by Gwyneth Rees
Alex bent over to look at the keys more closely. ‘Look,’ he whispered. Each key had a tiny sticky square label stuck to it. I bent down to see better as Alex silently lifted each key in turn to read the tiny letters. F.D. Did that mean front door? S.D. That must be the side door. There was O–1, O–2 and O–3. O–4 was the one in the lock at the moment. Did O stand for outhouse? There was also a key labelled T.R. We stared at each other.
Before we could react further, Mrs Daniels called out to us. ‘All right! Come in, but don’t touch anything! Is this the colour you want?’
I went into the shed, where Mrs Daniels was shining a torch on the bottom tin of a stack of paint pots. The label showed a lemon-yellow colour. ‘That’ll do fine,’ I said. ‘Won’t it, Alex?’
But Alex had stayed outside.
‘You can help me move the rest of them then.’ Mrs Daniels started to remove the pots on top of the one we wanted, handing them to me to put somewhere else. ‘This place is such a clutter,’ she complained. ‘It needs sorting through, but I haven’t the time to be doing that as well as everything else. Here.’ She handed me the tin of yellow paint. ‘You’ve got a full pot there. You’ll be needing brushes too, won’t you? You’d better take these two.’
As I carried the paint pot and brushes outside into the yard, I noticed that Alex had moved away from the door. He waved at me to join him, so I walked across to where he was standing while Mrs Daniels locked the outhouse again. He was holding something in his hand and I realized straight away what it was.
‘Alex—’ I began, nervously, but he shushed me.
‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered. ‘In the village there’s a shop that makes copies of keys while you wait. We’ll get a copy made and put this back on Mrs Daniels’ keyring before she notices it’s missing.’
‘But, Alex, I promised we wouldn’t spy on her any more,’ I said. ‘What if she finds out? What about Ben?’
‘Once we’ve seen inside the tower room, we’ll still be able to keep the deal with her about Ben, even if she finds out what we’ve done. We’ll tell her that her secret – whatever it is – will be safe with us so long as Ben’s secret is still safe with her. Come on. Let’s get to the village before she finds out the key’s missing.’
‘But, Alex, how are we going to get that key back to her?’ I asked.
‘We’ll say we need more paint. While she’s looking in the outhouse, I’ll replace her key the same way I took it. It’ll be easy!’
I frowned. I had to admit that it did sound easy. And I really did want to know what was inside that tower room.
There was a small hardware shop in the village that cut keys and Alex went inside while I stood on the pavement keeping look-out. The hardware shop was opposite the entrance to the railway station, a few doors along from the village tea room. Alex had spotted his father’s car parked in one of the spaces just outside the station entrance and said that his father must have already arrived to meet Aunt Charlotte’s train.
‘This is pretty lousy timing then, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘What if he sees us?’
But Alex said that if he did, we could just say that we were there to buy something for the garden.
I supposed he was right, but then, while Alex was still inside the shop, his father emerged from the station, carrying a suitcase and leading a tall, grey-haired lady to his car. He spotted me and waved just as Alex came out of the shop.
‘The lady says her husband’s the one who cuts the keys and he isn’t there, but she’s expecting him back any minute,’ Alex said. ‘I left it with her and she says to come back in half an hour. I got these though.’ He held up a packet of grey nails. ‘They’re masonry nails. I asked what sort you needed to bang into a brick wall and she says it’s these.’
Alex’s father was waving us over to the car so Alex put the nails in his pocket and hurried to greet his aunt. I walked over at a slower pace to join them.
Alex’s aunt seemed to know who I was already. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Mary,’ she said, holding out her hand for me to shake. She was elegantly dressed with a friendly face.
‘What are you two doing here?’ Mr Rutherford asked.
‘We’re buying something for the garden,’ Alex said.
‘Really? Do you need some money then?’
‘It’s OK,’ Alex said. ‘It isn’t anything expensive.’
‘Good! Well, do you want a lift back in the car?’
‘Oh no,’ Alex said quickly. ‘We’ll walk back a bit later.’
‘All the way up that hill? Rather you than me!’ Aunt Charlotte said, smiling. ‘But that must be why you’re looking so healthy, Alex – all this country air and exercise.’
‘He’s certainly been getting a lot more exercise recently,’ Mr Rutherford said approvingly. ‘You know, you’re in much better shape than you were at the start of the summer, Alex.’
Alex flushed, avoiding his father’s gaze as if he felt like he was being criticized, not complimented.
‘I think you must have turned a good bit of fat into muscle with all that gardening you’ve been doing,’ his father continued lightly.
‘Yeah, well . . .’ Alex looked even more uncomfortable, and before anyone could say anything else he had run off across the road. He was heading for the sweet shop.
Mr Rutherford was frowning. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
Aunt Charlotte didn’t say anything, but she looked thoughtful as her gaze followed Alex.
‘I think he just thinks that it’s not fair of you to judge him by his appearance,’ I told Mr Rutherford politely.
He looked at me in surprise. ‘I’m not judging him at all, Mary. I’m just concerned about his well-being.’
‘I know, but I’m just telling you what Alex thinks, that’s all,’ I said. ‘I’d better go and catch him up.’
I found Alex buying lemon bonbons at the sweet counter. ‘You know, you do look slimmer,’ I told him, ‘especially your face. It’s no wonder your dad’s noticed.’
‘I’m more acceptable to him now, I suppose,’ he grunted.
‘He says he isn’t judging you. He says he just cares about you.’
‘Really?’ He sounded sceptical and, by the look on his face, he was still planning to eat all his sweets at once, in an act of defiance against his dad, no matter what I said. Deciding that it was my duty as a friend to help him, I took a lemon bonbon out of the paper bag and stuffed it into my mouth.
Alex led us out of the shop and back towards home at a rapid pace. We didn’t speak much on our way up the hill towards Thornton Hall because we were too out of breath – sucking lemon bonbons at the same time didn’t help much either.
‘How do you think your Aunt Charlotte will get on with Mrs Daniels?’ I asked as we neared the gates of the house.
‘I don’t know,’ Alex replied. ‘But Mrs Daniels is making her a birthday cake – and she seems to be going to quite a lot of trouble.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Dad asked her to make it. I think he’s too scared to risk buying a cake again after what happened the last time!’
‘What nearly happened, you mean! Thanks to me, it didn’t!’ I pointed out.
Suddenly Alex stopped walking. ‘The key!’ he exclaimed. ‘I was meant to collect it before the shop closed.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Come on! We’ll have to run!’
But by the time we got back down to the village, it was too late. The village shops all closed on the dot of half past five, and today was no exception.
‘What are we going to do?’ Alex gasped, holding his side and panting to get his breath back. ‘She’s bound to want to go up to the tower room tonight, isn’t she? What will she do when she finds out her key’s missing?’
I frowned, trying to think clearly. ‘There’s also the other key, remember,’ I said. ‘The one with the label that said “Attic”. She must have taken that one and maybe it fits the tower room door as well.’
‘So she’ll still be able to
get in, you mean?’
‘Hopefully. Otherwise . . .’ I grimaced. ‘. . . whoever’s in the tower room is going to be pretty hungry tonight.’
Alex knocked on the door of our cottage a little while after Ben had left for work the following morning. It was a quarter to nine. ‘Come on. The shop should be open by the time we get there,’ he said.
On the way to the village, Alex told me that Mrs Daniels didn’t seem to have discovered that her key to the tower room was missing. ‘Maybe she hasn’t had time to go up there since Aunt Charlotte arrived,’ he said.
‘Maybe she goes up there less often than we think,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe she takes a whole day’s food supply up there at once.’ I had kept a special look-out last night for any signs of a light up in the tower room – but I hadn’t seen one.
‘She must need to go up there today though,’ Alex said.
After we had collected the key – and the copy we’d had made – we went straight back to the house to return it to Mrs Daniels’ keyring. But we soon discovered that putting the key back wasn’t going to be as easy as we’d hoped.
‘Mrs Daniels,’ Alex said, finding her in the kitchen where she was busy preparing pastry for some apple pies she was making for Saturday’s party. ‘We need another tin of that paint you gave us the other day. Do you think you could come and see if there’s another one in the outhouse?’
‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ Mrs Daniels snapped, sprinkling flour on to her rolling pin and barely bothering to look at us. ‘Anyway, you can’t possibly have used up all the paint I gave you yesterday.’
‘No, but we already know it won’t be enough,’ I said. ‘There are two benches in the garden and they’ll need two coats of paint each.’
‘You go and use up the tin I’ve already given you and when you bring it back to me empty, that’s when I’ll down tools to look out some more,’ the housekeeper told us firmly.
So we had no choice but to go to the garden and start work on the benches without having returned the key.
‘At least she’ll be too busy to want to go up to the tower room herself this morning,’ I pointed out.
‘I know, but we have to get that key back to her before she does! We’re going to have to paint these benches really fast, Mary.’
By lunchtime we had painted one bench each and the tin of paint was almost empty. We paused to admire our work – the yellow benches really did brighten up the garden – then we hurried back to the house, where we found Mrs Daniels hanging out some washing. She nodded her approval when we showed her the near-empty paint can and agreed to have a look for some more paint for us now.
She opened up the same outhouse and, leaving the keys in the lock just like before, she stepped inside. This time she let me follow behind her straight away. ‘I saw another pot of that yellow over here somewhere, I think,’ she murmured, starting to look for it.
I made as much noise helping her look as I could, giving Alex plenty of cover to replace the key, and finally Mrs Daniels found another tin of the same paint she’d given us the first time.
We went back outside to find Alex looking pleased with himself. He gave me a thumbs-up sign to show that he’d successfully completed his mission.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Mrs Daniels asked sharply, catching sight of his gesture.
‘Just a thumbs-up that we’ve found more paint,’ Alex said quickly.
‘That Mary and I have found more paint, you mean,’ the housekeeper corrected him sharply. ‘I notice you weren’t offering to help look for it.’
‘I didn’t want to crowd you!’ Alex replied, coming forward to take the paint pot out of my hands. ‘I’ll carry it for you, shall I?’ he said, grinning, as he led the way back towards our garden.
‘Aren’t you having any lunch?’ Mrs Daniels called out after us.
‘A bit later!’ Alex called back. ‘Mary and I have got stuff to do first.’
‘Thank goodness for that!’ I burst out, as soon as we were out of earshot.
‘We can take our time investigating the tower room now,’ Alex said, still grinning. ‘I think we should wait until after Aunt Charlotte’s birthday, just in case, don’t you? We don’t want to upset Mrs Daniels until the garden party’s over. Especially since she’s the one doing most of the work for it.’
Back in the garden, Alex told me that the next thing he wanted to do was fix the nails in the wall so we could hang the pictures. He got the first painting he’d done – the rose – and carried it over to the wall, where he asked me to hold it up for him. But I wasn’t tall enough to get it as high up on the wall as he wanted.
‘I think we’ll need to borrow a stepladder as well as a hammer from your brother,’ he told me. ‘Come on. Let’s go and have some lunch and then see what we can get off Ben.’
But it turned out that banging masonry nails into a brick wall was a much tougher job than Alex had anticipated. Even when he was standing on the stepladder we’d borrowed and using a big hammer to hit the nails as hard as he could, they kept bouncing off the wall and falling to the ground.
‘We’d better ask Ben to help us,’ I said.
‘But then he’ll know what we’re doing!’
‘Not if he doesn’t see the paintings,’ I pointed out. ‘Why don’t you mark the wall where you want the nails to go and then we can just ask him to bang them in? He’ll see inside the garden – but he’s seen that anyway.’
Ben was busy getting the main gardens ready for the open day and he wasn’t too pleased to have his work interrupted by us yet again. But with a bit of coaxing he came and did what we asked. Even he had a job getting the nails into the wall, but eventually he managed it.
‘Are you putting hanging baskets up here or something?’ he asked us.
‘Wait and see,’ I told him.
‘You know, you two have done a really great job on this garden,’ Ben added, looking around. ‘It just needs some pruning now, I reckon – but that can wait for a bit.’ He smiled at me. ‘It’s definitely a prizewinning garden as far as I’m concerned!’
‘Can you fix the blades on the mower like you said?’ I asked. ‘So we can cut the grass really short for Saturday.’
Ben nodded. ‘I’ll bring it round for you to use tomorrow.’
When Ben had gone, Alex looked around the garden and said, ‘Do you really think it’s good enough to win the competition?’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe. But Ben’s always like this about any competitions I enter. He thinks whatever I do deserves to win!’ I hadn’t entered that many competitions in my life, but whenever I did, Ben always thought my entries were better than anybody else’s – even though they usually weren’t.
Alex was looking at me now. ‘I wish my big brother was more like that.’
I shook my head. ‘Your big brother’s a proper big brother.’
‘How do you mean?’ Alex asked.
‘Well, Ben’s not, is he? He’s my guardian as well. That’s why he gets so involved in everything I do.’
Alex looked thoughtful. ‘Do you ever wish he was just an ordinary big brother? That you had parents as well, I mean?’
‘Sometimes,’ I admitted. ‘But mostly I just wish I had Lou back as well as Ben. Then we’d be a complete family again.’
‘Sometimes I try and imagine how it would be if my mum and dad got back together,’ Alex said. ‘Then we’d be a complete family too.’
‘Maybe it’s better when you imagine things,’ I said slowly. ‘Maybe a complete family is much better in your imagination than it is in real life.’ Lou had once said something like that to me, I remembered, when I’d been complaining to her about not having a normal family like everybody else.
‘When I grow up, I want to have a complete family anyway,’ Alex said firmly.
That made me remember what Louise had said just before she left – that she was breaking up our family because she needed to be free to start her own family one day. Maybe Louise did want a complete
family for herself after all, I thought now, despite what she’d said to me before.
‘Don’t you?’ Alex suddenly asked me.
‘Don’t I what?’ I asked.
‘Want a proper family when you grow up?’
‘You mean a proper family with a mum and a dad and a boy and a girl and a cat and a dog and a rabbit?’ I said jokily.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Well, maybe not the rabbit!’
But I was fed up now with imagining things, especially as my feelings were starting to get tugged at. ‘You know something?’ I said brightly, looking around the garden. ‘This garden isn’t exactly how I imagined it would be, but it’s still really nice. And in a way, it’s better than the one in my video because that’s just a garden in a story, whereas this one is real. And your paintings are real too and they are good enough, Alex. They really are!’
‘Do you think?’ He still looked uncertain about that as he went to fetch his paintings from the shed.
‘Well some people don’t try and do anything,’ I said, ‘but we’ve tried really hard, and look!’ I spun around slowly on the spot, taking it all in. ‘We’ve done all this!’
That evening Ben and I were invited up to the main house for dinner. Mrs Daniels was joining us too and we had been told it was going to be very relaxed, so we didn’t have to worry about not having anything smart to wear.
Alex had had to make another trip to the hardware store that afternoon to buy some screw-in hooks and some string to attach to the backs of his canvases. He had completed the task of screwing the hooks into the wood and attaching the string, but he hadn’t tried hanging the paintings on the wall yet. He said he wanted to wait until tomorrow – the day before the garden party – to do that. Before he hung them he wanted to paint the green stems on to the walls, and while he was doing that I was going to give the two benches a second coat of yellow paint each.
The garden party was the main topic of conversation at the dinner table to start with. We were eating in the dining room, which felt quite grand. Mr Rutherford sat at one end of the table, with Ben to his left and Aunt Charlotte to his right. I was sitting next to Ben, and Alex was sitting next to Aunt Charlotte. Mrs Daniels was sitting at the other end of the table, between Alex and me, serving the food. Everybody had been served now except Mrs Daniels and Alex, and Ben was giving me a sharp sideways look to warn me not to start eating until everybody else had their food in front of them. I thought that was funny, because normally he tells me to tuck in straight away while my food’s still hot and not to just sit staring at it.
