There was a steaminess and a friendly, lived-in smell. Tolly stood there like someone in a trance with his hands over his face, and heard a stirring of feet in straw, then warm, velvety lips began to try to pull his fingers away from his eyes. With his eyes still closed he put his arms round a bending neck, just behind the ears, twining his fingers in the long mane that fell over them. Then he felt a prod on his thigh from the apple in his pocket, which was being nosed and pushed about. Tolly pushed the apple upwards from the bottom till he heard Feste’s teeth crunch into it. ‘Oh, why didn’t I bring sugar?’ he thought. ‘Now he won’t know who puts it there.’ Just then the outer stable door swung wide open with a bang as Boggis tramped in wheeling his bicycle, whistling loudly. The dust raised by the slam must have gone into Tolly’s nose. He sneezed and sneezed and sneezed again.
‘’Struth!’ said Boggis, looking over into the empty stall where Tolly cut a peculiar figure in his old-fashioned ragged coat and bare feet, sneezing in the dust of centuries. ‘What in heaven’s name is going on here? I thought you were a gypsy. What’s that you’ve got on?’
‘Happy Christmas, Boggis,’ said Tolly. ‘These are my special Christmas clothes.’
He went pattering off towards the house, but skirted round the garden path, partly to avoid the painful gravel, partly because in imagination he was riding a high-spirited horse and needed room to gallop. As he came along the lawn he saw the children grouped near the tree. Linnet was holding one of the partridges in her lap and feeding the other with corn. The peacock was sharing it, looking for once very beautiful and gracious. Toby was coatless, wearing a shirt which had full sleeves like a bishop’s with lace at the wrist. He looked slim and athletic, as if he had just come from a fencing lesson. He was holding and examining something which, as Tolly drew nearer, stuffing his hands into the pockets of Toby’s coat with quiet swagger, he saw was Truepenny. The deer and Watt were browsing at Toby’s heels. Alexander was standing by with a handful of nuts which he was cracking between his teeth and eating. The squirrel was on his sleeve helping itself out of his palm.
Toby looked up and smiled at Tolly, raising one eyebrow just as his mother had done in church. ‘Come here, Linnet,’ he was saying. ‘Will you hold Truepenny for me? Alexander’s too busy eating the squirrel’s nuts. Hold him upside down. I want to get a thorn out of his hand.’ Linnet took the little velvet thing and held him carefully. He looked pathetic with his pink palms and soles kicking at the four corners of his body, for his limbs were so short he looked as if he had none. He opened and shut his mouth but no sound came. There was truffle on the end of his nose. One of Linnet’s curls, falling forward as she bent her head, lay on his stomach like an eiderdown. Toby had neat skilful fingers and the thorn was soon out.
‘Give him to me,’ said Alexander. ‘I’ll put him back among the thruffles.’ He said it with difficulty because his mouth was full of nutshell.
‘Did they all come?’ asked Tolly.
‘Oh yes, it has been a splendid breakfast party. I wondered where you were,’ said Toby, grinning at him. ‘I had to tie Reynard up because the new partridges were too much for him. Even the badger came today. He ate all the raisins.’
Linnet looked round, all alive with fun. ‘The partridges are sweet,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a pocket full of field-mice, too. Look!’
She put her hand into the pocket of her silk apron and brought out a bright-eyed handful. One of them she put on the ground. It ran towards Tolly, so he picked it up and tied it in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket.
‘I think I’ll keep that one and tame it,’ he said. They all laughed.
‘Yes, keep it and tame it,’ echoed Linnet, laughing like a little mad thing.
Her laughter was drowned in a rushing sound almost like a passing aeroplane, but it was only the arrival of the starlings. They descended in a gabbling cloud, blotting out everything else for a moment, and when they had alighted, the ground was carpeted with their waddling shiny figures, pecking at top speed to right and left among the crumbs of the feast. They had the place to themselves.
Tolly had gained a new confidence, perhaps because he was wearing Toby’s coat. He no longer feared that the children would disappear and leave him, and perhaps never come back. He felt that they were like brothers and sisters who come and go, but there is no need for worry: they are sure to come home again. He remembered with remorse that he had not yet wished his great-grandmother a happy Christmas. She was preparing breakfast and smiled when she saw him.
‘Good morning, Barefeet. Happy Christmas!’ she said. ‘Do you like your toes blue with cold?’
‘Do you know who I am this time?’
‘Why, Toby, of course! That means you will want two eggs for breakfast. Dear me, that coat is getting shabby. It is worse than shabby – it is coming to pieces like tissue paper.’
‘I’ll take it off carefully and fold it up and put it in a drawer by itself,’ said Tolly.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ she called after him, ‘Percy Boggis always comes for Christmas Day. He’ll be here for breakfast. He’s a nice boy.’
When Tolly came back he was properly dressed and carried a very small parcel in his hand.
‘It’s for you,’ he said, ‘for when you used to play with the doll’s house. It’s ALIVE.’
‘What good ideas you have!’ she said as she unwrapped the tiny rose tree. ‘I always wished so much that there could be such a thing. I never guessed I should ever really have one.’
‘It’s alive,’ he said again. ‘It will have leaves no bigger than bird-seed, and flowers like tiny wild strawberries. It will make a doll’s-house room smell of roses.’
‘Thank you very much for a perfect present. I will water it with my fountain pen filler, and put a salt-spoonful of compost on it in the spring. As for my present to you, you must Wait and See. I think I hear Percy.’
She went out into the hall to meet him, where there was some whispering before she brought him in.
He was a tough little boy with a shining, apple-cheeked face and hardy blue eyes. When Tolly shyly said ‘Hullo’, he made no reply, but stared around him like a lion. Mrs Oldknow made them sit down and gave them two eggs each.
‘I expect you’ve both been awake since dawn,’ she said. ‘How did the breakfast party go off under the tree, Tolly?’
‘I think everything is eaten up and everybody came. Hedge-prickles squeaked and grunted when he ate the truffles. He liked them very much. The peacock was quite nice to the partridges, like Miss Spudd with new boys. I brought one of the mice to tame. It’s here in my pocket. I’ll show you.’
He felt in his pocket while the other two watched him, but all he could find was his handkerchief with something hard in it. He brought it out to see what it could be and put it on the table. It was his own ebony mouse. Percy gave a loud country guffaw, and Tolly felt as if he had unwillingly done a conjuring trick. After a minute he began to laugh too, and so did Mrs Oldknow.
‘It won’t be hard to tame,’ said Percy, and that was his only remark during the meal. He ate a great deal and looked quite at home.
Tolly sat, as usual, opposite the family portrait. He looked from the children to Percy and from Percy to the children again. Percy was so real. You couldn’t imagine him vanishing. Tolly felt sure Linnet would have liked him. There ought, he thought, to have been a Boggis somewhere in the picture, if only in the garden that you can see through the window at the back. Or perhaps he was standing beside the painter, watching how he did it, and it was someone like Percy that Linnet was really laughing at, and with; not the artist at all.
Breakfast was over. Tolly’s eyes, still smiling from what he imagined in the picture, came down and met Percy Boggis’s bold blue gaze, and was answered with a wide grin.
‘I went to the circus,’ said Percy briefly, as he left the table. ‘They did this.’
He did two back-hand springs in quick succession and stood up panting and flushed, and hiccoughed. ‘
Too soon after breakfast,’ he said, and did two forward ones, remaining on the same square of carpet. Tolly stood lost in wonder and ambition to do the same.
‘Bravo, Percy!’ said Mrs Oldknow. ‘I see how you and Tolly are going to spend the day. But wait a moment. We have something to do first. You know what.’
‘Aw, aye,’ said Percy, disappearing from the room without more explanation.
‘Tolly, shut your eyes and hold out both your arms. Come in, Percy. You can give it to him.’
Tolly stood there with his eyes shut, remembering the soft nose in the stables and the bump of the apple against his thigh, when suddenly his waiting arms were weighed down by a bundle of electrical activity so twisting and squirming that it was all he could do to hold it.
‘It’s Orlando!’ he called out, opening his eyes. ‘It’s a real Orlando! Is he mine?’
‘He’s yours from now on.’ Orlando was tugging at Tolly’s sleeve, showing a great deal of white of eye. Tolly could not so much as speak to anyone else without getting his fingers nipped with pin teeth to recall his wandering attention. Puppy barks in a voice not yet broken made all conversation impossible. The two boys and Orlando let off all their surplus energy for half an hour. Then Percy said, ‘In the circus they made them jump through hoops.’
‘I know where there’s a hoop,’ said Tolly, ‘hanging on a nail in Boggis’s wood loft.’
‘My old hoop!’ said Mrs Oldknow. ‘Tolly, your eyes really do see everything. Go off both of you and get it.’
Percy went down the garden in a series of cartwheels. Tolly was learning too, but Orlando was always barking either at his hands or his feet; and if he fell, the penalty was to be nibbled alive with pin teeth down the back of his neck and under his chin, or worst of all, on the bare back of his knees.
There is no need to describe the rest of Christmas Day – the turkey stuffed with chestnuts, the plum pudding that Tolly lit and Percy carried to the table in a circle of forget-me-not blue flames; the crystallized fruits, the crackers after tea, from which Mrs Oldknow drew a white paper bonnet that made her look more like the grandmother in the picture than ever. Tolly and Percy were luckier; their crackers dropped tiny metal aeroplanes and Snakes’ Eggs.
Orlando shared everything. He even pulled a cracker with Tolly. Out of it he got a rolled-up paper tongue that, when Tolly blew, shot out suddenly to a stiff arm’s length and flipped him on the nose, always slipping back into its roll before he could bite it.
When at last Mrs Oldknow came up to say good night, Tolly and Orlando were quite worn out. Orlando, curled up on the bed, would not open an eye however much Tolly nudged him. Tolly’s eyes wandered sleepily over his room, acknowledging all his treasures, and their shadows that he loved perhaps almost more.
‘Must I go to school next term?’ he asked.
Mrs Oldknow kissed him good night.
‘I can’t waste your singing on Miss Spudd any more,’ she said. ‘You are going to the choir school at Greatchurch. I think they may let you sing in the choir. How Alexander would have envied you! And of course all your holidays will be here.
‘And your father has written that he wants you to learn to ride.’
The River at
Green Knowe
‘WHEN DO THE CHILDREN COME?’ asked Dr Maud Biggin without looking up, as she licked her thumb and flicked over the pages of one of the many books open before her. The room was full of tables, collected from all over the house, and every table was piled with books, stores, photographs and boxes, which spread and spilled over on to the floor. Dr Maud was a short-sighted woman who never straightened her back, but moved about at the right height for consulting other books wherever she had laid them. If not reading, her attention was on the ground as if expecting that something very interesting might catch her eye there. She had spent much of her life digging up old cities and graves in deserts and shaly hillsides, and had got into the habit of searching the ground for fragments. She could not bear a vacuum cleaner because it left her nothing to look at. Her shambling way of walking made her look rather like a monkey, and if a chimpanzee were let loose in a shop to choose its own clothes it would choose much the same as she was wearing. When she needed more books, she brought out a little motorcycle with a large basket on the carrier and set out for the library. And very funny she looked in her crash helmet.
‘Ah! The dear children!’ replied her old friend Miss Sybilla Bun. ‘They arrive at tea-time. I have made a three-tiered strawberry cream sponge for them. I hope they have healthy appetites. I am looking forward to seeing them eat.’ Miss Sybilla’s only remaining passion in life was food. She liked a lot of people to cook for, because that meant she could be ordering and cooking and seeing around her much more food, heaps of food. She loved to see it going into mouths. In that respect the children were likely to have a wonderful time if their digestions were good enough. Sybilla Bun, needless to say was very plump. She was not unlike a hen in many ways, especially on the rare occasions when she ran, for instance after the bus. She chortled over her food and sometimes bowed gravely to it several times, looking at it first with one eye and then with the other before she ate. Her clothes were all fuss and flummery, weighted down with mixed necklaces of every kind from golden sovereigns on a gipsy chain to ivory and ebony rosaries and even melon seeds dipped in silver paint.
These two ladies had rented for the summer a house called Green Knowe in the country beside a broad, slow-flowing river. Maud Biggin had chosen this remote and ancient place because she was writing a book. (She was one of a group of scientists who believed there had been prehistoric giant men as well as giant animals.) When she had settled in at Green Knowe and had taken in its Grimm’s fairy-tale quality and felt how much room there was to spare, she threw off one of her ideas. She often launched an airy plan into action and then returned to her books and left the plan to work itself out as best it could. ‘We will send to the S.P.S.H.D.C. for some children,’ she said.
‘The what, my dear?’
‘The Society for the Promotion of Summer Holidays for Displaced Children. We will have two sent, and I will invite my great-niece Ida to take them off our hands.’
‘What if they can’t speak English? I know you can speak German, Spanish, Russian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and the most important words in a dozen more languages, but Ida can’t. And I can’t ask them if they like grilled kidneys in Hebrew.’
‘Don’t fuss. I want to get on with my writing. I’ll say they must speak English.’
‘But my dear Maud – is it wise? What are they going to do? Because after all there’s always spare time in between meals. We’ve no toys, no playroom. What will they play?’
‘You can’t stop children playing. They’ll play all right. There’s the river, isn’t there? And a house you can hardly believe in when you see it. What more can a child want? Just turn them out. So long as they don’t interfere with the Ogru.’ (This referred to Dr Biggin’s book, which was to be called A Reconstruction of the Habits and Diet of the Ogru. A summary of recent discoveries.)
‘But will it be safe?’ Miss Bun persisted. ‘Supposing they can’t swim?’
Maud Biggin tossed across the letter she had just typed.
‘For heaven’s sake! How you fuss! Put a PS. that they must be able to swim. And now please let me get on with my work.’
Miss Bun took the typewritten note and added in her fat round writing – ‘PS. It’s imperative that the children shall be able to swim. The river here is very dangerous.’
The Society had replied that they would be happy to send two children.
*
‘AH, HERE’S THE TAXI! Here they are!’ cried Sybilla Bun.
‘And ready for their tea I hope. Come in, children, come in.’
They stood shyly in a row. Ida was eleven, trim, grey-eyed and reliant, but so small her age was almost unbelievable. Next to her stood Oskar, also eleven, leggy and head in air with an obstinate thrust in his lips and chin. He clicked h
is heels together and introduced himself.
‘Oskar Stanislawsky.’
Lastly there was a slim nine-year-old with an Asiatic face.
‘What’s your name, dear boy?’ Miss Sybilla bent down to bring her nose level with his, so that her beads fell forward and the melon seeds hung like a skipping rope between them.
The boy gave a gurgling sigh.
‘Come, tell Auntie Sybilla your name, love.’
He replied with exactly the same sound.
‘Doesn’t he speak English?’ Miss Sybilla asked Ida. ‘We said they were all to speak English. What is his name?’
Ida, though so small, was clearly the head of the group and had established her position on the journey.
‘That is his name, that he said. It is spelt HSU and it can’t be said in English. So we shall call him Ping. He speaks English very well, only he hardly ever speaks.’
Ping had black velvety eyes and a delicious smile.
‘I thank you for your very kind invitation,’ he said softly, with a little bow over his folded hands.
Maud Biggin coming to the door of her study, looked out.
‘How d’y’ do, Midget,’ she said. ‘You don’t grow much.’
Ida came forward and after a moment’s hesitation, because her great-aunt’s bent position brought her cheek within range, gave her a dutiful kiss.
‘I’m not a kissy person,’ said Dr Biggin, ‘but I’m glad to see you. Hullo boys. I hope you won’t be any trouble. Enjoy yourselves. Be off now with Miss Bun. I’m busy.’ She firmly closed the study door between them.
‘Come children with Auntie Sybilla and see your room.’
As they wound their way upstairs after her the children were wide-eyed with surprise. ‘Is it a Buddhist monastery?’ asked Ping. ‘It could just as well be a Crusader’s castle,’ said Oskar.
The Children of Green Knowe Collection Page 12
