Charlotte Sometimes

by Penelope Farmer

  “No, I suppose I wouldn’t be.”

  “And at least they’re both here at once, but I’ve only seen you and Clare separately.”

  •

  Gradually Charlotte slipped back into normal living. People no longer looked at her in a peculiar way because she asked the wrong questions or gave the wrong replies. Teachers had gotten over their surprise because she had suddenly become so much worse at netball but so much better at English. All that was left to her of the past was the nostalgia she felt at unexpected moments—when she found coal-tar soap in a bathroom or when they had Chelsea buns for tea, for these had been one of the few nice things to eat in Clare’s time. Bunty and Emily used to try to make them last as long as possible, unwinding them carefully and picking out the currants one by one.

  Yet all this time Charlotte still had not talked to Sarah Reynolds. Partly she did not know how to start—it seemed impertinent to question a prefect about her mother, whatever the excuse. Partly she was almost afraid of the answers she might get.

  So, she did not ask her questions. If anything, she found herself avoiding Sarah so as never to have the chance of asking them. She might have gone home at the end of term and still not have known what she wanted to know if her form mistress had not been ill one morning and the register called instead by an elderly teacher, partly retired, who came two or three times each week to take special classes in geography. Charlotte had seen her but never known her name.

  This teacher was a small woman with the bright eyes of an elderly bird, and a manner that tried to be gay. She wore her waists tight, as if she had once had more hip to curve below. Indeed, her clothes all looked to have more stuff in them than her shape now needed. She wore a black velvet ribbon in her hair. Vanessa and her friends played her up a little, though they did not dare too much, for she had some authority. They giggled behind desk lids now and then and answered with voices louder than necessary when their names were called.

  Vanessa’s hand waved suddenly. The teacher was talking to Susannah and did not notice her at first.

  “Miss Wilkin, Miss Wilkin,” called Vanessa, waving her hand more furiously than ever.

  Charlotte did not take in the name at once. Then, a moment later, she gasped, stared unbelievingly.

  “What’s her name?” she whispered, nudging Elizabeth.

  “What? Who? Oh, her. Miss Wilkin,” said Elizabeth, her mind elsewhere.

  Charlotte stared at this Miss Wilkin, stared and stared and stared. The Miss Wilkin she had known in 1918 must surely be too old now to teach, even part time like this. Perhaps it was another Miss Wilkin. Wilkin, after all, was not such a very uncommon name. But then she remembered seeing her skip upstairs like a schoolgirl, not like a grown-up woman. Bunty and Emily had thought it funny and giggled afterwards, but it made Charlotte think now that Miss Wilkin must have been very young as teachers went, perhaps no more than ten years older than Emily herself.

  Gradually, she began to see in this old Miss Wilkin the younger one; the way she batted her head about and smiled, the jolly eyes, the inappropriately nipped-in waist. On her left hand there was an engagement ring. What would Emily look like now Charlotte wondered sadly. In a way she wished, as she had wished before, that Clare and Emily had lived long enough ago to be quite safely dead.

  Not long after, on a December day, the juniors were sent for walks in groups of five or six, each in charge of a prefect. Charlotte, Elizabeth, and Susannah found themselves with Sarah, who walked them briskly to the park, over the river, and up the hill. It was fine when they set out, sunny even, but by the time they reached the track that led to the ponds at the park center, a smooth sheet of black clouds had come up behind them, catching the sun. A little wind had mounted, too. Soon the clouds had reached over their heads and beyond. Some short and graceless trees stood here and there, and to these they ran as the rain began, the wind, suddenly huge and furious, making it tear across the bracken stalks in angled veils and sheets, pushing the rain so hard round the trunks of the sheltering trees that they could stand behind them in little dry passages while everything about was drowned.

  Charlotte found herself sharing a tree with Sarah. But she did not look at her at first. She stood as close up to the tree as she could, rubbing her fingers on its small uneven ribs and letting herself be frightened by the wind quite pleasurably—because so comforted by the tree. She was also thinking of Miss Wilkin and willing herself to ask Sarah what she wanted to know. They could not have been more alone and private than in that wild wind and rain. But whenever she dared look round, Sarah was smiling, just smiling, not even at Charlotte especially, which disconcerted her, and still for a long time she did not speak.

  Then Charlotte saw behind them a line of light beneath the clouds, drawing nearer, broadening. The rain would stop quite soon and the chance be lost again. In a panic she blurted the first words out.

  “Do you remember—once—about your mother? Do you remember—you told me . . .”

  “Yes,” said Sarah. The rain still fell but straighter, dabbing at their shoulders, patterning the earth about their feet.

  Charlotte hurried on desperately. “You said she’d told you to be nice to me, if I came—I mean if a girl called Charlotte came. And I didn’t know why, because I didn’t think I knew your mother.”

  “Do you think you do now?”

  “I was just thinking perhaps I did know her after all, only I’d forgotten, and I wondered what her name was, you see.”

  “Mrs. Reynolds.”

  “No, I knew, I mean, what I wanted . . .” Charlotte was blushing, more and more confused. “I mean her Christian name. I wondered if . . . Is it . . .?” She almost said Clare, the name ready on her tongue to echo Sarah, though it did not quite come out. “Do you mind my asking?”

  “Of course not. Her name is Emily.”

  “Emily!” said Charlotte at last, thunderstruck. “Emily! Not Emily! It can’t be Emily!”

  “It’s an old-fashioned name, but not as odd as that.” Sarah was laughing at Charlotte now, but in puzzlement.

  “No, no, I don’t think it’s odd. Of course not. . . . It’s just . . .”

  The rain had stopped now, or very nearly. The others were coming from behind their trees, walking across toward the track. Charlotte looked uncertainly at Sarah, and though she did not move, she took the chance to escape from their conversation herself, or at least from this part of it, marching off over the rough and sodden earth. Sarah followed, caught her up at once. They remained still separate from the rest. When once Susannah seemed about to come, Elizabeth grabbed her arm and pulled her back, making a wild sign with her other hand as if to tell Charlotte she guessed what might be happening. The other three girls remained with their heads together, farther up the track.

  The sun came out. It made garish, deep, deceptive colors; made the tumbled bracken bright as red earth. Charlotte thought she even saw red earth not bracken at all, and her eyes took minutes to correct themselves. Near the ponds there was a group of trees with sick green trunks, but their twigs and branches were glowing red, as if they shed their own light instead of taking it from the sun. The ponds were a harsh battleship color. Their blue-gray water had white flecks in it like wave crests but solider, for these were sea gulls, they saw, drawing nearer, sea gulls bobbing in the swell that the furious wind had raised. The wind had come so suddenly and now was gone.

  Charlotte and Sarah stood by the water for a minute. Sarah bent and hurled a stick. Then they turned away across a bleakness of earth and bonelike grass, where even that sun could scarcely raise a color. Charlotte had recovered by now from the worst of her surprise. She was screwing herself up to ask more questions.

  “Did Emily—your mother—did she have a sister called Clare?” She was embarrassed enough now to have asked almost anything.

  “She did, as a matter of fact. I’m called after her. My second name is Clare. But how did you know? She died a long time ago of flu. It seems odd, someone dying of
flu. It was just at the end of World War I, so my mother said.”

  She spoke so casually that Charlotte would never have known what had been about to come. How can she be so cool, so calm, she was thinking, how can she be?—forgetting that to Sarah it was all only past history, so long ago; that Clare was someone she had never known, only heard about.

  “Charlotte, what’s the matter? Whatever is the matter?”

  It had taken some minutes even then for the story to sink fully into Charlotte’s mind; but suddenly, she had soaked it up and in new, full grief she had begun to cry. On that bleak track, the sun almost gone again, tears were pouring down her face. She was crying and crying for a girl who had died more than forty years before, whom in any normal world, to any normal way of thinking she could not possibly have known; whom she had never even seen, though she had lived as her. She was crying for herself, perhaps, and for Emily.

  •

  “I think Sarah must have thought I was crazy,” she said the next day. She had turned off Elizabeth’s transistor and dragged Elizabeth to a bathroom and locked the door behind them. She had not wanted yesterday to speak to anyone about it, but now today she did, having awakened curiously feelingless. Elizabeth was huffy as well as upset about it.

  “You wouldn’t talk to me yesterday, would you, not at all? I know you were miserable, but you could have said what happened. I liked Clare; I knew her.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m awfully sorry,” Charlotte said. “It was so sad. I didn’t know what to do. Don’t you mind, too?” For Elizabeth seemed so much less grief-stricken than Charlotte had been, though picking a sponge to pieces all over the bath.

  “Yes, I do mind. I do mind. It makes me want to cry. But it’s so long ago. It’s all over. She was a sort of ghost really, wasn’t she? But I know it can’t seem so long ago and gone to you.”

  “I suppose I must have been a sort of ghost, too, in 1918, if you can have ghosts from the future.”

  “She was a pretty solid sort of ghost, of course, if bony. You could feel her bones, and they felt hard as yours or mine. You couldn’t put your hand through them like you’re supposed to with ghosts. Of course it might have been more interesting like that.”

  Charlotte shuddered. “Suppose I hadn’t been able to feel my own bones. That would have been horrid.”

  “Interesting though,” insisted Elizabeth.

  Charlotte said tentatively, because the fear had been so deep in her that it seemed dangerous to reveal it even now, “Do you know, do you know, I was afraid of one thing? I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to get back here, and then I thought, then I thought. I might—Sarah’s mother—might be me—grown-up.”

  “But you couldn’t have been,” said Elizabeth. “You’d have had to be alive twice over. I mean, little as Charlotte and then grown up as Sarah’s mother, Clare. I don’t think that would be possible.”

  “I used to think ghosts weren’t possible,” said Charlotte.

  Elizabeth almost shouted, hands flying, face red, “But, look, of course! Don’t you see? That’s why Clare couldn’t have been Sarah’s mother either, because she’d have had to be alive twice at the same time, as you and her—I mean Sarah’s mother.”

  “You mean,” said Charlotte, aware for a flash what Elizabeth was saying, though afterwards her brain was dull again, “you mean . . .”

  “I mean Clare could only come into the future, into now, because she died—because she isn’t alive now.”

  Chapter 20

  SO SHE really was a ghost then?” Charlotte said at last reflectively.

  But Elizabeth was caught in a fire of her own logic and discovery, working it all out for herself. “I wonder why the bed worked like that, though, with you and Clare especially? It must have been lots of things, I think, all the ways you were alike. I mean, having no mothers and having younger sisters, and just starting at school, oh, and sleeping in that bed, both of you.”

  “There were the dates, too.” Charlotte remembered suddenly. “You know the dates were on the same days of the week—I mean Saturday, the fourteenth, then was the Saturday, the fourteenth, here. I should think that might have helped as well.”

  “I should think it was a chance in a million, all those things together at once. You are lucky. I wish things like that happened to me.”

  “Do you?”

  “Why, aren’t you glad it happened?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  It was late now, near prayers. They rushed back to their room to find Vanessa and Janet, tight-lipped and righteous, making a bed each, Susannah, her face a copy of theirs, picking up Elizabeth’s clothes. Charlotte was apologetic, but not Elizabeth, who bundled clothes in heaps and into her already scrambled drawers, enraging everyone more than ever. But it was she who ceased to be communicative for the rest of that day, shut behind a book. This left Charlotte with time to consider everything they’d said, and so it was that she thought of Miss Agnes again. If Elizabeth was right, she could not have changed with her as once she had feared she might, because then Miss Agnes would have been alive twice over in 1918. Arthur was dead, though. She must have heard his ghost in the dream that time. Charlotte believed in ghosts, for after all, she had been a kind of ghost herself. Indeed, she could believe in almost anything happening now.

  •

  Two days later the parcel came. No one had sent Charlotte a parcel at school before, nor did she expect anyone to, so she did not bother to look at the list that went up each morning on the notice board. She did not look that day. It was Vanessa who shouted it along the passage.

  “Charlotte, you lucky thing, you’ve got a parcel.”

  It sat in the matron’s room and had been opened, as all parcels were. There were several smaller parcels inside, little round things grinding in a leather bag, something round and flat wrapped in tissue paper, a box with hard shapes each wrapped in more paper, the tissue soft and yellow.

  The bag had marbles in it, and the round flat thing was the solitaire board. In the box were some soldiers, their paint almost all flaked off. There was a letter, too, in a mildly scented envelope.

  “Dear Charlotte,” it said. “I did not send these before because I wanted to make quite sure you would get them, not Clare. I wanted you to have them, though. Miss Agnes gave them to both of us after all, and I think I’ve had my turn! I’m afraid, though, I couldn’t bear to let you have the doll. It was so like the one my mother had, which got lost, unfortunately, a great deal of time ago.

  “Did you know Clare had died? If so, I hope you didn’t worry too much what had happened to me (like Clare you used to worry a great deal too much). Of course, it was a terrible shock, but more than forty years ago now, a long time. Clare caught flu not long after she returned; had it very badly for some reason and died about four days later. Many died of flu that year you know. I stayed at the school for six years but went home every holiday to our Aunt Dolly, and my father joined us permanently when he was demobilized, so I grew up very happily, though missing Clare. Then I got married and had four children, in spite of what I’d always said—which shows, I suppose, that one’s views change.

  “One thing I never quite knew was when exactly you would come to the school. If you and Clare ever mentioned the year, I did not remember it, but I hoped one of my girls would coincide with you; this being Sarah’s last term, I had rather given up hope, so I was delighted when she wrote to tell me a Charlotte Makepeace had arrived. Of course she does not know why I am interested in you.

  “Her name is Clare, did you know? Her second name only. Her father preferred Sarah. She’s not unlike my sister Clare.

  “I was strongly tempted to come down to see Clare, but did not dare. Nor do I think I could face seeing you. (Or perhaps I could not face you seeing me.) I’m quite plump and gray now. To me it feels extraordinary that I should be old enough to be your grandmother, having once been your younger sister. (Odder still to you, I should think, since you are still a child.) When I was littl
e, I used to think each birthday that now I should catch Clare up, forgetting she would have birthdays coming, too. In a way, I suppose this is fulfillment of a dream, gone mad.

  “With love, yours, Emily Reynolds.

  “P.S. The solitaire board is more battered than you’d remember. My children played with it a lot. The soldiers were always very battered, as you will remember.”

  Charlotte had locked herself in a bathroom to read this letter. After a while she unlocked the door and took the packages back to her own room. She hid the solitaire board under some clothes in her drawer, but put the marbles in a glass tumbler, which she filled up with water and set on her chest of drawers. She put the lead soldiers to flank it on either side. The marbles looked very pretty, everybody said, and Charlotte was pleased, because no longer now was her chest of drawers the only one without ornament. It looked individual; it belonged to someone. It seemed odd that it belonged to her more as Clare than as Charlotte. But she had begun to realize that she could never entirely escape from being Clare. The memory of it, if nothing else, was rooted in her mind. And what had happened to her would go on mattering, just as what had happened in the war itself would go on mattering, permanently.

  PENELOPE FARMER was born in Kent, England, in 1939, the younger of twin girls. She was educated at private schools and Oxford University. Apart from brief spells of teaching and a variety of odd jobs she has spent most of her working life writing for children and adults. Charlotte Sometimes is her best-known book, and inspired the song of the same name by the rock group the Cure. She has two children and three grandchildren, and with her partner, a former academic biologist, divides her time between London and the Canary Islands.