by Gwyneth Rees
‘I’d rather go to Australia to stay with Louise,’ I said.
‘Come off it, May—’ Ben began crossly, but I interrupted him.
‘Why can’t I go, when it’s what I really want to do?’ I said.
‘You know why!’
‘No, I don’t! Look, you really want to go to university, don’t you?’ I challenged him. ‘So why don’t we both just do what we really want for a change?’
Ben stared at me. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
‘What’s all this about Australia?’ Mr Rutherford wanted to know.
And slowly, looking as if his whole world had just been turned upside down, Ben began to explain.
Ben emailed Louise the following lunchtime and asked for her phone number at Greg’s aunt and uncle’s house so he could talk to her directly about what she’d suggested. He then spent most of the afternoon on the Internet in the library at Thornton Hall, researching what history courses were available, how he could apply for them and how much they were going to cost. He kept telling me that he hadn’t yet decided anything for definite and that he would let me know when he had.
Now that Mrs Daniels no longer had any hold over us – and since we had our own key to the tower room – Alex and I both knew we could go up there whenever we wanted. So why we decided to schedule our expedition to the top of the house for midnight on Monday, I wasn’t entirely sure.
‘We have to drop in on them when they least expect it,’ Alex argued on Monday afternoon, when I suggested that a trip to the tower room in daylight might be a better idea. ‘It’ll be much safer that way.’
‘Safer?’ I queried.
‘Safer for us. After all, we don’t know who or what might be up there, do we? It’ll be much better to get a look at them while they’re sleeping.’ Alex sounded to me like he was getting a bit of a kick out of trying to freak me out.
‘I wouldn’t worry too much,’ I said coolly. ‘It’s probably just a relative – and not even a mad one. We’d know if they didn’t want to be there. They’d be banging on the door to get out.’
‘Yeah, but how do you know it’s a person?’
‘Don’t tell me it’s a ghost again, because you know I don’t believe in them!’ I snapped.
He grinned. ‘Well, I reckon it could be an animal!’
‘An animal?’
‘I reckon Mrs Daniels might be keeping a pet up there. Those trays of food could be for it – not for a person at all.’
‘She wouldn’t serve food to an animal on a china plate, would she?’ I protested. ‘Or take it tea in a pot!’
‘Maybe she just puts those things on the tray to hide what she’s really taking up there. Maybe she’s got some kind of pet food hidden in that teapot.’
‘But we’d hear an animal,’ I said dismissively. ‘It would make some sort of noise.’
‘What if it’s something that doesn’t make a lot of noise – like a rabbit or a rat or a tortoise?’
‘Well, what about the voices Miss Johnson heard? She actually heard Mrs Daniels arguing with someone.’
‘Maybe what she heard was Mrs Daniels talking out loud to her pet. My mum talks to our cat all the time. She argues with it too! She says stuff like, I told you not to throw up on that carpet! If you’re going to throw up, why can’t you do it outside? I mean, that might sound like a conversation if you weren’t close enough to hear properly.’
I pulled a face because I still thought his idea was pretty far-fetched. ‘Why would Mrs Daniels want to keep her pet a secret?’ I challenged him.
‘I don’t know. Maybe she thinks Dad wouldn’t let her keep it in the house if she told him. Maybe it’s something really weird – like a snake!’
Now, that I could believe! A snake was just the sort of pet I could imagine Mrs Daniels having.
‘Maybe she takes it a whole teapot full of live mice every day,’ Alex went on. ‘And then she hand-feeds them to it.’
‘Don’t be revolting!’ I said sharply – but I couldn’t help remembering how I’d caught Mrs Daniels looking for mice under the sofa that day in our cottage.
‘Look, whatever’s going on,’ Alex said, ‘I think it’s time we found out. So I’ve asked Dad if you can sleep over tonight and he says you can.’
That evening Alex and I played Monopoly with his dad and also with Ben, who had come up to the house to ask Mr Rutherford’s advice about university courses and ended up staying for supper. Aunt Charlotte had gone home that morning, taking one of Alex’s sunflower paintings with her. Mr Rutherford said he wanted to hang one of the sunflowers next to Chris’s paintings on the upstairs landing, and Alex was going to take the other two sunflower pictures home with him. The painting of the rose he had given to me.
‘Yellow roses will always make me think of you,’ he told me, grinning. ‘Yellow roses and convolvulus!’
Alex and I went to bed at half-past ten, waiting in our bedrooms for the rest of the house to follow suit. We heard Mr Rutherford come up to bed about half an hour later, though we knew he’d be awake for a while, reading. Mrs Daniels had gone upstairs for the night much earlier on, but we weren’t sure whether or not she had gone to bed.
Alex knocked on my door at one minute to midnight and when I opened it, he was shining a torch on his face, pretending to be some sort of ghoul.
‘I’m not coming with you if you’re just going to muck about!’ I whispered crossly.
He grinned and shone the light ahead of us along the landing. ‘Don’t be such a wimp! Dad’s definitely asleep, because I just stood outside his door and heard him snoring. So come on!’ He led the way along the landing to Mrs Daniels’ corridor, then stopped. ‘I wonder if she’s still awake.’
We turned off the torch and crept past her bathroom and bedroom. There were no lights visible under any of her doors. ‘Have you got the key?’ I whispered to Alex when we came to the door that led up to the tower.
He nodded, switching the torch back on and shining it on to the lock. He quickly slipped in the key and turned it. The door creaked slightly as he opened it and we both froze, but the house remained silent. Alex shone the light on the staircase ahead of us. It was a spiral one that seemed to twist upwards at a very steep angle.
‘Do you want to go first?’ he whispered.
‘Why? Don’t you?’ I hissed back.
‘I bet you’re too scared to go first, aren’t you?’ he teased. ‘Girls always are!’
‘I am not!’ I grabbed the torch from him and stepped on to the first stair. I could feel my heart beating now. What if Mrs Daniels woke up and caught us? What if she shut the door behind us and locked us in the tower room forever?
But I knew those thoughts were silly. Mrs Daniels wasn’t that evil and, in any case, Alex’s dad was here in the house with us. If we suddenly disappeared then he would come looking for us.
As I climbed the steps I thought I heard a muffled sob coming from above. ‘I think someone’s crying up there,’ I whispered, turning round to tell Alex.
‘I can’t hear anything,’ he whispered back.
The staircase was shorter than I’d imagined it would be. We soon reached a closed door at the top of it and heard the sound of someone blowing their nose.
‘Shall we go in?’ I asked Alex, who, since he had heard the nose-blowing, was looking a lot less relaxed.
Then we heard crying again.
Suddenly, whatever was inside that tower room didn’t seem so scary. ‘They might need our help,’ I hissed, and I knocked on the door.
There was no response.
I knocked again. Still the muffled sobs continued.
‘I’m going in,’ I said. ‘You keep a look-out for Mrs Daniels.’
The door wasn’t locked and it pushed open easily. The only light inside came from a portable television set on the opposite side of the room. It seemed to be showing an old black-and-white movie. There was no sound coming from the set, but an armchair was pulled up close to it and somebody
was sitting there with their back to me.
I stepped closer and called out, ‘Hello?’ My mouth felt completely dry.
There was no reply. I shone the torch on to the person in the chair and stepped further into the room at the same time. As the figure stood up, I felt the floor give way beneath my foot. As I stumbled forwards, losing my balance, I saw that I was face to face with Mrs Daniels herself. She had headphones on which were plugged into the television.
‘Mary!’ she cried out, pulling off the earphones. ‘Mind the floor!’
But it was too late. My right foot had already gone through the floor and my left foot – and the rest of me – seemed about to follow. The torch fell from my hand and I screamed as I felt myself falling.
Mrs Daniels switched on the light and told me not to panic, which was difficult as there was dust everywhere and it was going in my eyes so that I couldn’t see properly. I started to cough and all I wanted was to feel firm ground beneath my feet again. She barked at Alex to stay in the doorway as she started to pick her way around the safe bits of the floor towards me. ‘I told you this floor was dangerous,’ she grunted. ‘That’s why you weren’t meant to come up here.’
‘But you came up here,’ I argued, as I clung on to a beam of wood with both arms, trying to get my legs back up from the hole I had just made in the floor and through which the entire lower half of my body had now disappeared.
‘I’m an adult. I’m allowed to take stupid risks with my own life,’ Mrs Daniels said sharply. ‘Alex, we’re going to need help here. I think you’d better go and fetch your father.’
‘He won’t like it if he sees that,’ Alex warned her, pointing at the silent television in an awed sort of a way, like it was some sort of apparition.
‘He’ll like it even less if Mary falls through the floor to her death,’ the housekeeper snapped. ‘Now hurry up!’
‘I’m not really going to fall that far, am I?’ I asked, making the mistake of looking beneath me. It was a long way down into the darkened room below.
‘We both will if this floor caves in any more,’ Mrs Daniels said. ‘Now just keep still and you’ll be fine.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said as we waited for Alex to bring help. ‘Why are you up here on your own? And why were you crying?’
‘I was watching a very weepy film. Don’t you cry when you watch weepy films? Now stop talking and concentrate on keeping still, please!’
It wasn’t long before Alex arrived with his father. Once Mr Rutherford – looking very sleepy and dishevelled in his dressing-gown – had pulled me to safety and seen us all back down to the main landing, he went to inspect the damage I had done to the bedroom below – the one where Miss Johnson had been sleeping.
‘Miss Johnson said she could hear voices!’ I exclaimed.
Mrs Daniels grunted that she didn’t always put her headphones on to watch her television set. Sometimes, especially during the daytime, she sat and watched with the volume turned down low. But clearly not low enough for Miss Johnson’s bat-like ears, she added tartly.
We all went downstairs to the kitchen, where Mrs Daniels promptly put on the kettle to make us all a cup of tea and Alex headed straight for the chocolate biscuits. For once Mr Rutherford didn’t stop him. He wanted an explanation about what had just happened and, before Alex or I could speak, Mrs Daniels started to.
‘I was afraid I might lose my job when you first arrived here,’ she told her employer, ‘so I’m sorry to say I tried to ingratiate myself with you in any way I could. I told you I didn’t approve of television any more than you did when you mentioned how you felt about it. At that time I still had the old portable down in the cottage, which I knew I could go and watch whenever I wanted – until Ben and Mary arrived, of course. That’s when I thought of moving the television up here. Most of the tower-room floor is safe enough – apart from that rotten part in the middle. I accidentally left the remote control behind though,’ she said, looking at me. ‘That’s what I was looking for the day I showed you and Ben the cottage. I thought it might have got kicked underneath the sofa. In the end I found it behind the cushion on the armchair.’
‘So all those times we saw you carrying a tray,’ Alex said, unable to keep the amazement out of his voice, ‘that was just for you?’
‘Of course!’ She sounded impatient. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of people having TV dinners?’ She told us that she liked to eat her evening meal and her lunch in front of either the news or an episode of her favourite soap, although if there happened to be an old weepy movie on at either of those times, she’d plump for that instead.
‘Mrs Daniels, I had no idea . . .’ Mr Rutherford began, sounding like he was talking about some sort of illness or disability that he hadn’t known she had until now.
And that’s when Mrs Daniels suddenly lost her temper. ‘I haven’t got a disease!’ she yelled at him. ‘I just like watching television! I like nature programmes and gardening programmes and slushy old black-and-white films. Is that a crime?’ She slammed down the tea plate she had been about to hand to Alex, so hard that it broke in half down the middle. She didn’t seem to care as she picked up another plate and looked like she might slam that down at any minute too. She told him that he had no right to force his own views on everybody else and that television was a godsend for many people like herself who needed it for company. As she said all this, her voice got louder and her face got pinker and Mr Rutherford didn’t say a word.
Finally, when she’d finished, he waited for a few moments before responding. ‘I wish you’d told me how you felt, Mrs Daniels. I have no wish to deprive you of something which is obviously so important to you.’ And he did look genuinely sorry to hear that he had done that – or at least would have done, if she hadn’t still been watching all her programmes up in the tower room in any case.
Mrs Daniels looked taken aback. ‘You don’t?’
‘Of course not! If you want a television in your own room then that’s fine with me,’ Mr Rutherford continued.
‘So, Dad,’ Alex put in quickly, ‘does this mean you don’t want to deprive me of TV any longer either?’
His father gave him a sympathetic smile as if he admired Alex for trying, then shook his head. ‘I think being deprived of television, at least for a little while, is good for your development. Mrs Daniels has already developed, so that’s why it doesn’t apply to her.’
Alex scowled. ‘That’s rubbish!’
Mr Rutherford laughed, but in a warm rather than a dismissive sort of way, and I could see that at least he was letting Alex have the last word for once – even though Alex probably wasn’t appreciating that right now.
‘Well, then . . .’ Mrs Daniels began, stiffly, ‘since you don’t mind, I think I’ll go and bring my television down to my sitting room right away. I shall be much more comfortable watching it there. There’s another good film starting shortly.’
‘Isn’t it a bit late to be watching films?’ Mr Rutherford asked, glancing up at the kitchen clock.
‘Not for me – I’ve never been a person who needs a lot of sleep. Besides, they’re showing Rebecca. It’s one of my favourites.’
‘Rebecca?’ I blurted out, hardly able to believe it.
Mrs Daniels nodded and gave me a pointed look. ‘I rather like the housekeeper in it,’ she said.
One month later I was sitting on the plane that was going to take me to Australia. It had been a difficult decision for Ben, but in the end he had decided to let me have my big adventure.
It was the beginning of September and Ben wanted me to go now before the school term started here, even though he wasn’t starting university until October. He’d succeeded in getting a place at a university that was less than two hours away from Thornton Hall on the train, which meant he was going to travel back some weekends to work in the garden. He was going to move up into the main house after I’d gone and apparently, when I returned from Australia, I would be able to live there too, until Ben finis
hed university and we could afford a place of our own again. I was only going to be gone for a year. Then Louise and Greg and I would all be coming home to England together – at least, that was the plan. (I ought to mention that I’d been feeling a lot friendlier towards Greg since he’d offered to help Lou pay for my ticket to Australia.)
Ben was excited about studying history and getting to be a student like he’d always wanted, but he also said that he would really miss me. I told him that I felt the same. I was excited about going to Australia and seeing Louise again, but I was also worried that I would really miss Ben while I was there.
An hour earlier, as we’d waited together at the airport for a member of the airline staff to come and collect me, I had told Ben that I was starting to feel scared. I was worried about the long journey I was going to have to make all alone – especially as I’d never flown before. And something else was worrying me too.
‘You’re not cross with me for not staying here with you, are you?’ I asked him.
Ben shook his head. ‘It was my decision to let you go. Why would I be cross?’
‘But . . . you know . . . are you cross with me for wanting to go?’
‘Of course not! Look, this is a really good opportunity for you. I can see why you want to go! And what we both have to remember is that we’re not losing each other. It’s not like that, OK?’
I nodded, trying to think positively like Louise had always taught me to do and like Ben was always struggling to do.
There was something else I was frightened of – something I was sure would make Ben angry if I told him about it now, just as I was about to step on to the plane. But somehow I couldn’t hold back from blurting it out. ‘What if I don’t like it when I get there, Ben?’ I could feel tears welling up in my eyes as I added, ‘What if I should have stayed at Thornton Hall?’
At Thornton Hall everything was safe and familiar, and Ben wouldn’t be very far away.
