The Secret Passage

by Nina Bawden

  Then Mr Epsom said something that surprised her so much that she stopped being angry.

  He said, “They have an aunt in England. I imagine they’ll be sent to her.”

  Mrs Epsom sighed. “That’s something to be thankful for. Though I suppose we shall have to see to it all. Their father isn’t exactly an efficient person, at the best of times.”

  “I suppose not.” Mr Epsom sounded rather uncomfortable. “Still—we must do what we can. It’s going to be hard enough for them—poor little beggars.”

  Mary had no time to wonder what he meant because the telephone suddenly started ringing. Mr Epsom heaved himself up out of his creaking chair and trod heavily across the veranda. For a moment Mary was rooted to the spot with horror Suppose he caught her? Why—she had been spying on them.

  But Mr Epsom passed by without seeing her. He went into his little study and closed the door.

  *

  Mary climbed into her bed and lay still for a minute, her heart thumping. Then she said, “John, are you awake?”

  “No,” John said sleepily.

  “Don’t be silly. Listen. It’s something important. We’re going to be sent to England. To stay with Aunt Mabel.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose …” Mary frowned, trying to think. “I suppose it’s because we haven’t anywhere to live now. I mean—Dad couldn’t afford for us all to live in an hotel.”

  John said, “Will Mother come too? Dad said she was getting better, didn’t he? So she won’t have to stay in the hospital much longer.”

  “Dad will want her to stay with him for a bit. But I expect she’ll come to England to be with us as soon as she’s quite well.”

  Mary felt much better now she had worked all this out in her mind. She even began to feel a little excited at the thought of flying to England and having to look after John and Ben. Although John was a year older than she was he was a bit absent-minded, like Dad, and would be bound to lose his passport and ticket and things.

  John was silent for a little while. Then he said, in a queer, shaky voice, “I don’t think I want to go.”

  He sounded very miserable. Mary wriggled her hand out under her mosquito net and held it out to him. They held hands across the gap between their beds.

  Mary said, “When we’re grown up, we can come back to Africa and build our bungalow up again.”

  John said, “It wouldn’t be the same. Nothing will ever be the same again.”

  *

  In his study on the other side of the bungalow, Mr Epsom put down the telephone. He was standing quite still and staring straight ahead of him, his small, dull eyes full of tears. In spite of everything his wife had said, he had always secretly admired Mrs Mallory who had seemed to him a pretty, charming woman who was too sensible to waste her time fussing about whether the furniture had been dusted or whether her children’s clothes were spotlessly clean.

  After a moment or two, he wiped his eyes and blew his nose very loudly. Then he went back to the veranda to tell Mrs Epsom that what she had been half-expecting to happen, had happened. Mrs Mallory had died half-an-hour ago.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “ENGLAND MUST BE A VERY SMALL PLACE”

  IF AUNT MABEL thought the children were spoiled, they thought she looked very disagreeable, and not in the least like their pretty mother, who had been her younger sister.

  In fact, Mabel Haggard was ten years older than their mother. Mr Mallory had told them she was a widow because her husband had been drowned at sea and John, who had heard Sara Epsom play a piece of music called The Merry Widow had somehow expected a plump, jolly woman with a cheerful smile. But she wasn’t at all plump or jolly. She was tall and thin with a long, thin face and grey hair insecurely fastened in a straggly bun at the back of her neck. Whenever she turned her head, a little shower of hairpins fell out. She was wearing a shabby brown coat and stockings that wrinkled up on her skinny legs as if they had been intended for a much fatter person. When she met the children at London Airport, the very first thing she said to them was, “Here you are! I thought you were never coming. Your plane was two hours late.”

  It did not occur to them that she had been worried. They thought she was simply angry.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary said timidly. The journey had been very exciting but it had lasted for hours and now she had a funny feeling in her stomach—sick and hungry at the same time.

  “Oh—it’s not your fault,” Aunt Mabel said. She looked at Mary and then bent to kiss her cheek. It was a clumsy little peck as if she was not really used to kissing people. She shook hands with John and said, “I expect all grown-ups tell you that you’ve grown. As far as I’m concerned, you really have. You were fifteen months old when I saw you last.”

  Then she glanced rather nervously at Ben who was glaring at her in the fierce way he had when he was wondering what people were like. She said, “You need a hair cut.”

  It wasn’t a very encouraging remark, but Ben didn’t mind. He grinned at her and took her hand as they went out to the Airport bus.

  John and Mary were quiet in the bus. They both had the feeling that their Aunt was not very pleased to see them. But Ben bounced and wriggled on the seat, looking out of the windows and squealing with excitement. He had never seen so many houses and roads and cars before.

  “England must be a very small place,” he said suddenly.

  “What a funny thing to say,” Aunt Mabel said. It didn’t sound as if she thought it was funny, her voice was slightly annoyed, but after a minute she smiled at Ben just the same. It is difficult not to smile at someone who expects you to smile at them. She didn’t understand what he meant but John and Mary did. The hundreds and hundreds of houses were all so small and cramped together that it looked as if there couldn’t be enough space for people to live comfortably.

  “Wherever do all the children play?” Ben said in an astonished voice.

  Aunt Mabel glanced out of the window. “In the gardens, if they’re lucky enough to have them. If not, in the streets or the parks.”

  “But there’s no room,” Ben said. “Round our house, there was miles and miles and miles.”

  “Well, there isn’t here,” Aunt Mabel said shortly. “Certainly not in the towns, and in the country there are fields full of crops and you aren’t allowed to play in those, let me tell you.”

  Ben wrinkled his nose. “It sounds horrid,” he said.

  John and Mary looked at each other. It did sound depressing and it looked depressing too. The sky was leaden grey and seemed to press down low over the little houses and the crowded streets and the hurrying people. It was all very flat, there were no hills and only a few dead looking trees—John thought they were dead until he remembered that in England the trees lost their green leaves in winter. They swept into London over the Hammersmith Flyover.

  “Look,” shouted Ben, kneeling up on his seat, “the cars are going underneath. We’re up in the air!”

  John and Mary might have been excited too, if they had not been so cold. Even Aunt Mabel, who didn’t seem inclined to notice things about people, saw that they were cold. When they got out of the bus and were waiting for a taxi to take them to the railway station, she turned Mary’s collar up round her neck and said, “That coat isn’t warm enough. Your blood must have got thin with being in Africa.”

  “Mrs Epsom said you would have to get us some warm clothes,” John said.

  “She said you would probably buy us some toys too,” Ben said with a happy grin. Mrs Epsom had said this to comfort him when he realised he would have to leave Balthazar behind.

  “Oh she did, did she?” Aunt Mabel said dryly. She didn’t say anything else until they were sitting in the train and eating the ham sandwiches she produced out of a brown carrier bag. While they ate, she watched them thoughtfully and rather anxiously with her sharp, brown eyes. She was thinking of the letter Mrs Epsom had written to her.

  … I imagine that their father will eventually make some financia
l arrangement for the children but at the moment he is in no state do do so. He is quite broken-up by his wife’s death and of course everything he had was swept away in the flood. He seems to have no money in the Bank, either. We think he has always lived beyond his income. The children seem always to have had everything they want. My husband has advanced the money for their fares and for a few clothes. I have asked Mr Mallory over and over again if you can afford to support the children but all he says is: There is no one else …

  Aunt Mabel said in a brusque voice, “You may as well know—I can’t afford to buy you a lot of clothes and toys and things.”

  They all looked at her in surprise and she went on in an odd, almost indignant way, “Mrs Epsom says you’ve been used to having everything you want. I think we’d better get it straight from the beginning. You’ll not go without anything you really need, but there’s no money for frills. I hope you’ll understand that.”

  “Yes, Aunt Mabel,” Mary said, though she didn’t really understand at all. She supposed they always had had everything they wanted, but it had never seemed to cost much money. After all, there were so few shops where they lived, in Africa, that it would have been difficult to spend a lot of money. She wondered if Aunt Mabel was really poor and if they would all have to live in a mud hut, but she didn’t like to ask her.

  Ben wasn’t so tactful. He said, looking bright and interested, “Are you a beggar, then?”

  Aunt Mabel’s face went very red. “Certainly not.”

  John said quickly, “He didn’t mean to be rude. He just wanted to know if you were really poor like some of the Africans are. Some of their children have big swollen stomachs that stick right out because they’re starving.”

  “Oh,” said Aunt Mabel. “Oh—I see.” She said, to Ben, “I’m not poor, not in that way. But I keep a boarding house and if it’s a bad season, I don’t make very much money. When it rains a lot, no one wants to come to the sea, and they cancel their bookings.”

  The children looked at her blankly.

  “What is a boarding house?” Ben said.

  “It’s a place people go to for holidays. It’s my house, you see, and they pay me to come and be guests in it. I’ve only got two guests now because it’s winter. Mr Agnew and Miss Pin. Mr Agnew is a sculptor—he’s very busy all the time, and you must be sure and not bother him. Miss Pin is—is a little peculiar.” She gave a little sigh. “Just now, there isn’t anyone else.”

  Mary said, “Is it the same house that you and mother lived in, when you were girls?”

  “No. That’s the house next door. It’s a big place—when my husband died it was too big for me to keep up. So I sold it to a man who took a fancy to it; he wanted it for summers, he said—he had more money than sense, if you ask me—and now he’s old and ill and it’s shut up mostly. It’s a pity, it’s a nice old place with a huge garden and lots of rambling rooms. And attics. We used to play up in the attics—you can see the sea from some of the windows, and there was an old brass bedstead that we used to play on. We used to tie string to the posts and pretend we were driving a horse and cart. I wonder if it’s still there—I left a lot of stuff behind when I left and as far as I know he never turned anything out.”

  Aunt Mabel smiled and her face was soft and much gentler, suddenly, as if she were remembering a very happy time.

  Mary said, “What was our mother like, when she was a little girl?” Her eyes were very bright and she was breathing very fast. John and Ben looked at her and then down at their feet. It was the first time any of them had spoken about their mother since the dreadful morning Mrs Epsom had come into their room and told them that they would never see her again. Mary’s question made them feel very lost and strange.

  Aunt Mabel caught her breath. “She was very pretty. Very pretty and gay.” She looked at John and Ben, sitting still and silent as wax images and then she looked at Mary as if she were really seeing her for the first time. She said in a low voice, “She looked a little bit like you …”

  *

  The train stopped. A large notice on the platform said HENSTABLE, and outside the Waiting Room there was a coloured poster of a girl in a bathing costume, sitting by a bright, blue sea. The poster said, Sunny Hcnstable Welcomes You.

  They didn’t feel very welcomed, though. It was dark and cold and the wind sliced through their thin clothes like a sharp knife.

  “It must be like the North Pole,” said Ben.

  They climbed into a taxi and drove away from the twinkling lights of the station, into the dark town. The houses all seemed very tall and narrow and somehow sloping, as if the fierce, cold wind from the sea had blown them sideways. The taxi stopped outside a house with The Haven painted on the lighted fanlight above the door. It was a particularly tall, thin house that seemed to lean against the much bigger house next door to it—a large, looming building with a heavy, pillared porch and dark, empty windows. “That must be the house they used to live in,” John whispered, while Aunt Mabel paid the taxi driver. “It looks spooky …”

  Inside The Haven, it was almost as cold as it was outside. The hall was narrow and high and smelt musty. There was a closed door on the left. “That’s the dining room,” Aunt Mabel said. “Of course, we don’t use it in the winter.”

  They went to the end of the hall and down some narrow stairs to the basement. Here there was a big kitchen and at one end of it there was a black, menacing looking object from which came a steady whispering sound.

  “Thank Heaven’s the Beast is still alight,” Aunt Mabel said cheerfully. She smiled at their surprised faces. “I call it the Beast,” she said. “It won’t hurt you, though.” She opened a little door in the front of the old, black boiler and a lovely shaft of warmth extended into the kitchen. They stood in front of it, thankfully warming their frozen hands. “You look like a lot of shivering monkeys,” Aunt Mabel said. “Come on now, move about and get warm. Which one of you is going to lay the table for me?”

  The children looked at her, then at each other. Rather slowly, Mary came away from the fire and looked at the things Aunt Mabel was taking out of the dresser cupboard and putting on the deal table; a pile of mats, a bundle of knives and forks and spoons, four glasses. She tried to remember how the table always looked at home, how the knives and forks went and which side of the mat you put the glasses but both her brain and her fingers seemed numbed with cold.

  “Hurry up,” Aunt Mabel said. “Good heaven’s child, haven’t you laid a table before?”

  Mary shook her head, feeling shy and ashamed. She said, “Jason always lays the table at home,” and her eyes filled with tears.

  Aunt Mabel clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I forgot you’d been waited on hand and foot. Well, I haven’t the time for that. Or the inclination, I may as well tell you. So you’d better start learning to do a few things for yourself.”

  In spite of her sharp voice, she explained how to lay a table patiently and clearly and Mary quite enjoyed doing it. She decided that it would be fun to learn how to do things in a house—perhaps she could make beds and clean windows and so on. At the back of her mind was the idea that in this terrible, cold climate it might be just as well to make yourself useful indoors. Perhaps John had the same idea because after they had had supper, he offered to help wash up, but after looking at the three weary little faces, Aunt Mabel said that it would be more sensible to go to bed.

  They were to sleep up in the attic, as all the other rooms were furnished for the paying guests. They trooped, one by one up the narrow stairs, past what seemed like endless closed doors.

  “Are all the rooms really empty?” John whispered, half fearfully, glancing along a long, dark passage.

  “Yes.” Aunt Mabel thrust open one of the doors. “You may as well look now,” she said. “Then there’ll be no need for you to go poking about when my back’s turned.”

  They peered into a dim, high-ceilinged room which had a big bed in the middle of it, shrouded in a white sheet. The light fr
om the street lamp outside came through the window and made dark, eerie shadows in the corners. John clutched at Mary’s hand and she could feel him shiver.

  He said in a small voice, “It’ll be funny living in a house where the rooms are all shut up and empty, won’t it?”

  Mary squeezed his hand sympathetically. She didn’t think the empty rooms were frightening, only rather dreary, but she knew that John was much more nervous in some ways than she was. He wasn’t a coward, he was a normal, strong, healthy boy, but he often saw ghosts and other alarming, shadowy things in places where Mary very seldom saw them and Ben never saw them at all. Ben was a very practical person who was only afraid of good solid things that he knew were dangerous, like charging elephants and angry rhino.

  Aunt Mabel shut the door with a bang and said, to John, “It seems you’ve got more imagination than is good for you.”

  The house seemed very quiet and still but as they reached the second landing they heard something—a low muttering that gradually got louder and louder until it burst into a deep, vibrating roar. The children stood stock still. The roar seemed to shake the house; then, suddenly, it stopped short in a loud snort and a sniffle.

  They heard nothing more for a moment. Then, from behind them, they heard another queer sound. It was Aunt Mabel, laughing.

  “That’s Mr Agnew,” she said. “He snores. He has a quite exceptional snore. In the summer he sleeps out in his shed in the garden so he won’t disturb the other guests.”

  “But it’s only seven o’clock,” Ben said. “Why should a grown-up man be asleep at seven o’clock?”

  Aunt Mabel said crisply, “Mr Agnew is an artist. Artist’s aren’t ordinary people. Mr Agnew likes to sleep at funny times—sometimes he sleeps all day. I expect he’ll wake up soon and want his lunch.”