by Nina Bawden
Nick closed the parlour door. He whispered, half scared, half excited. ‘Whatever did you say to him, Carrie?’
‘Nothing wrong, I don’t think. I don’t know.’ She mopped her eyes with the tablecloth but it was too wet to help much. ‘I just told him something Mrs Gotobed asked me to tell him. I thought he’d be pleased. Perhaps he would have been, if I’d explained properly. But I did try! I said how I’d feel if it was you and me, and we’d quarrelled, and you’d died …’
Nick gawped at her. ‘You’re potty. Quite potty! He’ll have you locked up, I should think!’
‘I was only trying to put myself in his place,’ Carrie said. ‘I felt sorry for him.’
‘Then you really are nutty as a fruit cake,’ Nick said with conviction.
Chapter Eleven
Mr Evans’s rages were noisy while they lasted but they didn’t last long. Nick and Carrie were used to timing them now, fairly accurately: they went out for about half an hour and when they came back he was sitting quiet in the kitchen, reading the paper. He looked up in a thoughtful way that made Carrie nervous but all he said was, ‘Well, Carrie, I’m much obliged to you! Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!’ It seemed an odd remark but he made it quite amiably and Carrie’s immediate reaction was one of relief: at least he wasn’t angry with her!
He had been angry with Hepzibah, though, and thinking about it, lying awake in bed that night, and at school the next day, Carrie knew she must warn her. Albert had said Mr Evans would be flaming mad when he heard about Mrs Gotobed’s Will and it seemed Albert was right. Mr Evans was flaming mad, not with Mrs Gotobed but with Hepzibah for ‘doing him out of his rights’. He had said he would drag her through every court in the land, which sounded unpleasantly threatening. And if he did something dreadful to Hepzibah it would be all Carrie’s fault, though she hadn’t meant any harm, only passed on a message. But when she thought about it an odd picture came into her head; a picture of herself innocently lifting the lid of a box and letting out a dark, shapeless shadow …
All day this shadow grew in her mind and by the time school was over and she was running along the railway line, it seemed to be running behind her like some dark, winged creature. She ran faster and faster, afraid to look back, but with hope in her heart. She would be safe once she reached Hepzibah’s kitchen …
But Mr Evans had been there before her …
She knew it at once. There was nothing obviously wrong – Albert sitting at one end of the table in front of his books and Hepzibah making an apple pie at the other, pressing the pastry top with a fork to make a frill round the edge – but it was as if a light had gone out. From the room, from their faces …
Albert said, ‘We’ve had a visitor, Carrie.’ His expression was stony and she knew that he blamed her.
Hepzibah said, ‘Only natural that he should want to come and pay his last respects to his sister.’
‘Poking about among her things. That’s what he came to do,’ Albert said.
Hepzibah sighed. ‘Her next-of-kin, Albert. Within his rights there.’
Albert said – and it was like a cold statue speaking – ‘And to tell you to clear out, Hepzibah! Was that within his rights, too?’
She answered, quite calmly, ‘A month’s notice is reasonable. Gives me time to find somewhere. It ‘shouldn’t be difficult, there’s plenty of farms could do with a bit of help with men away at the war. We only want two rooms and our keep and I’ve got a strong back and I’m willing. So’s Mister Johnny, in his own way. He’s good with cows and with sheep, lambing time.’
Carrie burst out, ‘But, Albert! You said they could stay here?’
‘I was wrong, it seems.’
‘But you told me …’
‘And you told him, didn’t you?’
Hepzibah said, ‘That’s enough, Albert!’ She smiled faintly at Carrie. ‘There’s no Will and that’s that! Mr Evans rang the Bank and her London solicitors and there’s no sign of one anywhere. I expect the poor soul took the will for the deed, if you’ll excuse a weak joke. She had a kind thought and she believed she’d carried it through, and that’s not uncommon, with someone as sick as she was and in pain a lot of the time. So there’s no call to blame her.’
‘Oh, I don’t blame her,’ Albert said.
Hepzibah looked at them both. Then she put the apple pie into the range oven and slammed the door so hard that coals fell into the grate. She riddled the dust and made up the fire and said, ‘You two make friends time that’s cooked. Or you’ll get the rough edge of my tongue. I’m short on patience this evening.’
Albert stood up and jerked his head at Carrie. ‘Come on, you. Do what she tells you.’
Carrie followed him out of the kitchen, through the hall, and up the polished stairs. A door stood ajar on the landing and Carrie saw the bottom end of a silk-covered bed and drawn, silken curtains. Mrs Gotobed’s bedroom!
She stood still, heart hammering. ‘Is she in there?’
Albert’s face was contemptuous. ‘Couldn’t hurt you if she was, but she isn’t, she’s downstairs, in her coffin. It’s not her I wanted to show you.’
He pushed the door wide. The big, dim room smelt of roses. Carrie saw a big bowl of them on a table and then their reflection – and hers – in what seemed hundreds of mirrors. They covered the walls; when Albert opened the cupboard doors to show her Mrs Gotobed’s wardrobe, the whole room became a shimmering rainbow of colour.
‘Her dresses,’ Albert whispered. ‘All her dresses.’
‘Twenty-nine,’ Carrie said. ‘One for each year of her marriage.’
Albert blinked; caught his breath. Then he recovered and spoke with a cold, held-in anger. ‘Your Mr Evans! Do you know what he did? He came up here and he went through them all, counted them, and wrote down the number. Then he told Hepzibah he’d hold her responsible! As if he thought she might steal them! Hepzibah didn’t say what else he said but I don’t suppose, taking that for a guide, it was exactly friendly, do you?’
Carrie shook her head. That viper, that snake in the grass! Had he said that to Hepzibah?
‘Went through her drawers too, I dare say,’ Albert said. ‘And her jewel box!’
It stood on the dressing table, among silver-topped bottles. A shining, ebony box, its lid open, showing a tray lined with blue velvet. Jewels winked up, like bright eyes.
Albert was frowning. He stood straight and still, breathing hard as if he were steeling himself to do something. Carrie waited, but when he moved all he did was to lift the tray out of the box. There was a cavity beneath with a string of pearls in it.
Albert said slowly, ‘Oh, well. It was just a chance, I suppose …’
‘Chance of what?’ Carrie asked but Albert didn’t reply because Mister Johnny suddenly spoke from the doorway.
‘Geelalookala, geelalookala …’ He scurried into the room and came up to them, smiling hopefully into their faces. ‘Geelalookala, geelalookala …’ He wasn’t talking as he sometimes did, just for the sake of making a conversational noise. He was trying to tell them something.
Albert looked at him intently. He said, in an urgent voice, ‘Try, Mister Johnny. Please try harder.’
Mister Johnny’s smile vanished and he screwed up his face and puckered his mouth but all that came out was a string of indecipherable, watery sounds.
Albert sighed.
Mister Johnny was watching his face. He said, ‘Schlakali.’ He started to laugh excitedly, put his little hand into the jewel box, took it out again, and touched his breast pocket. Then he put his head on one side and looked at Albert in an expectant way, like a dog waiting to be given a biscuit.
‘I wonder,’ Albert said. ‘I wonder …’
Mr Johnny was making a queer, sucking sound with his lips. It seemed familiar to Carrie. ‘Mr Evans does that! His false teeth are loose. Nick says he’s too mean to buy new ones.’
‘I think that’s it!’ Albert said. ‘Mr Evans was in here and he took something out of the jewel
box. Is that what you’re trying to say, Mister Johnny?’
But Mister Johnny just laughed; he was bored with this game. He wandered off round the room, looking at himself in the mirrors and pulling faces and laughing.
Albert said, ‘I’m sure he did see Mr Evans and I think what he saw him take was an envelope. I saw one in the box once when she was trying her pearls on to see if they went with one of the dresses. A brown envelope. I’m quite sure I saw it, I’ve got a sort of picture in my mind’s eye. Not that I thought much about it, why should I? Until Hepzibah said there wasn’t a Will anywhere. Then I thought, well, perhaps that was it!’
‘But there isn’t a Will,’ Carrie said. ‘Mr Evans rang the solicitors, didn’t he?’
‘In London.’ Albert took off his glasses and rubbed them on his handkerchief and put them back on, as if clean spectacles might make him think better. Then he said, speaking softly and half to himself, ‘Suppose she got someone local to make a Will for her and then kept it here? To go through it sometimes and change it – old people like to do that. Hepzibah says she knew an old woman once who kept what she called a Death Book. With what she was going to leave to each of her relations written down in it so that when she got fed up with one of them she could just strike his name out!’
‘What a beastly idea,’ Carrie said. ‘But it’s nothing to do with what we’re talking about, is it? I mean, Mr Evans wouldn’t take Mrs Gotobed’s Will. Why should he do that?’
‘God give me strength!’ Albert raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Carrie, you innocent nit! If a person dies intestate – that’s without making a Will – then everything they’ve got to leave goes to their nearest relations. Mr Evans and Auntie Lou, in this case. The house’ll go to them, and the jewels, and her dresses. Nothing to Hepzibah, not even the right to stay on here. So all Mr Evans had to do, to get rid of her, was take the Will and destroy it!’
‘But that would be terribly wrong!’ Carrie cried.
‘Clever girl.’
‘I don’t believe he would do it. I just don’t believe it.’
Albert grinned at her in an indulgent, knowing way and it made her angry.
‘If you believe he did it, then you can do something about it, can’t you, Mr Fancy-Yourself? Tell someone …’
Albert stopped grinning. ‘Oh yes? And who’d listen? To a fourteen-year-old boy who thinks he saw an envelope in a box once, and an idiot who can’t even say what he saw?’
Carrie was so shocked to hear him call Mister Johnny an idiot that she couldn’t speak, only stare. Albert’s eyes fell, and he blushed.
He muttered, ‘Oh, it’s so stupid! If only I’d looked earlier on! I could have looked last night, if I’d thought. But even if I’d thought, it wouldn’t have seemed right to go poking and prying with her only just dead. Hepzibah wouldn’t have liked it. She’d have said it wasn’t respectful.’ He sighed, very deeply, and looked at Carrie. ‘I would have looked in the end, though. Tonight, I expect, or tomorrow. And that would have been time enough if you hadn’t shot your mouth off and brought that foul man roaring round here …’
Carrie gasped. ‘That’s not fair.’
‘No. No, it isn’t. But fairness doesn’t come into it really. I mean, me being fair to you. If I wasn’t, I’m sorry, but it isn’t important. What is important is that Hepzibah’s got to leave Druid’s Bottom. And of course she’ll say it’s all right and she’ll manage but she’s just being brave.’ He stopped and went on in a low voice, ‘I came back early from school and when I came in I saw she’d been crying.’
‘Hepzibah?’
‘She said she’d been peeling onions. But I could tell because her mouth looked all slippery. Onions just make your eyes water.’
Carrie said, ‘Suppose – suppose she asked Mr Evans? To let them stay – well, not for ever, but for more than a month. Till the war’s over, perhaps.’ That seemed, when she thought about it, almost as good as saying for ever.
‘Too proud,’ Albert said. ‘Besides, it wouldn’t be any use, would it? He wouldn’t budge.’
‘She could put a spell on him,’ Carrie said.
Albert smiled at her but so sadly that it brought her no comfort. Even if they were friends again, perhaps he still blamed her, secretly. Perhaps Hepzibah blamed her …
She left Albert with Mister Johnny and went downstairs to the kitchen. Hepzibah was darning socks. She looked up at Carrie and smiled.
Carrie stood by her chair. She said, ‘Hepzibah …’
She didn’t know what else to say, but there was no need to say anything. Hepzibah’s brilliant eyes looked into hers and Carrie felt as if something inside her, some hard, painful lump, were dissolving. She started to cry with happy relief and Hepzibah put her mending aside and took her on to her lap as if she were Nick. She said, ‘Hush. Hush, my lambkin,’ and rocked her a little, and then, when Carrie was quiet, ‘I should think that old pie’s nearly ready. Wait till I’ve cut it and we’re all sat down with a piece, and I’ll tell you a story.’
And when Albert and Mister Johnny came in, she cut the pie and told them about the big fair that was held every Michaelmas in the Norfolk village where she had lived when she was a little girl; about the gay gipsy carts and the fire eater, and the booth where you could have a tooth pulled for sixpence with a brass band to drown your screams; about the two-headed calf and the Bearded Lady and the Toffee Woman. ‘She was a fine, big woman with hair black as night,’ Hepzibah said. ‘And you never tasted such toffee! It made your mouth water even though you’d seen how it was made! She’d pick up a great lump of it and throw it over a nail and then oil her hands with spit and draw it out and out in a long skein, till it was smooth as glass …’
Mister Johnny sat quiet and still as he always did when she talked, watching her mouth and moving his own as if he were trying to copy her. Albert sat, hugging his knees, and staring at nothing. He had a bit of a beak for a nose and in profile, especially when he was frowning and thoughtful, looked like a young, dreaming hawk. Carrie knew that although he was soothed, as she was, by the sound of Hepzibah’s voice, he was not really listening. She leaned against Hepzibah’s knee and watched Albert and wondered what he was plotting.
Chapter Twelve
Mr Evans and Auntie Lou went to Mrs Gotobed’s funeral. When they came back Auntie Lou was red-eyed but Mr Evans seemed almost cheerful. ‘Well, that’s over,’ he said, and went straight upstairs to change out of his good suit.
Carrie had been minding the shop. It was the first time she had been left on her own and she had managed quite well except that she had given Mrs Prichard, the colliery manager’s wife, short change by mistake. Only sixpence, but Mr Evans sent her off to return it at once. Whatever else was wrong with him he was at least honest, Carrie thought as she ran up the town. The idea of him stealing Mrs Gotobed’s Will was a bit of what Hepzibah would call ‘Albert’s Old Nonsense’.
But Carrie brooded about it all the same. The summer holidays had begun and she had plenty of time to spend in the shop, helping Mr Evans and watching him and wondering … He was a bully, he flew into rages, but to do what Albert believed he had done he would have to be wicked, and Carrie didn’t think he was that. He was even kind sometimes, letting old age pensioners have credit if they were short at the end of the week, and once he sent a box of free groceries to a poor woman whose husband had died of pneumonia. ‘It’s the Lord’s will we should take care of the Widows and Orphans,’ he said.
Hepzibah and Mister Johnny were not exactly widows and orphans of course but perhaps, Carrie thought, Mr Evans could be persuaded to think it was the Lord’s will to help them as well. If she were him she would want to, but she knew now that it was no use trying to put herself in his place. She had thought he would be happy about Mrs Gotobed’s message because she would have been, but she had been wrong about that. He had simply been angry and believed that it meant he had been right all the time and that his sister really was in Hepzibah’s Power. That Hepzibah had bewitched Mrs Go
tobed …
Did Mr Evans really believe that Hepzibah was a witch? Religious people didn’t believe in witches and Mr Evans was very religious. Carrie wondered if she believed it and decided she wasn’t quite sure. Hepzibah was good at most things she did, making pastry and telling stories and keeping poultry. If she was a witch she would be good at that, too. Her magic would have worked. Mrs Gotobed would have made a Will and Hepzibah and Mister Johnny would be safe in Druid’s Bottom for ever and ever …
But Albert was so sure that she had made a Will …
Carrie’s head seemed to spin like a top. So many thoughts twisting round, it made her quite giddy. Tired, too: she lay awake at night, thinking, and came down several mornings so pale that Auntie Lou wanted to go to the chemist and buy her a tonic.
‘Waste of good money,’ Mr Evans said. ‘Stewing indoors, that’s the trouble. Bit of exercise and fresh air, that’s all you need, girl! Get your bowels moving …’ Speaking crossly and rudely although Carrie had only been stewing indoors because she had been helping him in the shop! His unfairness gave her something else to brood over. Mr Evans was unfair. Life was unfair. Poor Hepzibah and poor Mister Johnny. Poor Carrie and Nick, having to live here with this rude, unfair man for the rest of the war. For the rest of their lives, probably …
But they were not even to stay for the rest of that year. A letter came from their mother. She had resigned from her ambulance unit because her own mother was ill and had rented a house outside Glasgow so that she could look after her and still be near the port when their father’s ship came in. It was a small house, only a cottage, but there was an attic room for the children and a good school not too far away. She was sending Auntie Lou the money for their rail tickets and they were to leave in two weeks’ time. She wrote, ‘That’s not long, is it? I’m so happy, my darlings.’
