The Changeover

by Margaret Mahy

  "The army came closer," Miryam chimed in, taking over, rather than interrupting. "Suddenly we no longer needed to climb the hill to see it. When we went out of our gate on what was then a country road we could see it coming towards us. That was already years ago..."

  "Twenty years ago perhaps," Winter put in.

  "I was very young and opinionated in those days," Miryam said, smiling back at a past self. "I thought the world began and ended at the farm gate and was quite prepared to mistrust everything beyond it. On rainy nights the city's lights began to take over the entire sky. My mother and I thought that we would try anything to save our valley and we decided ..." She glanced at her mother.

  "We decided to raise what we call a cone of power over the farm," Winter said calmly. "We would still be visible, but somehow not observable. The city would know we were there but would pass us by. However, such a condition is hard to create and even harder to maintain. We needed a third witch."

  Miryam leaned forward almost pleadingly.

  "We work best as a trio, you see," she explained, "as the three female aspects."

  "I was the old woman," Winter said.

  "And I was to be the mother and my daughter the maiden." Miryam sat back again. "I thought that if I had a child it would certainly be a daughter. We have had daughters for fifty years — never a son in all that time. All the time I expected my baby, I spoke to it as if it were a daughter— promising her the valley— but as you know, I had a son."

  "Sorry!" said Laura. "I mean Sorensen."

  "It's an old family name," Winter said. "Even though we didn't expect him to be one of the family, we still gave him a name that tied him in with us. I suspected, when I realized Miryam could not exchange dreams with her unborn child. She had a difficult time having him. We were told he would be her only child and — to be frank — when he was born neither of us wanted him."

  "Wouldn't he have done to be the maiden?" Laura asked with a faint grin. "He is a sort of witch, isn't he?"

  An expression of bafflement crossed Winter's face. A little storm of anger passed through her at the perversity of past events.

  "We didn't realize what he was until a long time after," she said. "Perhaps the signs develop later in men or perhaps ... anyhow we didn't realize. However, it was not just one mistake, but a combination of two. We underestimated Sorensen, and we overestimated ourselves."

  Now they were suddenly both silent. Laura, filled with her own anxieties, bewildered by their eager confidences, knew they had come to the heart of their story, and having come there they now hesitated and looked at each other.

  "I'll tell.. ." said Miryam with a sigh. "In the end it was my decision."

  "My dear ..." Winter turned to her and spoke gently. "In the beginning it was mine."

  "Laura," Miryam said, "I am not a motherly woman and, when I thought of my son, I felt quite trapped. The thought of watching him grow up, so close and yet so much a necessary stranger (as I thought then) unable to help me protect my home from the army— from the city, that is— marching towards us, swallowing market gardens as it came... well, I could not bear it. I decided to have Sorensen adopted. Yet I'd no sooner decided this than I realized that I didn't want to lose sight of him, either. I don't want to try and conceal just how self-centred I was... I didn't want to look after him, but I still wanted to have news of him, even some control over what happened to him. I know it was self-centred... Well, as it turned out perhaps it was lucky that I was well enough off to have the best of both worlds."

  "We found a foster home for the baby," Winter said. "It was almost like a story-book home ... a wonderful, motherly mother, all the cake tins filled with home baking, kind father, such a dependable man, and four brothers ... the sort of family that goes to church on Sunday morning, and then off for a picnic in the family car on Sunday afternoon. They liked children— didn't want to have any more of their own— and had decided to foster a child."

  "I did make certain conditions," Miryam said, "and to this day I'm not sure if I did wisely or if I was stupid. If things turned out well it was certainly for different reasons than I thought at first. You see art and learning have always seemed to me to be some of the most powerful consolations the world has to offer us ..." She broke off and said smiling, "You're too young to know what I'm talking about. What I mean is I did tell Sorensen's family what school I wanted him to go to and ask them to encourage him to read and listen to music ... I also promised I'd never get in touch with him directly ..."

  "You could have done things quite differently and it still would have made no difference," Winter said. "He was a witch at heart, and all other differences are nothing to that one."

  "We followed his progress from a distance," Miryam continued. "Everything always seemed to be going well. Every day for a while I wondered if I had been fair — but there was no way I could ever have been fair — and after a while I forgot to be concerned. The city came. My father died, my uncles forced us to sell the farm (though we kept the house and its closest gardens) and then one morning, three years ago, I walked into the courtyard and found Sorensen sitting there. He looked so like my father that I knew him at once, though he was in a dreadful condition, filthy, dirty, exhausted, injured, quite unable to speak. He couldn't even tell me his name. And then for the first time I realized that this shattered boy— he was fifteen then— was all I had planned in the first place: a true child of power." She shook her head, less at Laura than at Winter, sharing a memory that could not be described.

  "How did he know where to come?" asked Laura. "If you'd never written to him or anything."

  "It seems that, without any of us realizing it, he was still tied to us," Miryam said, "and when he needed a place to run to, he ran to Janua Caeli as a spider might retreat along an invisible strand of its web. When he needed to find people of his own kind he had the power to find them. In the circumstances we had to be glad, but we were rather frightened too, to think there was no way we could hide from him."

  "We struggled to save him," Winter continued, "oh, not his life — he was in no danger of dying — but," — she looked at Miryam doubtfully — "his humanity, I suppose. We realized the danger we were in. You see, Laura — you can probably imagine — a witch without humanity is a black witch nine times out of ten. We took him to doctors, we patched him together. He imitates normal life very well now, when he has to, but no wonder he talked about your little brother as if he were a broken car. Sorensen is very much a broken- down car himself, and none of us can tell how badly broken. He doesn't appear to feel very deeply, though he can seem quite clever."

  "Smart!" said Laura. "Smart, and sort of tricky!"

  She could not help being distracted by this story, though her deepest thoughts were always of Jacko. "What went wrong with his other family?"

  "Too many things to tell you now," Miryam said. "I've tried to let you see the judgements we made. But now I suppose we're paying the price because we've grown very fond of Sorensen and, having made such mistakes in the past, we don't feel very confident. We can't tell much of what he really thinks or feels — perhaps he doesn't know himself. We work by guesses a lot of the time." She looked at Laura very directly but her voice grew quite shy. "We felt very pleased when he began to talk about you because it seemed to us... we both thought ... We both thought that simply by recognizing him you had set some machinery free, that he had begun to move towards..." She hesitated and seemed to wait for Laura to finish the sentence, but Laura was silent.

  "But of course," Winter seemed to be starting a different topic, "it might have' its dangers from your point of view. We can't promise he's safe company."

  Laura looked at them uncertainly. Inside her clothes was the body that still surprised her, not yet completely herself, its powers of attraction, great or small, largely unknown. It was because she was a girl that they thought Sorry might be dangerous to her. However, she knew she must not give in to fear.

  "I'm all right!" she said indignantly. "O
r I will be when Jacko gets well again."

  Old Winter stirred, and then said briskly, "I'll talk to you about that after dinner. I'd better move my bones and get it served. It won't take long. Perhaps you can go and call Sorensen from his study and tell him dinner will be in about ten minutes. Remind him to wash his hands."

  Laura was learning the geography and landmarks of this house — the carved chest just outside the arched doorway of the big room, the table with its slender legs and its top inlaid with ivory leaves and the telephone set in the middle of it. Laura passed it, willing it to ring and for the caller to be Kate saying, "I'm coming round to pick you up immediately," but the 'phone was unobliging. She walked to the door of Sorry's study and knocked, but there was no reply. She knocked again and, after a moment, boldly turned the handle.

  The door opened as silently as the door in a dream and she went, like beautiful Fatima, into Bluebeard's chamber. Of course, there were no previous wives hanging by their hair, stabbed to the heart, cut throats smiling with terrible knowledge, only seventh form homework spread across the floor and desk. Laura looked at the math with the interest of someone seeing something written in a language they are beginning to learn themselves, and lifted her eyes to the backs of the row of romantic novels along the bottom of the book case. There, no doubt, she would find For the Love of Philippa and Stolen Moments. Behind the door, Laura now saw many photographs of birds and a shelf holding Sorry's camera and square bottles labelled Developer and Fixer. Laura had seen most of them before at the Science Fair and turned to look at other pictures. In a heavy frame, as though through a window, a painted man watched her. His face was shadowed by enormous wings rising high above his shoulders, but his forehead sprouted leaves and, from among the leaves, either horns or branches. Beside him, the photographed woman, naked, and smooth as satin, reclined, smiling at Laura just as she smiled at Sorry, but the glance meant something different. To Laura it was the Smile of a sister, not a siren. Pinned to the corner of the poster over the woman's head was the small photograph she had observed with curiosity nearly twenty- four hours earlier. The skeleton looked at her, smiling anxiously, but she refused to meet its gaze and walked instead to the foot of the couch, stepping in between islands of homework to study the photograph. She was staring at herself — made grainy with enlargement — as if a detail had been selected from the background of some other photograph and blown up beyond the capacity of the image to hold a clear outline. Yet there she was, caught in a moment of recent, but past, time, half turning, speaking to someone, perhaps Nicky, who was out of the picture, her knees showing guiltily under the school uniform. Laura, looking from her own picture to that of the naked goddess extending herself langorously to the left, sighed and shook her head.

  Frowning, she turned to find Sorry standing in the doorway watching her narrowly, his cat coiling around his ankles. He did not look so very different from one of his own pictures, and, once again, just as she had when she saw him in this room for the first time, he looked more than himself, a wild man framed in the heavy architraves of the door, the telephone dimly visible in the hall beyond him.

  "If you had read Wendy's Wayward Heart," he said, "you would recognize my expression. I'm trying to look rueful at being caught out in an act of sentimentality."

  Laura said nothing.

  "How am I doing?" he asked.

  "I don't think you look sentimental," she said, nor did she think that pinning her photograph to the poster was a sentimental thing to have done. He immediately moved close to her so that he was standing almost over her, and though he was not much taller than she was, she was caught between the wall and the couch and could not step past him. He looked at the photograph over her head.

  "It's not very clear is it?" he said. "I was pretending to photograph the school library. You wouldn't stand still."

  "You could have asked me," she replied. "I don't mind being photographed."

  "I was too shy," he said, and Laura could not tell if it was at himself or at the idea of shyness to which he directed his black smile. Laura did stand still. She remained as still as the heroine of a jungle movie who, waking to find a serpent coiled on her breast and unable to move in case it bites her, lies breathing slowly and watching light rippling over its wonderfully coloured scales. At that moment Sorry seemed brilliant, his own breathing uneven, his eyes almost luminous.

  Something is going to happen, Laura thought. She was going to be kissed. On one side of a kiss was childhood, sunshine, innocence, toys and, on the other, people embracing, darkness, passion and the admittance of a person who, no matter how loved, must always have the quality of otherness, not only to her confidence, but somehow inside her sealing skin.

  However, Sorry did not kiss her, but put his left hand on her breast without once taking his eyes from her face or ceasing to smile at her. Laura felt her own expression become incredulous. Nevertheless, his touch was real, and immediately changed Sorry, whose air of menace had given him only a moment earlier a sort of impervious glitter, for his face softened somehow, became a little unfocused as if he were more disturbed by it than she was.

  "Don't!" she said, inspired. "Remember, you've got to be invited."

  "W-well invite m-me then," he demanded, beginning to stammer, but as his voice lost confidence his half-threatened embrace became more intrusive. At that moment the 'phone rang, and she felt Sorry, leaning against her, catch his breath in surprise and, perhaps, relief.

  "Saved by the bell, Chant," he remarked.

  "I wouldn't have invited you," she called after him as he went to answer the 'phone. "You were saved as much as I was."

  "I was planning to be very nice to you. You might have enjoyed it," he replied. He answered the 'phone and then turned, holding it out to her. "It's your mother," he said. "Isn't that wonderful! She might have known you were in difficulties."

  "Not real difficulties," Laura said, seizing the 'phone.

  "It was touch and go," Sorry said. "And this is me going."

  He left her alone with Kate's voice coming from another world. Laura thought she could smell the hospital over the 'phone.

  "How are you, Lolly?" Kate asked.

  "Fine!" said Laura. "They're being terribly kind to me. Everything's fine. How's Jacko?"

  "No one knows yet," Kate said after a pause. Her voice was careful, but Laura could hear desolation eating its way through her words. "No one knows yet," she repeated. "Tell me truly — do you think the Carlisles mind having you?"

  "I don't think so." Laura had to speak truly. "But I mind. I hate being away from you and Jacko."

  "I hate it too," Kate said, "but there's nothing you can do here except j ust sit around with Chris and me."

  "What's he doing there?" Laura's voice sharpened with jealousy. "Why is he there and not me?" Kate was silent. "Mum?" Laura cried.

  "I don't know," Kate answered at last. "I just don't know. I didn't plan it that way. It's just happened out of the blue. I don't know why you're where you are either. Everything happened so fast... an offer was made... it was convenient at the time and I just grabbed at it. I've wondered about that too, sitting here by Jacko's bed. Laura, I'm staying with Jacko tonight. I can't bear the thought of going home to an empty house."

  "I could come home, of course," Laura cried. "I'm not a prisoner. We could be together."

  "I wouldn't sleep," said Kate. "I might as well be here."

  "I'd sit up with you," Laura promised, but Kate had made up her mind. She had made up her mind about something else, too.

  "Laura, I think I'd better get in touch with your father," she said. "I think Jacko's so ill that he'd better be told."

  To her dismay, Laura felt herself going rigid with a pain so old that it seemed unfair she should still suffer from it. She thought she was over mourning her vanished father and was furious to find she still suffered, and while she stood, momentarily struggling with this remembered anguish, Sorry came into the hall again, pointing through the arch, perhaps sug
gesting dinner was ready.

  "It might cheer him up to know there's a chance he won't have to pay so much maintenance in the future," Laura said at last, in a hard voice.

  "Don't be like that, Lolly!" Kate pleaded. "It's too serious a time to give in to thoughts like that. Part of what we like in Jacko is your father. The same with you. I mean, he's got a share in you. And he was so very fond of you. He never really got to know Jacko."

  "All right!" Laura said. "Do what you think best."

  "It has to be what I think best," said her mother. "I'll ring you first thing in the morning and tell you if there has been any change. And Laura — I know I'm more incoherent than usual, but I do love you and I am thinking of you. Don't forget!"

  "Me too!" Laura cried. "Give my love to Jacko."

  "Things no good out in the world?" Sorry asked as she put the receiver down.

  "Not very!" Laura said. "I hope it's all right if I do stay tonight. I've forgotten to pack a clean shirt but maybe I could get one tomorrow morning."

  "You can see that Winter and Miryam are delighted to have you," Sorry answered courteously. "And I've proved my enthusiasm, haven't I? The perfect host, I'd say."

  "You're different out of your room," Laura commented, hoping she sounded more casual than she felt.

  "Well, maybe!" Sorry replied restlessly. "I'm very powerful and sexy in there, but the further away I go from my room the meeker I become. At school I hardly exist. Are you hungry?"

  Rather to her surprise, Laura found she was starving. They came into a room where a big window looked out on a vine-covered verandah, though now, as evening deepened outside, the vines looked like ghostly serpents, less real than the reflection of the table and the four people around it.

  It was a proper dinner, with thin, clear soup, a salad, and a chicken casserole, and even pudding. Laura felt quite weak with delight at the sight of food, though it seemed heartless to be eating while Jacko was so sick and Kate so worried.