Bryony drew a thoughtful little line through the soap suds.
‘Maybe I could be a magician-on-wheels, Mr Undrum,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t that be slick?’
Ken smiled and nodded. Then he stared out of the kitchen window, suddenly absorbed in his own thoughts.
‘A magician-on-wheels,’ he muttered. ‘My oh my, Ron would sure have loved that…’
Bryony pricked up her ears. There definitely was an American accent.
‘Who’s Ron, Mr Undrum?’ she asked.
‘No one,’ he said softly. ‘No one of any importance…’
And, eyes gleaming bright with a sudden strange sadness, he sploshed both hands into the washing-up bowl and scrubbed the milk jug till it shone.
* * *
That afternoon, as Bryony skated into the hall, a resounding ‘Bang!’ rang out from upstairs. Each of the star-studded bedroom doors flew open and the little ’uns rushed out. Bryony raced upstairs. As she neared the top, two rabbits tore past her and vanished. One of the rabbits was huge and determined-looking. Bryony’s heart did a triple leap. Lily was at large once more.
Bryony pushed past the crowd of Bells and surveyed the scene. As she took in the horror of it all, her heart once more bled for Ken.
The bedroom looked like a bombsite. Just visible under an avalanche of boxes and hutches and pieces of mirrored box-side, the bed stood at a rakish angle. Shards of broken mirror covered the floor, and two of the hutch doors swung on their hinges. Each now contained just one rabbit.
In the midst of it all, his saw dangling from one hand, Ken stood gazing forlornly at the wreckage.
‘Seven years bad luck,’ he moaned. ‘Seven years for each mirror, and there were four mirrors, so that makes…’
He paused and counted on his fingers. But his calculations were interrupted by a furious yell.
‘Twenty-eight years!’ Angelina roared. ‘What on earth did you do with that saw, Mr Undrum?’
Ken looked down at the leg of the bed. It was sawn clean through.
‘Thought it was a bit sticky,’ he said miserably. ‘Must have forced it.’ And he began to pick up some of the pieces of glass.
‘Be careful, Mr Undrum,’ Bryony said, shooing the little ’uns away. ‘We’ll get a brush and do it carefully.’
Angelina followed Bryony into her room and as she took her Vipers off she stood at the door, her toe drumming against the pink shagpile.
‘It seems to me, Bryony Bell,’ she said, ‘that you don’t want The Singing Bells to succeed.’
Bryony looked up, truly horrified by the accusation.
‘But, Angelina,’ she protested, ‘I’m your biggest fan.’
Angelina raised her eyebrows.
‘That’s what you say,’ she said loftily. ‘But I reckon you’re out to sabotage the Summer Panto. Bringing that tenth-rate magician into the house…’ Her braids rattled furiously together. ‘Just because you didn’t get a part,’ she added, her nose in the air.
Bryony stood up. ‘Honestly, Angelina, that’s not true,’ she implored. ‘I only told Mr Undrum he could stay because he’d nowhere to go. I promise I’ll keep an eye on him from now on.’
‘OK,’ said Angelina, sounding unconvinced.
‘But I’m warning you – if one more thing happens, Mr Undrum’s out – understood?’
And she marched off.
All that evening, as Bryony and Clarissa helped Ken clear up his room and Big Bob repaired his bed, the search for the runaway rabbits went on. But by nightfall no one had seen hide nor hair of them.
Bryony took Ken a comforting cup of cocoa.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Undrum,’ she said, perching rather gingerly on his bed. ‘Dad says he’ll make you a new box in Antique Pine. It’ll be safer than glass. And Lily’s sure to turn up.’
‘Don’t know that she will, Bryony,’ Ken said mournfully. ‘Once Lily’s heard the call of the wild, there’s no stopping her. And she’s on the run with Snowflake, and, well…’ he blushed into his cocoa, ‘boys will be boys – if you catch my drift.’
Bryony let it sink in, then nodded. ‘Oh well,’ she said at last, ‘I suppose you can never have too many white rabbits.’
She bent down to pick up a piece of paper. As she handed it to Ken, she turned it over. Two rather faded young men, with identical handlebar moustaches smiled proudly out at her. On their shoulders, their wings pressed very closely together, sat dozens and dozens of white doves.
The smaller of the men looked familiar. ‘Is this you, Mr Undrum?’ Bryony asked.
‘In my hey-day, Bryony,’ Ken said, and his eyes gleamed like dark little spotlights. ‘When we were on Broadway.’
‘Broadway?’ Bryony gasped. ‘You were on Broadway?’
Broadway. There it was again! And the way Ken said it, with that American accent and the light in his eyes, made the very name sparkle.
She looked at the taller man. ‘And who’s this?’ she asked.
A shadow passed over Ken’s face. ‘That’s Ron,’ he said.
Bryony opened her mouth to ask ‘Who’s Ron?’ then, remembering the sad faraway look she had seen in Ken’s eyes when they had washed the dishes together, closed it again.
‘The doves are knock-out, Mr Undrum,’ she said instead. ‘Did you make them appear from out of your hats?’
As soon as she had said it, Bryony saw the light in Ken’s eyes go out. Ken took the photograph gently but firmly out of her hand.
‘I would be very grateful,’ he said politely, ‘if you would never, ever mention doves. It is a very sore subject.
‘I seem to put a jinx on everyone I meet,’ he went on miserably. ‘I’m sure you must be wishing you hadn’t invited me to stay.’
‘Not a bit of it, Mr Undrum,’ Bryony said, patting him on the shoulder. ‘You’re a great help, and soon you’ll be teaching me magic too.’ She paused. ‘But…’ she said slowly, ‘…we will have to be really careful from now on…’
Then she brightened up. ’Come on, Mr Undrum,’ she said, ‘what’s that song you always sing to the rabbits?’
Ken gave a bright smile, and his moustache bristled with his usual cheerfulness.
‘There’s a rainbow round the corner,’ he sang lustily,
‘And a sky of blue above…’
When he had finished he leapt up and gave Bryony a very flamboyant bow.
‘Nothing like the old songs to cheer you up!’ he said, straightening up.
Bryony gave him a hug. ‘Tomorrow’ll be hunky-dory, you’ll see,’ she said, and Ken nodded brightly.
‘Hunky-dory,’ he repeated. ‘That’s what it’ll be!’
But when Wednesday dawned, ‘hunky-dory’ was the very last thing it was.
Six
‘The worst thing,’ Bryony told Big Bob as she handed him a fresh sheet of sandpaper, ‘was that Mr Undrum was trying to be so helpful…’
It was Wednesday lunchtime, and Bryony had skated home lightning-fast to give Big Bob a hand with Ken’s new Antique Pine ‘sawing-a-lady-in-half’ box.
‘He means well,’ Big Bob agreed, ‘but there ain’t two ways about it – your Mr Undrum’s accident-prone. Specially around animals.’
For a while they sanded in silence, reliving the events of that terrible morning…
* * *
Ken, desperate to make amends, had risen at dawn, plodded round the garden calling ‘Lily! Snowflake! Come home, all is forgiven!’, fed the remaining rabbits, and cleaned the kitchen ’til it sparkled. Then he set the table and checked the time. Singing practice would not begin for at least an hour. It was far too early to start the toast and boiled eggs.
Then, as he was setting Clarissa’s breakfast tray, he had an idea. Wouldn’t it be nice to give all the Bells breakfast in bed? Make ’em feel like real stars, and more than make up for the day before. Delighted by his brainwave, he looked around for more trays and, finding nothing suitable, remembered the pile of Antique Pine planks in the potting shed waiting to be assembl
ed into the new ‘sawing-a-lady-in-half’ box.
A tad narrow, Ken thought but, with careful handling and the addition of a nice paper doily or two, they would do the trick. He picked up five of them, (Little Bob, he decided, was too young to appreciate the gesture, and Big Bob could share Clarissa’s) and headed back to the kitchen. He laid each plank with a bowl of cereal, a thickly buttered and strawberry-jammed slab of bread, and a mug of tea. Then, humming happily, he went out into the garden to pick roses to adorn each of the Bells’ breakfasts.
And it was at that moment that Lily and Snowflake decided to come home.
Like two white tornadoes, the rabbits bounded past Ken and into the kitchen. Ken tore after them, but he was too late. Driven to a frenzy by the combined scents of six bowls of Krispy Flakes and six thick layers of strawberry jam, Lily and Snowflake leapt on to the table and hopped ecstatically from Antique Pine plank to Antique Pine plank. Their whiskers had never trembled, nor their noses ever wobbled, so excitedly, as they settled their bottoms into the bowls of cereal and licked every drop of jam off the bread.
Then, once the slices were only slightly tacky, they turned round and, sitting on them, proceeded to demolish the Krispy Flakes. Finally, they nudged the mugs of tea onto the floor, where they smashed and spread their contents all over the kitchen.
For a while, Ken stared helplessly at the scene. Then, suddenly galvanised into action, he made a lunge at Lily and pinned her to his chest. But Lily had got the taste for Krispy Flakes. She clawed him furiously before jumping clear, leaving his face streaked with a mixture of blood and strawberry jam to which adhered two pink roses and a crumpled doily.
To make matters even worse, the first little Bell to get up to practise her scales was Angelina. On her way downstairs she had almost completed one octave – ‘Doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, tee…’ and, on the second last note, opened the kitchen door to find a warm wave of it lapping over her toes.
‘…d-d-doh!’ she stuttered as she gazed disbelievingly at the pile of jam-smeared, cereal-stuck Antique Pine planks.
And in the midst of it all Lily and Snowflake gazed innocently back at her, before returning to their breakfasts.
* * *
Bryony stopped sanding.
‘You don’t think I brought Mr Undrum here to sabotage the Summer Panto?’ Bryony asked anxiously. ‘’Cause I didn’t. I wanted to help him out, and I really want him to stay and teach me to be a magician!’
Big Bob stroked Bryony’s head soothingly.
‘’Course you didn’t want to sabotage the panto, Bryony,’ he said softly. ‘You meant well, just like Ken. But you’ve got to admit, lass – it isn’t working.
‘I had a talk with Angelina after breakfast,’ he went on, ‘and she’s agreed that this morning’s fiasco was a nice gesture gone wrong, but …’ He sighed and ran his hand over the surface of the ‘sawing-a-lady-in-half’ box, ‘…it’s like living with a time-bomb, having Ken here. Life with Ken Undrum,’ he added, reaching for a cloth and a tin of furniture wax, ‘sure ain’t humdrum! Come on, Bryony – let’s polish his box till it shines. We could all do with a bit of gloss today.’
Bryony copied Big Bob’s little circular movements. When the surface was covered with wax, they buffed it up. Soon, the Antique Pine gleamed.
‘Can we stick some silver stars on?’ Bryony asked.
‘Sure,’ Big Bob smiled. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘I don’t think Ken’s on the road to stardom. Shame to say it, but I reckon he’s had his day.’
Bryony thought about this. The photo of the young men with their doves flashed into her mind again.
‘I wonder about Mr Undrum, Dad,’ she said slowly. ‘I think he was once a big Broadway star. But then things went wrong somehow.’
She gave the box an extra-hard rub. She could almost see her red poppy hair-ties reflected in its surface now. But nothing was clear. It was still a blur…
‘I keep asking him things,’ she went on, ‘and he starts to tell me, and then he stops. Doesn’t he trust me?’
Big Bob rubbed his little brown moustache. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘telling’s not so easy …’ He sat down and patted his knees. Bryony perched on his lap, resting a hand on his bald patch to balance herself.
‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ he whispered. ‘A secret only your mum knows.’ He gave Bryony a squeeze. ‘’Cause I know you’ll keep it to yourself, and it’ll maybe make it easier for you to understand Ken.’
‘It’s safe with me, Dad,’ Bryony said gravely.
Big Bob took a big breath in. ‘When I first set eyes on your mum,’ he began, ‘she was singing in the Pig and Whistle.’ He gazed into the distance. ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, the song was, and to this day it brings me out in goosebumps to hear it.
‘Anyway, I knew right off she was the girl for me. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask her for a date – her being a singer and me just an apprentice joiner. So I did a very wrong thing.’
He looked up at Bryony. ‘A very, very wrong thing,’ he repeated. ‘I told her a lie to impress her. I told her I was an airline pilot.’
‘An airline pilot? You?’ Bryony spluttered. ‘You get dizzy up a ladder and you’ve never flown in your life!’
Big Bob blushed. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But love makes fools of all of us, Bryony.’
‘So – did she believe you?’
‘Sure did. And she was impressed, and she let me take her to the pictures. But then she kept wanting to see me in my uniform, and somehow what had started out as a little lie started to grow bigger and bigger…’
In the distance a clock chimed. It was time to go back to school. Reluctantly Bryony got up, took both Big Bob’s hands, and skated down the path pulling him after her.
At the gate she stopped. ‘How did you get out of it, Dad?’ she asked.
‘Chocolate-covered fondant creams,’ Big Bob smiled coyly.
Bryony gave him a quizzical look.
‘Six juicy fruit flavours, in a gold box with a red lining. Cost me a packet. And,’ he added, giving Bryony a push in the direction of school, ‘I owned up.
‘“I am only a humble joiner, Clarissa,” I said, “but I give you my awl.” And she said that was very clever. She also said she preferred a man with both feet on the ground. And then she ate the chocolate-covered fondant creams, and the rest is history.’
Bryony freewheeled backwards. ‘Oh, Dad,’ she sighed, ‘that is romantic.’
She pirhouetted round Big Bob. ‘Not quite sure what it’s got to do with Ken though…’
Big Bob swivelled round too. ‘Sometimes,’ he explained, rotating on the ball of his foot, ‘there are things in our past we don’t want to tell. And, if we are going to tell them, we need to wait ’til the right moment.
‘But if we do tell,’ he said, stopping and swaying slightly, ‘it’s often a weight off our mind.’ He clutched his head and staggered. ‘So just ease up on Ken, lass. If he wants to tell, he’ll do it in his own good time.’
And he wended his way giddily back to the potting shed.
Bryony skated thoughtfully schoolwards. She could see Abid waving at her and she rushed towards him, bursting to tell him how good the ‘sawing-a-lady-in-half’ box was looking.
But Abid had bad news to tell. And, in a week full of bad news, his bad news was the daddy of them all.
Seven
Bryony clutched Abid’s shoulders and gave him a steadying squeeze.
‘Go back to the beginning and slow down,’ she told him firmly. ‘Rushing’s only making you wheeze. You didn’t say Angelina’s been given a hundred lines and banned from school dinners for the rest of the week? You didn’t?’
Abid coughed several times. Bryony watched him with growing horror.
‘Tell me you’re nodding ’cause you’re coughing, Abid,’ she said desperately, ‘and not ’cause it’s true?’
But there was no doubt about it. Abid was nodding.
‘But Angelina never does anything wron
g,’ Bryony said, shaking her head in disbelief. “The Angel of Peachtree Primary” Mrs Quigg calls her. How on earth did it happen?’
Abid struggled for breath, his face an interesting shade of damson.
‘Flies,’ he croaked, before another wheeze took over.
‘Flies?’ Bryony repeated.
‘The whole dining hall was full of them, Bryony,’ Abid went on, flapping his hands around at the memory. ‘Dozens of bluebottles, buzzing round everyone’s heads and landing in their Eve’s puddings.’
Suddenly Bryony’s world went into slow motion. Time had faded that morning’s kitchen scene to a terrible blur of tepid tea, sticky doilies, and what seemed like a roomful of white rabbits and screaming Angelinas, but somewhere in it all she remembered seeing her sister splash over to the fridge, take out her lunchbox, and flounce back out with it.
Except that that lunchbox hadn’t been yellow, had it? That lunchbox had been orange…
Bryony drew in a long breath.
‘Oh my goodness!’ she said. ‘She took…’
Her sentence was finished by a voice behind her that seemed to come from the very bowels of Hell.
‘I took Mr Undrum’s lunchbox!’
Turning to face her sister, Bryony braced herself. She had never seen Angelina so seethingly angry. Even her braids seemed electrically charged.
Bryony’s voice was a strangled whisper. ‘But why does Mr Undrum keep—’ She stopped. Suddenly, she had an awful feeling she knew the answer. What had Big Bob said? Your Mr Undrum’s accident-prone. ’Specially around animals…
Angelina, hands on hips, gave Bryony a dreadful stare. ‘Why does Mr Undrum keep flies in a lunchbox in the fridge? you were about to ask, Bryony,’ she repeated through clenched teeth. ‘I’ll tell you why…’
Grimly, eyes half-closed, she advanced, prodding Bryony with a forefinger in time to each word of her answer.
‘So – that – they – get – cold,’ she stabbed out.
‘So – they – look – dead,’ she jabbed again.
‘So – they – wake – up – in – his – hands,’ she went on.
Under the Spell of Bryony Bell Page 3
