pause Emily added, “Aren’t you ever going to get into bed?”
“Oh yes, of course,” cried Charlotte, who had been standing in strange agitation and was still so agitated that she climbed into bed wearing Clare’s dressing gown.
“If you shout like that,” Emily was whispering severely meanwhile, “you’ll wake everyone up, and then Nurse Gregory will come, and then where will you be?”
But no one in the other beds had stirred at all. Emily and Charlotte lay in silence for a long time. Charlotte felt so wide awake that she wondered if she would ever fall asleep. What would happen if she stayed awake all night and did not sleep. Would the magic, could it, happen then? She almost believed that nothing would happen in any case. Her own time seemed so remote and unlikely now. And it was belatedly that she remembered she must say good-by to Emily.
But Emily’s breath was even, slow. She was fast asleep. Charlotte wanted to wake her, to say good-by, but it seemed unkind. In a rush of difficult, muddled feelings, she began to cry, stupidly, sadly, burying her head in the increasingly sodden pillow and wondering as she cried what would happen if Nurse Gregory came in the night to find her in this bed. Then, unexpectedly, she, too, fell fast asleep.
Chapter 19
CHARLOTTE was awakened suddenly by a sound that filled her head inside and battered it without, bewildering, even terrifying her, before she realized what it was: an airliner directly overhead. She had forgotten about jet planes. Her pillow was now not damp, but she was still wearing Clare’s dressing gown.
“Goodness, Charlotte, whatever did you go to bed in your dressing gown for?” Susannah asked her curiously. She did not notice the other dressing gown lying at the foot of the bed, and Charlotte thrust it hastily in a drawer, wondering if Clare would be in trouble for having no dressing gown. But it was not a thing she could ever find out; any more than she could find out if Clare had gotten back to her room safely that morning or been found in the bed beside Emily.
Whenever Charlotte looked up, she saw Elizabeth staring at her hard. In the washing cubicle she went on staring, until suddenly her face slipped and she grinned. Charlotte grinned back at her uncertainly. Elizabeth looked untidier, more lumpish than ever, her hair wild and flying from the night.
“You’re back,” she said. “I wondered when it would happen.
“I’m what?” asked Charlotte, pretending uncertainty till she could be quite sure.
“Back,” said Elizabeth. “Instead of Clare,” she added, Charlotte still standing silently.
“How did you know?”
“I’m so brilliant, of course. Well, I guessed. At least I guessed something was funny. Oh, I guessed it, for ages. I asked Clare like I asked you, and in the end she told me. Actually I think she was quite pleased. It must have been awful for her, anyway, and much worse if no one
had known anything, all the time.”
“I’m glad you knew. I’m glad. I had Emily, her sister, you know, and that helped me a lot.”
In fact, Elizabeth’s knowing helped Charlotte, helped smooth out the difficulties she had expected, though it did not stop the odd dazed fuzziness she felt, the confusion at the change. In a way it depressed her that no one else had noticed that she had replaced Clare.
“Was Clare very like me then?” she asked Elizabeth one day, cautiously, because still quite shy of her, as well as of this particular question. She was hoping that Elizabeth would answer no, just as she had once hoped Emily would.
“No, really. No, I don’t think she was.”
“Well, why doesn’t anyone notice then?”
“Anyone would think you wanted them to,” said Elizabeth. After a while she added, “I tell you who in this school Clare did look most like, and that’s Sarah, Sarah Reynolds. You know, the one Vanessa calls Lady Sarah.”
“So might Clare look if she had been Sarah’s mother,” Charlotte thought confusedly. She had been folding a sweater of Elizabeth’s, but let it drop upon the bed and stood for a moment, still and dazed and quiet.
“Was Clare like me otherwise?” she went on insisting. “I mean, did she do things like me? What ways were we different, Elizabeth?”
Her need was to define herself, Charlotte, as much as Clare. She needed it enough to keep on badgering uselessly.
“Well, she used to fold my clothes up just like you do. Look”—Elizabeth was suddenly exasperated—“look Janet and Vanessa are a bit alike, aren’t they—and do things alike sometimes, though they’re quite different really, but would you be good at explaining why they were different, just like that?”
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