The Changeling

by Robin Jenkins

‘Robert the Bruce once visited Towellan Castle,’ he panted. ‘He must have walked through this wood.’

  Gillian had been told that several times before. Now she preferred to gaze at Tom Curdie with clinical intentness. He was seated on a green mossy lump, staring through the lilac-coloured branches and green needles towards Arran. Such earnestness could only be explained as a deliberate deception; behind it he must as usual be laughing at them. But what the purpose of that laughter could be she just couldn’t make out. It was a consolation that the mossy heap on which he sat was likely full of ants.

  Sure enough, when, with Alistair leaping on ahead, they continued up to the ruin now visible against the blue sky, she saw Tom clutch now at one buttock and now at the other. His face lost some of its inscrutability. He began to look like a boy whom ants were biting in embarrassing places, and who, because of her presence, couldn’t get rid of them.

  Alistair, with a triumphant yell and brandishing an iris leaf, disappeared into the castle.

  ‘I hope, Daddy,’ said Gillian, ‘he’s got the sense not to climb those stairs again.’

  ‘By Jove, yes!’ he cried, and raced for the castle. Last year Alistair had fallen on those broken stairs and gashed his knee. Mary had warned that he be kept away from them.

  Gillian stared at Tom in tight-lipped frustration. Had he been Alistair she would have looked and seen the red bites for herself. That she could not do it with this boy made his strangeness suddenly overwhelming. Yet grudgingly she admired him. Stoicism in the suffering of pain was to her one of the greatest virtues. Her own brother was a cry-baby.

  Then they were hailed from the castle. In an opening in the ivied wall, about fifteen feet up, appeared her father and brother. They must have climbed the forbidden stairs. Gillian frowned.

  ‘Come on, you two,’ roared her father. ‘We’ve captured the castle and put the garrison to rout.’

  Side-by-side they walked through the heather. Gillian was still baffled; not only could she not find words to tell him why she felt so suspicious, but she had also to take care she did not forewarn him in any way. It was a spy’s predicament.

  ‘Ants’ bites,’ she said, ‘aren’t poisonous.’

  Then she raced up the slope and over the broken wall of the castle.

  As soon as she had gone he slipped amidst some high bracken, removed his shorts, and searched them for ants. He found three. He did not kill them but shook them to the ground. Then he put on his shorts again and entered the castle.

  Gillian smiled but said nothing.

  Within the shell of the castle the turf was short and vividly green. It would have been ideal for a picnic had it not been for much sheep dung, and one weathered human excrement in a corner. Clegs were numerous, but so they were everywhere that hot afternoon.

  ‘We’ll bivouac here,’ said Charlie.

  Unobtrusively he dropped a flat stone on top of the faeces, and wished that it had been on the defiler’s head.

  ‘Well, sit down, mates,’ he said. ‘This is a perfect spot for a camp. Do you know what I’ve often thought of doing?’

  ‘What, Pop?’ asked Alistair.

  ‘Bringing a small tent up here and spending the night. A tent wouldn’t be needed; a sleeping-bag would do. Wouldn’t it be grand to lie and watch the stars and listen to the night cries of birds?’

  ‘Mummy wouldn’t allow it,’ said Gillian.

  ‘Would this be a good place for a tent?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Excellent,’ cried Charlie. ‘You couldn’t get better. Shelter from the wind. Turf like a feather bed.’

  ‘Too many clegs,’ grumbled Gillian, slapping one on her wrist.

  ‘They go at sundown.’

  ‘And then the midges come out, and they’re even worse.’

  ‘Gillian,’ cried her father, ‘why so doleful?’

  ‘I’m not doleful,’ she said, scratching her wrist.

  ‘What we need is a song,’ he cried. ‘What will it be?’

  Often he wished to sing when no one else did, but this time the reception of his proposal astonished him. Gillian shrieked and struggled in a frenzy of revulsion to her feet; lemonade dribbled out of her cup. Alistair too was recoiling in fear and disgust. Even Tom Curdie showed horror.

  Then he realised they were not looking at him at all, but at something behind him. He turned and looked. So close to him that he could have stretched out his hand and fondled its head, sat a rabbit; but that head was so monstrous that even a St Francis would have hesitated to stroke it in pity. It was a pinky-purple swollen mass, in which the eyes, bulging hugely, were no longer organs of sight. The creature sat, apparently unaware of its traditional enemies; then it moved blindly forward and collided with Charlie who hadn’t been able to scramble out of its way quickly enough. Dazed, silent, with what seemed a hideous grin of bewilderment forming on that putrescent mess, it paused again, waiting, as Charlie afterwards said, with the same heart-rending patience as Mary Stuart had waited for the axe.

  He had read that these rabbits ought to be put out of their misery, and he had approved. Here was a chance to practise that stern humanitarianism. To kill a rabbit one snatched it up by the ears and struck it smartly at the back of the neck: thus the theory. But here was putrescence, which would defile the hand forever. The other method was atavistic or instinctive; in his panic he adopted it. Seizing a stone, it was the one covering the excrement, he crashed it down on the rabbit.

  Gillian screamed and covered her eyes; but Alistair, usually the more tender-hearted of the two, watched in fascination.

  The stone lay, with the rabbit twitching under it. Mercy demanded another blow. Charlie could not bring himself to deliver it; his hands were twitching too.

  ‘Oh, kill it, please kill it!’ screamed Gillian.

  It was Tom Curdie who came forward, lifted the stone, and bending over the rabbit struck it several times with surgical coolness and accuracy. Only when it lay utterly still did he drop the bloody and messy stone. Nor did he let it drop anyhow. He placed it so that it covered as much of the dead creature as possible. In spite of his care spots of blood were on his hands; he wiped them off with grass.

  They fled. Charlie rammed the things into the rucksack, and escorted Gillian past the stone. Alistair did not have to be escorted; he had to be shouted on to hurry, for more than once he turned to gaze, with marvelling druidical eyes, upon the squashed creature. Tom Curdie, picking up a cup that Charlie had missed, walked after them.

  They halted in the pinewood, no longer delighting in its scented shadows, but dreading to see behind every lilac bark or lichened stone or waving fern another abomination.

  ‘That,’ gasped Charlie, ‘was myxomatosis. God forgive them.’

  Gillian never would. She had stopped weeping, and her red eyes were hard.

  ‘It was like Billy-Bobtail,’ she said.

  Billy-Bobtail had been a toy rabbit which had shared her bed for years. Because of the fluff wearing away, its head had become pinkish and one eye had been lost. She could scarcely look at Tom Curdie, who stood with his back against a tree, waiting calmly. He did not seem at all conscience-stricken, either for killing the rabbit or just for seeing it.

  Charlie comforted his daughter. ‘Yes, it was like Bobtail,’ he said. ‘They have forgotten that the rabbit is the friend of our infancy. We count them from railway trains when we cannot really count at all.’

  ‘Rabbits eat farmers’ crops,’ said Alistair.

  His father looked uneasily at him.

  ‘Miss Cameron said so,’ insisted Alistair. She was his schoolmistress, a white-haired oracle. ‘She said they waste millions of pounds’ worth of food every year.’

  ‘So do we all, by our gluttony,’ muttered his father.

  Alistair ignored that foolish irrelevancy. Stooping, he picked up a stone and hurled it with force. They heard it rattle in the branches of a tree.

  Charlie turned to Tom. ‘I would like to thank you, Tom,’ he said.

  ‘No!’ It
was Gillian who cried that.

  ‘But, Gillian, it was Tom who put it out of its misery. I’m sorry to say I just didn’t have the heart left to do it, though it was necessary. You saw yourself how necessary it was.’

  ‘He liked doing it!’ she yelled.

  Her father was shocked. ‘What a dreadful thing to say!’ he cried.

  ‘He liked it,’ she repeated.

  Her father felt helpless. From her he looked to the slandered boy, and then to Alistair. For an instant the three children became part of the horror; in their eyes were mysteries, remote and cruel.

  ‘Let’s get away from here,’ he said, with a shudder. ‘Let’s go down to the beach.’

  ~

  That evening he went out fishing; in its own way it was an expedition just as ill-fated as that to the castle. Gillian refused to go, although last summer she had been keener than himself. Mary, too, declined, and in addition forbade Alistair because it would be too long after his bed-time when the boat returned. That left Tom Curdie, who was eager, too eager, Charlie thought.

  Only Alistair came down to the beach to help them push off. It was an evening of surpassing stillness and clarity; yet Charlie as he rowed out felt more and more depressed and pessimistic. It seemed to him that Tom’s questions on the subject of fish and fishing were asked not out of boyish interest, but rather out of the changeling’s triumph at having so soon parted the family. Such an impression was of course absurd and unjust, but it kept persisting all that evening, and was encouraged by the almost uncanny absence of fish. In spite of the wealth of bait not one fish was caught.

  As they rowed ashore, pulled the boat up the beach, and made their way to the house, the moon was shining brightly, and an owl was hooting in the wood. They halted outside the back door.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t very successful,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I enjoyed it, sir.’

  Charlie yawned. ‘Is it possible to enjoy fishing, without catching fish?’

  ‘Maybe we’ll be luckier next time.’

  ‘Will there be a next time?’

  ‘I hope so, sir.’

  Suddenly Charlie’s peevishness broke out. ‘You’ve got to give us a chance, Tom. What I mean is, you keep apart from us, you never seem to let us know what you’re thinking.’ He had deliberately used Gillian’s words. ‘What Gillian said today at the castle was nonsense. You didn’t enjoy killing that rabbit, but did you have any pity for it? No, you kept apart even then. And I haven’t heard you laughing yet. You must let your heart thaw, Tom, if we’re going to be able to help you.’

  In the darkness he could not see that the boy was trembling and biting his lips. If it had been daylight and he could have seen those signs of physical distress, he would not have known what caused them.

  Tom knew very well, perhaps better than Forbes himself, what was meant by letting his heart thaw, because it was beginning to thaw, against his wish, threatening his whole carefully built-up system of self-sufficiency. He had, for instance, enjoyed being out in the lonely boat in the dark sea more than anything else in his life; and Forbes, whom he had intended to despise and cheat, he now found himself liking, more than liking, yearning for, so that he could scarcely bear the teacher to be out of his sight. But there was the girl Gillian, who hated him; there was Mrs Forbes, who thought that in some way he was doing harm to her children; and there was Mrs Storrocks, who had been insulted because the coachman had taken him for one of the family.

  All the time, too, he had to remember that he would have to go back to Donaldson’s Court, and if he went back with his heart thawed by too much love for these people, and with his independence therefore destroyed by them, he would become as lost as Peerie or Chick or his brother Alec.

  The long silence discouraged Forbes. He sighed.

  ‘Good-night,’ he said.

  ‘Good-night, sir.’

  Charlie watched the boy walk up the moonlit garden, reach the hut, and enter; then he went into the house, removed his Wellingtons, and crept upstairs. As he opened the door of his bedroom, the owl hooted again, with peculiar intensity; so that when Mary, whom he thought was asleep, spoke from the bed in the moonlight, he was confused: it was as if her voice was a continuation of the eerie bird’s.

  ‘Do you think this is a sensible time for a boy of twelve to get to bed?’

  ‘He’s thirteen.’

  ‘Don’t quibble.’

  He was about to start undressing when he remembered he hadn’t washed his hands, which smelled of spoutfish. Tom too had gone to bed without washing.

  ‘Did you have a good catch?’ Her voice was softer; but somehow he resented the effort needed to produce that softness.

  ‘No, we didn’t. We caught nothing.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Not a fin.’

  He thought she chuckled, but when she spoke again he knew he must have been mistaken.

  ‘I couldn’t get to sleep, Charlie, because there’s something worrying me.’

  ‘Can it wait till I go and wash my hands?’

  From her silence he knew the question was taken as an impertinence; perhaps he had meant it as such.

  ‘They’re stinking of bait,’ he said.

  ‘I can smell them.’

  ‘I’ll have to go and wash them.’

  ‘All right, go and wash them.’

  ‘I’ll not be long.’

  In spite of that promise he lingered, washing hands and face, brushing teeth, and using the W.C. But she was still waiting when he returned. Perhaps because the moon had moved in the sky he now saw her face gleaming from the bed; it was smeared with cream to soothe sunburn.

  He undressed by the window, gazing out at the moonlit wood. How happy on such a night must owls and badgers be! The moon would be shining on Goat Fell, in Arran, in the midst of the moonlit sea.

  ‘You know fine what’s worrying me,’ said Mary. ‘It’s this boy Curdie.’

  ‘He’s only been here one day, Mary; or one and a half, if we count yesterday.’

  ‘I don’t want you to go into a huff, Charlie. If we don’t get this settled, our holiday’s going to be spoiled.’

  ‘Get what settled?’

  ‘It’s the way he makes up to you all the time, Charlie.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed it.’

  ‘Well, the rest of us have. I understand your position, Charlie, and his too, for that matter; but I won’t have our own children being made to feel out of it.’

  ‘Have they complained?’

  ‘Not yet. Alistair hasn’t noticed it yet.’

  ‘And Gillian?’

  ‘You know how proud she is. She wouldn’t complain even if her heart was breaking.’

  ‘So we’ve got to breaking hearts? You should have heard her today, accusing that boy of actually liking what he had to do to the rabbit.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more about that. She’s jealous, that’s all; you should see it for yourself. She thinks—and perhaps she’s not far wrong—that he’s trying to steal your affection.’

  ‘Is affection like money in a bank?’

  She was silent.

  ‘Do you want him sent home?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said quietly. ‘He’s done nothing to deserve that, so far.’

  ‘You’re sure he will, though, if not tomorrow, then the next day? Do you hope he will?’

  ‘I think we’d all be happier if he wasn’t here,’ she said, her voice shaking with restrained anger. ‘But if you think I’m praying for a chance to be able to send him home, then, Charlie, you must think a lot of your wife.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ he muttered. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  She gave up the advantage. ‘I just want you to remember that Alistair and Gillian are your own children. You want this holiday to do Tom good; just make sure it doesn’t harm them.’

  He tried to laugh. ‘Who did I play at Roundheads and Cavaliers with? Alistair. Who helped me to put up the swin
g? Alistair. Whom did I look for crabs with? Alistair. Whom did I go swimming with this morning? Gillian. Who got the extra lemonade? Gillian. If Tom Curdie was with me this evening it was simply because no one else would go with me.’

  She sighed. ‘Oh, all right. Let’s hope things will sort themselves out, if we’re patient and sensible. In the meantime we’d better get some sleep.’

  ‘We’re going into Dunroth tomorrow, aren’t we?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I suggest we leave Tom Curdie behind.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To make absolutely sure he does not monopolise my attention.’

  ‘Good-night, Charlie.’ She turned her face to the wall.

  He stood on his bare feet, thwarted. Thus could pride so easily raise a barrier between those who loved each other dearly; and the effort to remove it exhausted love itself.

  Sighing, he climbed into bed. That sigh and many others were unheeded. But at last he fell asleep, and dreamed that while fishing in a boat with the whole family beside him, all strangely still and dumb like corpses, he pulled up his line and found hooked to it the rabbit that had been killed at the castle.

  Chapter Ten

  On the bus that took them into Dunroth there were no seats and little standing room. The conductor allowed them on out of compassion; as a result, when Mrs Storrocks loudly hinted that he was a member of a conspiracy to drive holidaymakers forever from the district, he was sadly displeased and seemed to blame Charlie, who paid the fares.

  The bus itself, ill-tempered and decrepit, rattled and staggered and swayed along the sea road.

  Charlie, resented because of his stoutness, had to be careful how he moved. Yet he could not bear just to stand still and pass the time staring at all the hot, peeved faces; he had to risk resentment, cramp, and crick, in order to stoop and gaze out at the scenery.

  In the classroom in Glasgow, mooning out at the tramcars as they lumbered along the street, he had remembered this travelling by bus from Towellan into Dunroth as a kind of lyrical journey: joyous fellow passengers, singing wheels, enchanting scenery; that had been the purged recollection, the sustaining vision. Was this swaty, jammed, cross, bumping purgatory the honest reality? And not even Mary or Gillian could blame Tom Curdie. Of all the sufferers in the bus the boy was the most patient, the least complaining.