Unexpected Magic

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Father frowned. “It was not. Quiet, Elizabeth!”

  “You ought to give the child a good smack and stand her in the corner,” Granny said to Mother.

  “But I don’t think she’s well,” said Mother.

  “Indulgence does no good,” said Granny. She turned to Father. “Stephen, it does no good to spoil the child. It’s—”

  Father waved the walking stick triumphantly at Aunt Anne. “Carruthers!” he said. “That was the name.” That was how Elizabeth learned the stick’s name.

  “—just a rod to beat your own back, Stephen,” said Granny. “You must be firm.” And that was how Elizabeth learned what Carruthers was for.

  She was still screaming. Father seized her arm and ran out of the room with her into the hall, roaring, “How dare you make a noise! How dare you upset Granny!”

  Elizabeth snatched at the walking stick he was holding. “Hit him, hit him!” she implored it. “Hit him, Carruthers!”

  Carruthers did not hit Father. It would have been hard to do, since Father and Elizabeth were each holding an end of him. Elizabeth was left sitting on the hall carpet, clutching the stick in one hand and the slab of uneatable chocolate in the other, while Father smoothed his hair and reknotted his tie. “And don’t come back in here again,” he said as he went back to the living room.

  Elizabeth sat until the uneatable chocolate had gone melted and slimy. Then it occurred to her that Carruthers might like it. Experimentally, she held the slimy lump toward the hooked end of him.

  Carruthers liked it. He was a bit languid and stiff—after all, he had never eaten anything in his life before—but he nuzzled willingly enough at Elizabeth’s fingers. Elizabeth sat for a long time, pressing the chocolate against the place where his mouth seemed to be. It looked like a sort of dent in the end of him. Beyond that dent, farther up the handle, were two more dents that seemed to be his eyes. Elizabeth thought that Carruthers kept his eyes blissfully closed as he discovered how much he liked chocolate, but, when it was mostly gone, he did once open an eye like a little bright bead and roll it soulfully at Elizabeth. He liked her. Nobody else had ever fed him before.

  “I think I shall feed you up and train you,” said Elizabeth, “as a rod to beat Father’s back.”

  She was interrupted by Aunt Anne’s son, who was called Stephen after Father, who came sauntering in from the garden with his bar of bitter chocolate. He had only managed to eat half of it. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  Elizabeth admired Stephen. He was over a year older than she was. “Feeding Carruthers,” she said.

  “Sticks don’t eat,” said Stephen, and he demonstrated that they didn’t by holding his chocolate against the end of Carruthers. Carruthers had already eaten so much that he could hardly manage another mouthful. Stephen’s chocolate simply melted on him, and on Elizabeth too.

  When everyone came out into the hall, ready to go home, Granny exclaimed, “Just look at that child! Just look at that stick! They’ll have to be washed at once.”

  “Carruthers doesn’t want to be washed,” said Elizabeth.

  Nevertheless, Granny took them both away and washed them severely. She nearly drowned Carruthers. Elizabeth cried heartily when Granny took him away and propped him in the corner of the landing, ready to go back to the attic. But Granny believed in being firm. She led the weeping Elizabeth out to the car. And, somehow, while everyone was standing around saying good-bye, Carruthers got into the car. Elizabeth found him on the backseat when she got in.

  After that, Mother, Ruth, and Stephanie got used to Carruthers going everywhere with Elizabeth. Father did not. “Why does that child have to take her blessed stick to ballet class?” Elizabeth heard him demanding.

  “She says it’s alive. She has a very vivid imagination, dear,” Mother explained.

  “What twaddle!” said Father. “She’s just trying to be interesting.”

  “He doesn’t like you,” Elizabeth explained to Carruthers in a whisper, “because he knows what you’re for.”

  Carruthers did not need to eat very often. The next time he fed it was a fortnight later, just before bedtime. Elizabeth was sitting dismally in front of her rice pudding from lunch. Father always insisted that everyone ate everything all up, or they had it for tea, then for supper, until it was gone. Stephanie once had the same mashed swede for two days, until Ruth and Elizabeth ate it for her out of pity. Elizabeth could only eat rice pudding by being almost sick. So there she sat, staring at the cold white mush, when Carruthers suddenly unhooked himself from the back of her chair and fell forward into it. There was a bit of slurping, and the rice pudding went.

  Thereafter, Carruthers always ate rice pudding, and occasionally swede for Stephanie too. Given a bit of luck, you could hook Carruthers into your plate while Father was not looking, and the food was gone when Father next looked.

  After he had fed, in those early days, Carruthers would fall heavily asleep. When he was asleep, he was exactly like any ordinary walking stick. Usually, he hid in the hall stand among the umbrellas when he wanted to sleep, and it was no good trying to disturb him. But as time went on, eating made Carruthers more and more lively. He slithered and clattered about the house so much that Father kept storming upstairs bellowing, “Elizabeth! Stop that confounded noise!” Elizabeth had to take Carruthers out into the woods above the house, so that he could get his exercise.

  Stephanie and Ruth loved watching Carruthers in the wood. They and Elizabeth would sit in a row on a log, laughing and applauding. Carruthers climbed trees by winding himself up the trunk in a spiral, and then swung himself from hook to tail through the branches. “Just like a monkey’s tail, without the monkey,” as Stephanie said. When he felt specially skittish, Carruthers liked to shoot out from a tree like an arrow, and, instead of falling to the ground, he had a way of folding himself into coils and drifting to an immaculate landing on the earth by the log. Ruth always applauded this furiously. Carruthers went hopping and skipping about in delight, like a rather small pogo stick.

  He was shy of other children. One day, a group of boys came to play in the wood and ran about all the trodden paths and plunged into all the bushes, shouting. Carruthers simply hooked himself to the tree he happened to be in and hung there. Nothing Elizabeth said would make him show any sign of life.

  “It’s lunchtime,” said Ruth. “Come on, Stephanie, or we’ll get into trouble.”

  Ruth and Stephanie went. Elizabeth lingered. But the boys were still there, and Carruthers still would not budge. At last, Elizabeth was too scared of what Father would say to stay any longer. She had to leave Carruthers hanging there. She was very relieved to find him asleep in the umbrella stand after lunch.

  After that, Elizabeth took Carruthers out to the wood every day on her way to school and left him there. He always came back by himself—how, Elizabeth never knew. Carruthers would not say. He was very surly altogether about the way Elizabeth went to school without him.

  “You take that other stick,” he complained in his small grunting voice.

  “That’s my hockey stick,” Elizabeth explained. “It’s not alive, like you. I only take it because I have to.”

  Carruthers did not answer. He did not speak much at the best of times. When he did, it was mostly short sentences—most of them rather self-centered. He said, “Don’t forget me,” if Elizabeth was going anywhere except to school, and, “Leave me alone,” if he was asleep in the umbrella stand. His favorite short sentence was “I’m hungry.” He said that increasingly often as time went on. Elizabeth learned to leap wide awake in the middle of the night, whenever the small grunting voice said plaintively in her ear, “I’m hungry.”

  “All right, all right,” she would say. “I’ll go down and get some biscuits. But you’re to be quiet while I do.” She knew Carruthers was quite capable of helping himself to tomorrow’s pudding or Stephanie’s birthday cake, if she left him to look for food on his own. As it was, Mother noticed that biscuits were vanishing. />
  “Darling, you should ask if you want biscuits,” she said.

  “Carruthers got hungry in the night,” Elizabeth said.

  “Well, if he does it once more I shall have to tell Father,” Mother answered. She said it in an indulgent way which made Elizabeth suspect Mother believed it was really Elizabeth who got hungry. Elizabeth tried to make Carruthers tell Mother it was him. But Carruthers only drooped his hooked head shyly and kept his eyes tight shut until Mother had gone.

  One way and another, as the years went by, there were a number of ways in which Carruthers annoyed Elizabeth. His appetite was one. Another was that he never, ever, despite all the good food and exercise he had, made any move to hit Father. Another was that Carruthers liked ballet.

  Elizabeth hated ballet lessons worse than she hated rice pudding. Ballet was a weekly torture to her. She was clumsy, she could not keep in time with the music, and the ballet positions made her arms and legs ache. The ballet teacher thought she was stupid, and said so. Mother looked sad and anxious. The worst of it was that Ruth and Stephanie were good at ballet. Ruth was very good. Stephanie did not love dancing the way Ruth did, but she was strong, limber, and willing, and she was soon much better at it than Elizabeth. Ruth and Stephanie both looked trim and lissom in pink shoes and black leotards. Elizabeth looked a fright. Her calves bulged above the pink shoes, her stomach bulged out of the leotard, and, when she put on the pink fluffy jacket you wore to keep warm, it made her look like an apewoman.

  “You look like an apewoman,” Ruth said, and laughed. This did not help Elizabeth to love ballet any better.

  Carruthers loved ballet. He picked up a great deal while he was propped in the corner of the dance room watching Elizabeth flop and struggle about on the polished floor. At night, he hooked himself to the end of Elizabeth’s bed and tried to do barre exercises. It is not easy to do ballet if you have no arms and legs, but this did not deter Carruthers. He stretched straight out from the bed rail to do the arm positions with his tail end. Then he collapsed gracefully into a plié, rose, and sank again. After that, he let go of the bed and went hopping around the room in one-legged jetés, pirouettes, and arabesques. He was very ingenious about them. He had picked up the music Elizabeth danced to, along with the steps, and he would hum Handel’s Water Music in his tinny growl as he capered. Elizabeth squealed with laughter, which very often had her in trouble with Father.

  Then came the dreadful day when Ruth won a scholarship to a London academy to train as a dancer. Father was delighted, but it occurred to him to wonder why Elizabeth and Stephanie had not won scholarships too. He discovered that Elizabeth was two grades behind even Stephanie. Elizabeth felt as if a volcano had erupted under her.

  When Father had smoothed his hair and straightened his tie and gone away, Mother came to find Elizabeth, who was in her bedroom, sullenly hugging Carruthers.

  “Darling,” Mother said, with her sad and anxious look, “you must try harder at ballet. Girls must learn to be graceful.”

  “I hate ballet,” Elizabeth said. “You know I do. And I’m not graceful, so why should I learn to be?”

  “Father has very strong opinions—” Mother began.

  “Bother and blast Father’s opinions!” Elizabeth shrieked. “What about your opinions? You know I’m bad at ballet, but you’re too feeble to say!” Mother looked so hurt and shocked that Elizabeth said hastily: “Carruthers says you’re feeble.”

  Mother went to the door, more shocked than ever. “Darling, I can’t stay and listen to nonsense.”

  “And Carruthers says Father’s a—a bloodthirsty tyrant!” Elizabeth bawled at the closing door.

  As the door shut behind Mother, Carruthers struggled out of Elizabeth’s arms and stood upright in front of her, hopping gently up and down in his indignation. “I never said that!” he said. “Tell her I never said it.”

  “No, I shan’t,” said Elizabeth. “It’s true.”

  “It may be true, but I never said it,” Carruthers insisted.

  “You only didn’t say it because you like ballet,” Elizabeth retorted. “When are you going to hit Father?”

  Carruthers squirmed sulkily. “All in good time.”

  “Soon,” said Elizabeth.

  “Why?” said Carruthers.

  “Because he deserves it,” said Elizabeth.

  They separated, both in furious sulks. Carruthers stayed in the umbrella stand, and Elizabeth left him there. He would not speak to her, or eat, and he never seemed to move. But he was always in the car when it was time to go to ballet lesson. Elizabeth left him in it. Twice, Stephanie ran after her with him, and once even Ruth, who was rather nervous of him, carried him cautiously into the dance room, saying, “You left Carruthers in the car, Elizabeth.” Elizabeth sighed. But she realized it was no good trying to keep Carruthers away from ballet and let him stand in the corner as usual after that.

  This was a little before Easter. Ruth was to go to her academy in the autumn. Meanwhile, Aunt Anne had to go abroad and Stephen came to live with them. He was to have gone to Granny, but Granny telephoned Father to say she could not cope, and Father said they would have Stephen instead. He could have Elizabeth’s room, and Elizabeth could move in with Ruth and Stephanie, as Ruth was going away before long.

  Much as Elizabeth disliked this arrangement, Ruth liked it even less. Ruth and Stephanie had shared a room since they were both small. Ruth had developed a series of masterly arrangements with Stephanie. They were all very complicated and they all amounted to the same thing: Ruth lay on her bed and gave orders while Stephanie ran and did things. When Elizabeth moved in, Ruth rightly feared that this golden time was over. Sure enough, Elizabeth saw through the arrangements at once.

  “Don’t be such a lazybones, Ruth,” she kept saying. “Why should Stephanie do it?”

  Ruth began to lose her temper. Stephanie was uncomfortable too. It was not what she was used to.

  “Honestly, Ruth, you are lazy!” Elizabeth said for the tenth time.

  Ruth pressed her lips together. Her way of losing her temper was to go icy calm and say the nastiest thing she possibly could. She took a long breath. For a moment, calm as she was, she wondered if she dared say it. “I—I don’t believe in Carruthers,” she said.

  “You what?” said Elizabeth.

  “I don’t,” said Ruth, “believe in Carruthers.”

  “He’s only a stick,” Stephanie added loyally.

  Elizabeth felt extremely anxious. Ever since their quarrel, Carruthers had indeed seemed almost like an ordinary stick. Elizabeth was afraid he was dead, until she remembered the way he kept turning up at ballet. That so relieved her that she said, “Have it your own ways,” and hurried downstairs to fetch Carruthers from the hall.

  Her sisters stared at each other. “Do you think she’s all right?” Stephanie asked anxiously.

  “She’s grown out of Carruthers, that’s all,” Ruth said. She did not really believe it, but she knew she had to keep Stephanie’s respect, or Stephanie would never run errands for her again.

  “Carruthers,” Elizabeth said to the unresponsive, sticklike Carruthers as she carried him upstairs. “Carruthers, would you like some chocolate?” Even that did not move Carruthers. Elizabeth came back into the room looking so miserable that Ruth relented. Ruth was going away to learn to be a ballerina, after all. She could afford to be kind. Besides, she thought she had hit on a way to make peace with Elizabeth and still keep Stephanie’s respect.

  “Never mind, Elizabeth,” Ruth said. “You’re growing up fearfully pretty, so it doesn’t matter.”

  This did not comfort Elizabeth. Nor did it keep Stephanie respectful. “Ahah!” Stephanie cried out, curled up like a gnome on her pillow. “When Ruth says that, you can believe it. Ruth’s a real girl. She really works at it.”

  “You’re both horrible,” said Ruth. “Worse than Stephen.”

  Stephen turned out to have grown into a very boyish boy. He played with cars, guns, and electric tr
ains. He made friends with all the boys who swarmed through the bushes in the wood. They came to call on him, so, for the first time, the house filled with boys.

  “Rude, rough lot!” Ruth said disgustedly.

  But Elizabeth discovered that the games boys played were fun. She liked guns, Cops and Robbers, and pelting about shouting. It was much more interesting to climb trees in the wood than to sit decorously on a log watching Carruthers. She admired Stephen. Whenever he let her, she followed him about and tried to join in the games.

  “Elizabeth, I forbid you to get dirty,” said Father.

  “Darling, you mustn’t act so rough,” said Mother.

  At first, Stephen was not at all pleased to have a girl tagging about after him. “We don’t want you,” he said to Elizabeth in the hall one morning. His friend Dave had called for him, and they were going to play parachutes in the wood.

  “Why not?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Because you’re forbidden to get dirty,” Stephen said as he went out through the front door.

  “I don’t want to come anyway,” Elizabeth shouted after him. “I’ve got Carruthers.”

  “That stupid old stick!” Stephen called back. The front door slammed.

  Carruthers was propped lifelessly in the umbrella stand. “He gets dirty,” Elizabeth said to him indignantly.

  The front door opened again. Stephen and Dave appeared. “I’ve changed my mind,” Stephen said. Elizabeth beamed, in spite of having Carruthers.

  “Er—hm,” said Dave.

  Stephen said swiftly, “Dave here wants you to be his girlfriend, Elizabeth. Tell him I’ve already booked you.” Elizabeth stared rather, and then opened her mouth to say that she did not like either of them nearly enough. “Well, that’s settled then,” Stephen said airily. “Come along, Elizabeth.”

  Being Stephen’s girlfriend was rather like being Stephanie under Ruth’s arrangements, Elizabeth discovered. It seemed to mean that she was allowed to carry Stephen’s sweater, to sit at the bottom of a tree to catch him in case he fell, to be an Indian woman—an almost lifeless role—when they played cowboys and Indians, and to sit for cramped hours switching electric trains when she was told. It also seemed to mean that Stephen was allowed to talk to her in the same bullying way Father used to Mother and Aunt Anne, and to frown whenever Elizabeth made any kind of suggestion. There did not seem to be any advantages to the post at all. After two days, Elizabeth was wishing she knew how to stop being Stephen’s girlfriend. But the post seemed to be a permanent one.