by Hilary McKay
Peter and Simon got a joint message in the form of a map of the top floor of the school. If they followed the arrows and lifted the floorboard he had marked in the trunk room by the back stairs, they would find three bottles of beer and a key to the cricket pavilion that he and his fiery-headed Irish friend had hidden there last term. The cricket pavilion was a good place to sit out a long cross-country run. Simon might use it. Rupert himself had had many a comfy nap amongst the nets while others were slogging around four miles of cold field boundaries.
After this, Rupert could think of no one else for his letters. Not one person whom he could tell about the two field ambulances they’d unloaded that afternoon and reloaded onto the train for the coast and then home.
Poor devils, he had thought, but the men from the ambulances hadn’t been sorry for themselves. One, pale as paper, flinching at every movement, gasped, “I got it in my guts. It’s nothing. I’m out of this now.” Another had grinned and grinned, with his left arm ending in a great lump of bandage at his elbow. Everyone who came from the front agreed that these were quiet days, hardly a pop from dawn to dusk, the cold was the worst, and the perpetual wet that did for your feet. Nothing like before Christmas, when things had been rough. Nothing like what was to come, best not think about that. So Rupert rolled himself in two blankets, and stretched out on his camp bed, picturing scenes from home to see him off to sleep. Lucy pushing her muzzle into his pockets for sugar. The run across the moorland to where the cliff dipped down to the sea. Pretty girls. That sort of thing.
Sixteen
EASTER CAME AROUND. EASTER 1915. one afternoon, Peter came home from school, with no warning to anyone and Simon tagging on behind him. Clarry heard a sudden clatter in the hall, voices, and the thump of bags being dropped, and rushed down the stairs and there they both were.
“Peter! Simon! Oh, how good!”
“Hello, Clarry,” said Simon.
“Hello! Oh, Peter, what’s the matter?”
Peter had collapsed onto the old wooden chair at the foot of the stairs, and sat rocking, his face crinkled with pain, rubbing his damaged left leg. “Couldn’t get a cab,” he said, from between clenched teeth. “Walked.”
“All the way from the station? With all those bags?”
“Don’t fuss. Why’s it so cold? This house is colder than outside.”
“The kitchen’s warm. Warmer, anyway. I’ve made some soup too. I thought I’d try. Come in there. Shall we help you get up?”
“No,” said Peter, wincing as he got to his feet again. “You and Bonners could bring the bags, though. Don’t want Father noticing them. When does he get home?”
“Father? Not for ages. Not till I’ve gone to bed sometimes.” Clarry held the kitchen door open for Peter and beckoned to Simon, now laden with a bag in each hand and another under each arm. “Come on, Simon! Come and get warm.”
“Clarry,” said Simon, hesitating for a moment and looking worriedly down at her. “Could I possibly stay?”
“Stay?”
“I’ve already said that you can,” growled Peter from the kitchen. “There’s no need to ask Clarry. She won’t mind.”
“Our house is shut up, you see,” said Simon. “They’re still at my great-aunt’s, Vanessa and my mother. And she’s not keen on me. My great-aunt.”
“Oh, Simon, we’d love to have you!” exclaimed Clarry. “But there’s Father, he’s not very . . .”
“Friendly,” finished Peter.
“Yes!” agreed Clarry. “I mean, no! But I don’t know what he’d say. Why doesn’t your great-aunt like—”
“Clarry!” interrupted Peter sternly. “Stop it!”
“Sorry! Sorry, Simon!”
“It’s all right. I do seem to break things when I’m there. I don’t know why.” He paused and stared humbly at his big bony purple breaking-things hands. “She says I’m too tall.”
“You are too tall!” said Peter, warming up and more cheerful. “There’s nothing much to break here and Father doesn’t matter.”
“He might not even notice,” said Clarry, taking heart. “I often don’t see him all day. Come and try the soup I made. It’s got barley in, and vegetables. And the fire’s hot, we can make toast. Oh, it’s lovely to have people!”
“I can sleep anywhere,” said Simon, knocking over a chair or two as he sat down at the table. “Floor or a chair or a sofa, anywhere.”
“There’s a spare room with a bed,” said Peter. “Rupe had it that Christmas.”
Simon, who had been holding his face over his soup bowl, gratefully breathing in the warm steam, looked up and smiled.
“Thank you,” he said.
He had a nice smile, like a great long-faced kindly giraffe. He was, Clarry thought, giraffelike altogether. She had seen one once, when a traveling menagerie had stopped on the outskirts of town and Peter had insisted to their father that the two of them must go, and most surprisingly, won. Clarry’s heart had melted at the great, lanky, puzzled animal, so clearly much too far away from home. Now here was one at their kitchen table, eating their soup and toast.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she told him, and reached out a comforting hand. “How is your leg now, Peter? Does it still hurt?”
“Not much. It doesn’t matter. Is there any more butter?”
“A bit. Save some for Father. It’s harder to buy these days. You have to go and queue. I don’t know what that room’s like, Peter, I haven’t been in it for ages and ages. Not since I got it ready for Rupe, and that was more than a year ago. I don’t think Mrs. Morgan has either. She doesn’t bother with bedrooms much.”
“It will be fine,” said Simon shyly.
“Freezing,” said Clarry, “and I suppose the same sheets and things. I never thought of taking them off, I’d better go and look.”
They all went to look. At the dead dusty ashes of the fire Clarry had lit for Rupert. At the rumpled bed, with the pillows still dented where Rupert’s head had lain. At the damp that had got in around the window and turned into a patch of mildew. It was freezing, and it smelled fusty and abandoned. Peter opened a window and let in a gale of wet cold spring air. Clarry said, “I’ll light another fire and find some different sheets and dust. . . .”
“No, no!” protested Simon. “It’s perfectly all right! Don’t do anything! I didn’t want to be extra work.”
“Yes, don’t fuss, Clarry,” said Peter. “It just needed some fresh air. It’s not any colder than your room, or mine. We don’t have fires. Anyway, he can have one if he can be bothered to lug some coal up and light it himself.”
“No, no, no,” said Simon. “Please, no. Just perhaps a candle, for in the night?”
Clarry found a candle, soap, and a towel, searched for clean sheets and concluded Mrs. Morgan must hide them, took the pillow down to the kitchen to warm in front of the fire, and promised herself she’d sneak up with a hot-water bottle as soon as she had a chance. Simon paid her back for this hard work by sweeping the kitchen floor, scrubbing muddy potatoes to bake in the oven, and going shopping for onions and triumphal sausages, which he cooked in the big frying pan. The days that followed were just the same. He was far more useful than either Mrs. Morgan or Clarry at housework, scrubbing furiously at grime, mending loose doorknobs, window catches, and dripping taps, and cooking exotic foods, such as omelets and curry. It was the smell of curry that gave him away to Peter and Clarry’s father, who tracked him down to the bench outside the kitchen door, where he was industriously polishing the household’s boots, while Peter leaned against the doorframe, criticizing, and Clarry whacked dust from the kitchen hearthrug with an ancient tennis racket.
“Peter, Clarry?” he said. “Er . . .”
“Oh, Father, this is Bonners . . . Simon,” said Peter, briskly unruffled. “He’s at school with me. He’s come to help us out for a few days. Simon, you remember my father?”
Simon smiled nervously, held out a polishy hand, changed his mind, and said apologetically, “Sorry, better
not,” half bowed instead over a boot, and added “I was here one Christmas. At the party. Me and my sister. I hope you don’t mind.”
“He’s made Mrs. Morgan’s end of mutton into wonderful curry!” said Clarry, hurrying over and standing protectively close to Simon. “Wait till you taste it! And he’s cooking rice too. His father taught him, but he’s away now and their house is closed up. That’s why Simon is here.”
“He’s navy,” murmured Simon. “Recalled. I needn’t stay, really. I shouldn’t. School’s open, I think perhaps I’d better go back.”
“No, no, Simon!” exclaimed Clarry. “Father’s nice! He wouldn’t want that, would you, Father?”
“I . . . er. No, of course not. No. Very welcome,” said her father, thus cornered into decency. “Do . . . er . . . stay. Well. We’ll meet again at dinner, perhaps?”
So Simon the Bony One was accepted into the tall narrow house, not just then, but often afterward. When Clarry saw an especially long shadow through the frosted glass of the front door she knew he was back again, hovering uneasily before knocking, apologetic, kind. He liked to hear the latest news of her life, and to talk of Vanessa (still working in her hospital) and the braininess of Peter, and most of all, Rupert. They both had a good supply of Rupert stories—Simon from school, Clarry from her summers in Cornwall—and then there was always the chance that Clarry might have a letter to share.
“Let’s send him a parcel,” Simon suggested once, and showed Clarry how to make gingerbread. They cut it into careful squares, found a box, and posted it.
“All of it?” asked Peter, coming into the kitchen sniffing.
“Yes,” said Clarry and Simon in unison. “Of course all of it!”
Clarry was knitting a scarf for Rupert too, and once, to her astonishment, Simon sat down with it at the kitchen table and added several rows to its length. “I learned to knit when I was very little,” he said, smiling at Mrs. Morgan’s astonishment. “I was stuck in bed with a bad chest and Mummy . . . Mum taught me for something to do. My dad can do it too. Lots of sailors can knit.”
“I daresay anyone can do it if they try,” remarked Peter, who had been listening and watching. “You never let on you could knit at school, though.”
“I’m not that much of a fool,” said Simon.
“Mrs. Morgan can shoe horses,” Clarry told them both. “That’s more surprising still.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Morgan, “I was a better lad than my brother ever was,” but still she looked curiously at Simon, bent almost double over the wool, and when he had gone, suddenly clumsy, knocking over the hatstand on his way out, she said, “Soft!”
“He is not!” snapped Peter, before Clarry could speak.
“Well, to hear a lad as big as him call his mother that!” Mrs. Morgan was not daunted by Peter, nor ever had been. “Mummy! You can’t deny it!”
“It’s just the way their family talk,” said Clarry, also indignant. “Vanessa says ‘Mummy’ too, when she forgets.”
“It’s a bit different coming from a girl,” said Mrs. Morgan. “However, I’ll say no more. Doesn’t he get laughed at at that school of yours?”
“Yes, of course he does, and so do I,” said Peter, still angry. “And so would Clarry and so would you, and so does anyone who isn’t a silly, grinning, sports-playing, book-hating, first-year-tormenting, prefect-groveling, hair-parted-on-the-right—”
“Eh?” said Mrs. Morgan.
“I’m just telling you the rules!” said Peter. “So you don’t get laughed at.”
“Well, now, I’m sorry for what I said,” said Mrs. Morgan. “I was wrong. I’m sure your friend is a nice enough lad. Folk can’t help how they’re brought up, nor how they turn out.”
“No, they can’t,” growled Peter, and marched out of the kitchen, leaving Clarry and Mrs. Morgan to make peace together.
“All the same,” said Mrs. Morgan, “you might just drop him a hint, Clarry, or mention it to his sister. About calling his mother what he does. No need for him to go around asking for trouble.”
“I wonder what Peter and me would have called our mother,” said Clarry, a little sadly.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Morgan. “That was sad, how you lost her. It was a great pity she was so frail.”
“Was she?”
“Well, of course she was. Not enough iron in her blood. Your father never accepted it, but there it was, anemia, and nothing to be done to help, from what that Miss Vane told me once. It was all left too late for treatment, not that they can do a great deal. And I’m guessing that’s the first you’ve heard of it?” she added, seeing Clarry’s shocked face and wide eyes.
Clarry nodded.
“White as paper, poor thing!”
“I didn’t know you even knew her,” said Clarry.
“I wouldn’t say knew,” said Mrs. Morgan. “I scrubbed this house out when they first moved in (last proper spring clean the place ever had!) and I’d see her in church now and then. Looked like the wind could blow her away but she hung on until you arrived. I used to think it was that kept her going, wanting to see her new baby.”
“Mrs. Morgan!”
“Now what have I said wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing! But I always thought, and Peter did too, that it was because of me she died.”
“Nothing of the sort! It was because of you she lived, my girl. Now, stop it! Don’t take on like that! Now that’s no use at all to us! No, don’t use your sleeve! Nor that tea cloth neither! There’s a handkerchief, blow! Dear goodness, if this kitchen wasn’t damp enough without you adding floods to the mix! She was a very brave lady; you’d never have caught her dripping all over the kitchen table.”
Clarry put her head on her arms and sobbed.
Peter, hearing the racket, stuck his head round the door and demanded, “What’s the matter with her now?” as if she was forever doing such things.
“Nothing. Go away,” said Clarry, without lifting her head, and when he had gone, closing the door rather hard, she said, “Don’t tell him, please, Mrs. Morgan.”
“Why ever shouldn’t he know?”
“He should, but not now. It would change too much. I don’t think he blames me anymore anyway, that was only when he was little.”
“You’re a funny girl, you are,” said Mrs. Morgan, rather grumpily. “It wouldn’t hurt your brother to hear he was wrong.”
“It would,” said Clarry. “It hurts people very much to know they’re wrong. I’m better now anyway.”
To prove she was better she got a cloth and washed her drips off the table and then peeled potatoes until Mrs. Morgan said, “Stop! They’re getting scarce in the shops these days.”
“What did they call it? An . . . something?”
“Anemia.”
Clarry nodded. Anemia, anemia, she thought, to help her remember, and she found it in the dusty old dictionary in the living room. The pages were of tissue-thin paper, but it opened easily at the word, as if it had opened there many times before. “Pallor,” it said, amongst other things, and, “Lack of vigor.” Nothing about dying.
Clarry was still sitting on the floor gazing at it when her father came in.
“What’s that you have?” he asked her, and when she replied, “Just the dictionary,” he said, “I never knew we had one. Put it back when you’ve finished.”
So it must have been her mother who had opened the dictionary so often that the pages remembered her touch. Clarry closed it carefully, but instead of putting it back, she took it upstairs to her room. Until now she had had no connection with her mother. There was nothing in the house to show she’d ever lived except Clarry and Peter. And now, this book. Gently Clarry fluttered through the pages and as she did so, she noticed that once again, the dictionary was choosing its own place to fall open.
Pushed tight against the stitched spine, on the first page of the Bs, Clarry found the reason for this. An oval of cardboard, a little photograph. A round, young, smiling face, looking out at her.
> JANEY PENROSE, 1901
(Mother)
read Clarry on the back.
Her mother’s face.
Her mother’s handwriting. There were no more pictures hidden in the pages. Clarry knew because she checked them, all 1,038.
Seventeen
I WISH, THOUGHT CLARRY, I had someone to talk to about Mother. And that illness, anemia, that she looked up in the dictionary so often. Poor Mother.
Who could it be? Peter was away. Mrs. Morgan had told her all she knew. Not Father, never. Not Miss Vane, who would fuss, or Simon, who Peter said had once fainted on glimpsing someone else’s nose bleed. Vanessa. Sensible, loving, cheerful Vanessa, at present in Southampton, slaving in her hospital for wounded soldiers.
“How did you begin all this nursing?” Clarry had asked her friend once. “Everyone at school is so surprised they let you. They say you’re not old enough.”
“Oh, well, I always was too tall,” Vanessa had replied very quickly and briskly. “It’s rubbish for dancing but does make a difference for other things. I lied about my age, of course, and put up my hair and wore a dreary skirt and borrowed my great-aunt’s ancient blue hat. And I talked a lot about first aid and nursing and the training I’d already—”
“Had you?” asked Clarry, surprised.
“And Dad being a naval doctor, and that helped enormously. Shut up! I know what you are going to say! Anyway, I’m good at it, and I work jolly hard!”
Vanessa was working hard the day that Clarry turned up in Southampton. She had to wait until her friend had a couple of hours free and they could scuttle away to a café.
“I’m sorry you had to hang around so long for me to get away,” apologized Vanessa. “Did you nearly give up hope?”
“No, no, and there was lots to look at. I’ve never been here before. Lovely to be so close to the sea.”
“I know. I come outside on windy days to blow away the carbolic smell. What’s the matter, Clarry? It must be something worrying to bring you all this way.”
