The Runaway Summer

by Nina Bawden

  *

  In fact, Mary was a little surprised herself. As she ran down to the sea, she thought that perhaps she had only been nice to Aunt Alice, to make up for being so nasty about her, in her mind.

  She said to herself, ‘She’s got a bottle marked poison in the cupboard. It’s a blue bottle and it’s hard to see how much there is in it, unless you hold it up to the light. It’s about half full now, and every time I go past and she’s not there, I try to look. If it gets emptier, then I’ll have to be careful because I’ll know there might be some in my food. I’m careful about that, anyway. If we all have something out of the same dish, like potatoes or stew, then I know it’s all right. But if we have something she brings in on separate plates, then I mess it about and leave it, just in case …’

  She wondered if Simon would believe this. She thought he might be rather a difficult person to convince. Not that it mattered, because she probably wouldn’t see him again, and didn’t, indeed, particularly want to.

  He was such a bossy boy. Besides, he knew she had pinched those Crunchie Bars.

  The thought made Mary uncomfortable. She began to whistle loudly, to take her mind off it.

  The weather had changed again: it was much warmer now and the sky was blue. The tide was right in but the wind had dropped and there were no waves on the water which moved against the sea wall as gently and soundlessly as water tipping in a cup.

  Mary walked to the pier and beyond, where there was a line of tall, terrace houses. They had names like Sea Vista and Water’s Edge. Mary sauntered past them, whistling softly, and trying to look as if she wasn’t looking.

  Harbour View was the last but one. It was shabbier than the others, badly needing a coat of paint; and instead of a neat front garden with flower beds and paving, it had only a worn, trodden patch of grass. A playpen stood in the middle with a happy, fat baby in it, hanging on to the sides and gurgling. It had thrown all its toys out of the playpen, adding to the litter already on the lawn: a tricycle on its side, a tennis racket with half the strings missing, two dustbins and a punctured beach ball. Beside the step that led up to the front door, there was an old pram with the hood up. As Mary watched, the baby inside began to cry and the front door opened. A little woman with grizzly hair came hurrying down the steps, and Mary turned and ran.

  She ran until she was puffed, suddenly horrified by the thought that Simon might have been looking out of a window and seen her. She would hate him to think she had come to look for him!

  She made for her grandfather’s bathing hut. The weather had been bad since she came, and this was the first time since last summer that she had been there. But the key was where she remembered, on its piece of wire, and after fiddling with the rusty padlock for a little, she pulled the creaky door open. Inside, the hut smelt cold and shut-up: she crinkled her nose and pushed the door wide, to let in the clean, salty air. Everything was neat and in its place: there was sugar in the tin marked sugar, and tea in the tin marked tea. There was even a hook on the wall for Mary’s bucket and spade, and two boxes on the table, one for the shells and one for the stones that Mary had collected last year. There were sparkly stones and dull, blue ones, and others with strange, knobby shapes that the sea had made. Mary turned the stones out, remembering the feel of some and the look of others. It struck her that while most grown-ups would have kept the shells, they would almost certainly have thrown away the stones when they cleared up the hut for the winter, and she wondered if Aunt Alice liked keeping things, as she did herself: her old toys, even the shoes and the clothes she had grown out of. It was a habit that annoyed her mother. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mary, this isn’t a junk shop. What on earth do you want to keep all that rubbish for?

  Mary squatted on the step of the hut and let the stones dribble slowly through her fingers.

  ‘My Aunt’s thrown most of my toys away,’ she said. ‘She’s kept a few locked up, but she only lets me play with them when the solicitor who looks after my money comes to see her. Then she gives me the toys, and clean clothes, and calls me Mary dear, in a sort of slimy voice … Of course, if I told the solicitor how she treats me most of the time, he’d take me away and probably send her to prison, but I don’t dare tell him because he’d never believe me, and then I’d catch it, after he’d gone …’

  She began to feel sleepy in the sun and leaned back against the door post, watching the sea. It was so calm it looked thick and smooth, like syrup. Far out on the horizon, there was a slow steamer with gulls blowing in its wake like pieces of paper, and, nearer the shore, a smaller boat with a drowsily chugging motor, that was making for the beach.

  Mary yawned. She was getting bored. It was always easy to begin a story, but hard to go on with no one to tell it to.

  ‘I wish something really interesting would happen,’ she said aloud, and then thought that perhaps if she closed her eyes and counted a hundred, something would.

  She closed her eyes and counted slowly, but when she got to a hundred and opened them, nothing had changed except that the steamer was further away and the small boat nearer. There were four people in it, three men and a boy. The motor had cut out and the boat was close enough for her to hear the men’s voices, though not what they said.

  She watched them idly. One of her grandfather’s walking sticks was leaning against the wall of the hut; she reached for it and began to poke at the shingle, still watching the boat which was gliding in over the silky water with hardly a ripple. Two of the men were dark-skinned and the third was white: a boatman wearing a beret. He was saying something; when he stopped, the others began to talk excitedly and wave their arms about, as if they were quarrelling.

  They landed some way along the beach from Mary, and she stood up to watch. The bottom of the boat ground on the shingle and the two dark men jumped out, their trousers rolled up. The boatman handed the boy to one of them and pushed the boat out again. As soon as he was in deep enough water, he started the engine and made for the open sea.

  The men on the beach stood, watching him go. They were oddly dressed for a sea trip; in dark suits, each carrying a small suitcase. Mary thought they looked lost and strange, because of their clothes and the way they looked about them once the boat had gone, as if they didn’t quite know where they were.

  Like castaways, Mary thought.

  The boy sat down. He looked as if he were putting his shoes on. One of the men jerked him roughly to his feet and the boy flinched away, holding his crooked arm in front of his face.

  The men began to run along the beach in Mary’s direction. She shrank back, out of their sight, in the gap between her grandfather’s hut and the neighbouring one.

  They passed so close she could hear them breathing. They were running barefoot, stumbling on the stones. Once they were past, Mary waited a minute; then she peeped out, and saw the boy. He was following the men, but slowly; he was crying a little in a damp, dreary way, and he looked so silly, running along the beach in the bright sunshine, dressed up as if he were going to a party in a dark, long-trousered suit and a white shirt and a red bow tie, that quite without thinking, she stuck out her head and said Boo …

  He was almost level with her. When she said Boo he gasped and turned with a look of such absolute terror that she was frightened herself and cringed back. Then he fell, all waving arms and thin legs, like a spider, banging his head on the hut steps.

  And lay still.

  Mary held her breath. For a moment she stayed as still as the boy on the ground. Then she came out of her hiding place between the huts and looked along the beach. The men had vanished. The only living things in sight were the gulls, resting on the calm sea like toys.

  She looked down at the boy. He was lying on his face and her grandfather’s walking stick stuck out from beneath him. She had left it leaning against the steps and he must have tripped over it. Mary pulled at it gently but she couldn’t move it. She was afraid of hurting him.

  She said softly, ‘Get up, you’re not hurt,’ but she
knew, even as she spoke, that he couldn’t hear her.

  She said, ‘Oh, please …’ with a sob in her voice but only a gull answered her, swooping over her head with a long, sad cry.

  Mary ran through the huts and on to the promenade. There were people about now, but they were some way away, by the pier. She went down the next flight of steps where there was a woman sitting in a deck chair, hidden from sight until now by a high breakwater. Mary started towards her but stopped almost at once. The old woman was lying back with her eyes closed, her shabby fur wrapped round her. It was the woman she had pulled the mad face at, this morning …

  She couldn’t wake her. And ask her to help …

  Whimpering in her throat, Mary went back to the hut. The boy hadn’t moved. A little wind had got up—no more than a gentle breath—and was stirring his limp, dark hair. His hands lay palm down on the shingles, the thin fingers loosely curled. One foot seemed to stick out at an awkward angle, and the side of his head was jammed up against the bottom step of the hut.

  Mary knelt beside him. She thought she ought to turn him over and make him more comfortable, but she was afraid to touch him.

  She thought—Perhaps he’s dead! And then—If he’s dead, I killed him!

  She began to shake, crouching on the pebbles with her arms hugged round her. She looked up and down the beach. No one had seen her; if she locked the hut and went away, no one would ever know. She could go home for tea and say—if anyone asked her—that she had been playing at the other end of the town, where the shell beach was. Aunt Alice and Grandfather would believe her. Whatever lies she told, they always believed her.

  But this was one lie she couldn’t tell! Suppose, after all, he wasn’t dead? She couldn’t just leave him here! She gave a little groan and put her hand down to his face. His cheek was warm and his breath fluttered against her palm like a bird’s wing.

  She stood up. Her stomach felt hollow and her legs seemed to be moving independently, like someone else’s legs. They carried her up the steps, on to the promenade and towards the pier.

  Just before the pier, there was a small crowd of people. She thought perhaps there had been an accident: there was a policeman there, though he wasn’t in the crowd but on the edge of it, standing and looking out to sea.

  Mary began to run towards him but slowed down when she was a few yards away. She remembered, with awful guilt, the Crunchie Bars she had stolen. Perhaps the man at the kiosk had missed them and told this very policeman. Perhaps he was looking for her now—for a dirty-faced girl with long, black hair. Forgetting she had washed before lunch, Mary pulled out her handkerchief, spat on it, and scrubbed at her mouth. She hesitated, gulped, went closer to the policeman—and then stopped dead.

  The crowd beyond him had thinned and she could see, at the centre of it, the two men who had been in the boat with the boy. Another policeman was talking to them and a third was holding their arms just above the elbow, which was rather silly, Mary thought, because neither of them looked as if they would run away. They seemed far too sad and bewildered, and so out of place, somehow, standing on the sea front in dark suits, with small, shabby suitcases in their hands. Someone near Mary said, ‘Poor devils …’ and she looked up at the faces round her, but no one else seemed sorry: they were just staring and staring as if they were expecting—or hoping—that something exciting would happen.

  But nothing did. There was a police car at the kerb, and as Mary pushed her way through the crowd, the two men and one of the policemen got into it, and drove away.

  Mary wondered what they had done wrong. They had come from the sea, so perhaps they were smugglers, smuggling gold watches or diamonds. Or burglars—perhaps the boat that had landed them would call for them on the next tide to take them and their loot right away, where the police couldn’t catch them. If they were burglars, it would explain why they had brought a boy with them. She remembered Oliver Twist, and how Bill Sykes had taken him burgling because he needed a boy small enough to get through a window and open the door from inside.

  If the boy was a burglar, it was no good asking a policeman to help him. Or any grown-up, for that matter …

  Mary had a sudden, awful feeling that everyone was watching her. She ducked her head, turned, and cannoned straight into the cushiony stomach of a large lady in a flowered dress. Her husband said, ‘Watch out, can’t you?’

  Mary was going to say she was sorry, but then she saw Simon beyond them, on the other side of the road. He must have been standing there all the time, watching like the others, and now he was walking away.

  Mary dodged round the large lady and flew across the road, looking neither to left nor to right—Aunt Alice would have had a fit if she’d seen her—and called, ‘Simon, Simon, wait for me.’

  She had forgotten he was bossy and inquisitive. She thought, a long time afterwards, that she must have known Simon would be a good person in an emergency, but in fact she couldn’t possibly have known it then. She just acted without thinking, and when he stopped and she saw there was someone with him, she came to a halt and couldn’t think what to say.

  ‘Hallo,’ Simon said. He looked shy for a minute, and then he said, ‘This is my Gran. Gran—this is my friend, Mary.’

  ‘Hallo, Mary.’ Simon’s Gran had a thin, merry face with a long, pointed nose, rather like a cheerful witch. She was pushing a pram with a baby in it. Mary thought it was the fat one she had seen in the play pen.

  ‘That’s Jane,’ Simon said. ‘And our new baby’s called Jenny.’

  Jane blew a large bubble and laughed when it burst.

  ‘Four sisters,’ Simon’s Gran said. ‘Poor, down-trodden boy. Still, I suppose he’ll live.’

  Simon looked at Mary. ‘Were you coming to see us? You came earlier, then you went away.’

  So he had been watching from a window! For a second, Mary felt horribly embarrassed, then it didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was to get Simon alone, to tell him about the boy. She had the feeling—and it was growing stronger and stronger—that he would know what to do.

  But how to get him alone? His Gran was smiling and saying, ‘Well, why don’t you come and see us now?’ and she set off at a good, smart pace, without giving Mary a chance to answer. She couldn’t even drop back and catch Simon’s eye, because his Gran was talking to her, telling her that the new baby weighed eight and a half pounds, which was two pounds more than Jane had weighed when she was born and three pounds more than Polly-Anna, who were naturally smaller, being twins, but Simon had weighed more than any of them: nine pounds, three ounces exactly. ‘And his Mum only a little thing, knee-high to a grasshopper!’ she said proudly.

  Mary tried to think of a polite remark on this subject, but failed. All she could think of was to ask Simon’s grandmother how much she had weighed when she was born, but that didn’t seem the right sort of question, somehow.

  ‘You sound like a cannibal, Gran,’ Simon said. ‘Working out which of us would have given you the biggest dinner!’

  ‘Horrible boy,’ his grandmother said calmly. She turned the pram into the front garden of Harbour View and began to unfasten the baby’s harness. ‘Come along my duckie-doo. Tea time now.’

  ‘Roast baby with mint sauce,’ Simon grinned at Mary. ‘Are you coming? Tea time with the Trumpets is a very special occasion.’

  Mary giggled. Then she shook her head. ‘I can’t, just now. There’s something I’ve got to do …’

  She looked helplessly at Simon who was capering round the pram, rolling his eyes and smacking his lips. ‘Something awfully special …’ she said, speaking loudly and willing him to stop acting the fool and pay attention …’

  But he barely glanced in her direction. He was too full of himself and his silly joke. ‘We don’t say what’s cooking in our house, we say who’s cooking,’ he said, bounding up the steps in front of his grandmother and flinging the door wide. She pretended to box his ears as she passed and he doubled up, laughing. He shouted, to Mary, ‘Of course, you
can always have a peanut butter sandwich, if you don’t fancy what’s on the menu!’

  Mary clenched her teeth. It was no use. When people were in this sort of mood, you could never get them to listen.

  ‘I suppose you think you’re witty,’ she said. ‘Mister Too-clever-by-half!’

  She stumbled out of the gate her eyes scalding with disappointment. It had been a mistake to think Simon would help. He was too stupid, too cockily pleased with himself and his beastly family to bother about anyone else. She had been wasting her time.

  And not only her time, she suddenly realised. The boy’s time, too! While she had been chasing around, silly enough to believe she could find someone to help her, he might have been dying! She should never have left him alone, not without looking to see where he was hurt. Suppose he had cut himself when he fell, and was bleeding to death!

  Fear grew as she ran. By the time she reached the bathing hut, she was so panic-stricken that she could hardly believe what she saw. Or, rather, what she didn’t see …

  The hut was as she had left it: the door standing open and the sun streaming in. But the boy had gone.

  FOUR

  ‘Anything might have happened to him …’

  ‘I WAS ONLY trying to make you laugh,’ Simon said. He sounded reproachful and slightly out of breath. When Mary didn’t answer, he sat down beside her on the hut steps and pretended to be more puffed than he actually was, blowing out his lips and fanning himself. ‘You run pretty fast for a girl,’ he said.

  Mary gave him a withering look and stuck her nose in the air.

  Simon said, ‘I know it wasn’t a very good joke, about eating people, I mean. But it wasn’t so terribly bad, either. Not bad enough to make you run away. Unless you believed it, of course …’

  Mary knew he was expecting her to laugh. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t even smile. She just sat, hunched up and staring at the sea. Perhaps the boatman had seen what happened and come back and fetched the boy? But if he had done, wouldn’t the boat be still in sight? She stared until her eyeballs ached. The sea was as empty as the sky.