by Penni Russon
Undine was looking at him again. She took his fingers in her hand, and this time he didn’t pull away from her. The warmth of her fingers seeped right through him, turning his bones to liquid.
“Undine,” he began, and then stopped, because the very second he started he knew how ridiculous the words would sound. And once they had been committed to air, they would live forever in the space between them, eventually forming something terrible and insurmountable, and their friendship would be lost to it.
Undine smiled gratefully, because he had stopped. “You know I love you,” she said, apologetically.
Trout smiled weakly. Because it wasn’t enough, and they both knew it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Inside, Jasper had discovered Caliban, much to the little boy’s delight and the bird’s disgust.
“Budgie!” Jasper said gleefully.
If birds had eyebrows, Caliban would have raised his.
“You’re not exposing my child to that inside-out feather cushion are you?” Lou called. Caliban shrieked.
“Get plucked, birdbrain,” said Trout, and Jasper squealed with laughter.
Undine looked up to see that Grunt was watching her. She had avoided being alone with him all afternoon, her feelings conflicted. They stood for a moment, considering each other. Undine went outside to catch her breath.
She was worried about what Prospero had said, about men finding the magic inside her attractive. She didn’t want to trick Grunt as she had Richard—poor, hopeless, two-timing Richard—into falling in love with her. She imagined him hypnotized, like a cartoon on TV, a zombie with his arms outstretched.
Though Grunt had seemed immune to it. Perhaps somewhere inside him he even despised her a little. From the look of disgust on his face when he’d driven away, she’d been sure that he hated her. But he’d come back. Did he like her? She just couldn’t tell.
Trout was the only one she could be sure of—she knew his feelings for her were more than just the zing of the magic. She sighed. The irony was that she didn’t want Trout.
She sat down on the veranda step. Perhaps she wasn’t ready for love. And yet it had started now. First Richard, now Grunt. There was no putting it away for later. She wondered if Lou had ever felt this way about Prospero.
Something caught her eye, distracting her from her train of thought. Underneath the boards of the veranda there was a barely perceptible movement. Undine peered between the slats.
It was the cat of the other day, but she was no longer pregnant. Instead, heaped together so one could barely be told from another, were three—no, four—kittens. They were odd-looking things, not at all catty yet, but long and seal-like, with tiny ears pressed flat against their heads.
She went inside to get Jasper, to show him the kittens, but found Prospero lurking unhappily in the hallway, and brought him outside instead.
“Look,” she said, pointing. “Kittens.”
“Humph.”
“Whose cat is this anyway?” Undine asked him.
“Nobody’s cat. A stray. I’ve seen her before.”
“Well, she’s your cat now,” Undine stated firmly. “She’s chosen you. And you have four new kittens.”
Prospero mumbled something about being more of a dog person.
“Piffle,” Undine dismissed him. “It will do you good to have some helpless things to love. And everyone loves kittens. Who couldn’t?”
Prospero said gruffly, “There are too many people in the house. I’m taking Ariel for a walk.”
Undine said, “I’ll come with you.”
Prospero did not argue, but called Ariel and set off down the path, Undine beside him.
She thought she might actually learn to love Prospero. It was like some tired, aching muscle deep inside her: it needed exercising, but it was there, it had made itself known to her now.
As they walked down the path, Undine asked, “Do you really mind them all being here? You seemed to…I don’t know. Enjoy my company. I thought you liked having me around.”
“Everything’s changing,” Prospero complained. “It’s all different. For years this place barely existed.”
“And you. You barely existed with it.”
“Barely.”
“Is that why you never tried to see me?”
Prospero smiled. “I knew you would come. You’ve been the thing that has kept me alive. Kept me existing.”
“Yes, but in Normal Land people ring on the phone. It might have been nice to have a father.”
Prospero shrugged. “You didn’t miss me.”
“I missed you. I just didn’t know what I was missing.”
“What did I have to offer? I’m no good at families.”
“I could have decided that. Besides,” Undine went on shyly, “I think you have been good at it these past few days. There were times when you shone.”
“Really?”
Undine nodded.
Despite himself, Prospero looked pleased.
“So,” Undine went on, “then it’s a good thing? You know, that I didn’t destroy us both and obliterate the universe?”
“I wanted to be young again. Strong and powerful. I wanted to feel the magic pouring through me.”
“But it was so wrong,” Undine said. “Don’t you see? I want to grow up. I want to get old. I want to watch Jasper grow up. I want to fall in love. Get married maybe. Have a baby one day. Even if it means getting sick and dying. To stay a teenager forever…” Undine shuddered. “Look, I’m kind of hoping life gets better than this. I want to make it past twenty so I can find out.”
Prospero grunted. “I suppose I want those things for you too. When you were just the idea of you, the hum of magic in the air, well, it didn’t matter. But the fact of you. That’s a different story.”
“I gave up the magic. When I thought Trout was dead, I gave it away into the sea. You could have taken it all, couldn’t you?”
Prospero closed his eyes, as if he suddenly couldn’t bear to look at all that blue. He nodded.
“But you used it to pull Trout out of the Bay instead. And Grunt too. You protected them.”
He opened his eyes. “No. I protected you. You could never have survived hurting them. I’m just a selfish old man, Undine. I just wanted to keep you whole. It was my loss that I was worried about. The loss of you.”
Undine smiled.
As Grunt, Trout, Jasper, and Lou appeared over the rise, Ariel stood at the shore barking happily at them.
“I guess she’ll never be much of a watchdog,” Prospero said gloomily. “She never had to be before.”
“That’s good too,” Undine said firmly. “She’ll be a welcoming dog. It will do you good to have visitors.”
Prospero grumbled softly to himself.
“Here you are,” said Lou. “You’ve been gone for ages.”
Jasper took Undine’s hand.
“This is where you went swimming,” Jasper said.
“Yes! I did go swimming here.” She picked him up and buried her face in his stomach, blowing raspberries. “What a clever boy you are to know that.”
Jasper squealed and wriggled free. He knelt down and patted the sand. “And this is where I did my drawings.”
“What?” Undine asked, attentive. “What drawings?”
Jasper ran up to Grunt and asked him something. Grunt, remembering, pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to Jasper.
With great care, Jasper opened it out flat and smoothed away the creases before running back to Undine. “Here,” he said, handing her the paper. “I did this for you when you were gone away.”
On the page were circles inside circles, wonky, crooked, but gorgeous. She recognized them immediately.
“Thank you,” Undine said, and she hugged Jasper tightly. “Thank you, gorgeous boy.” She folded the drawing again and put it carefully in her pocket.
“Come on,” Lou said. “Home. You’ve got exams to study for, remember? And plenty of time to do it, s
eeing as you’re grounded till you’re twenty-four.”
When they left, Prospero tried not to look too relieved to see them all go.
“Now,” Undine bossed. “I’m going to phone you as soon as I get back. And I expect a letter about the kittens, telling me how they’re all doing. You’d better go to the shops and buy some cat food. And you have to name them. You can write that in the letter too. And no Tempest names. Ordinary ones, like Mittens and Polly.”
“And look after my garden,” Lou said. “The lemon tree wants feeding.”
Jasper said, “Good-bye, Mr. Man. Thanks for the sandwiches.”
Grunt left first. As he said good-bye, his fingers brushed Undine’s so lightly that she wasn’t even sure if it was intentional.
The light was getting long and late. Shadows reached across the road, though behind them the day still glittered brightly. As they wound around the snaking highway, Undine caught the occasional glimpse of the indigo sea.
Trout sat behind Lou in the station wagon, watching Undine’s face. He thought of The Tempest, of Miranda’s brave new world. He wondered how Miranda had navigated this new world, after the play had ended. He thought of how heartless Shakespeare had been, to leave her there, unaided, unobserved. But then, that was life, wasn’t it?
Undine opened the car window and tasted the wind. They overtook the Fiat. Undine waved. The Fiat puttered happily, eating their dust.
Out on the rumpled sheet of the sea, a yacht traveled northward, the sail tipping and bowing happily in the wind. Beyond the boat, there was the straight blue line of the horizon. A pale daytime moon hung over the water, slender and brittle as a fingernail.
And beyond the horizon, beyond the moon, who knew what lay there?
“O brave,” Undine said to the wind, “new world.”
About the Author
PENNI RUSSON began her writing life as a poet, and Undine is her first novel. It was named a Notable Book of the Year by the Children’s BookCouncil of Australia and was published to rave reviews.
Ms. Russon spent her childhood roaming a small, tame mountain in Hobart, Australia. She now lives with her family in Melbourne, where she writes, reads, and edits books for children and teenagers.
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Credits
Jacket art © 2006 by Chad W. Beckerman
Jacket design by Chad W. Beckerman
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
UNDINE. Copyright © 2004 By Penni Russon. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780061975479
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