The Exiles at Home

by Hilary McKay

  ‘Slope around,’ Naomi said.

  ‘Unsuspiciously,’ agreed Ruth.

  ‘Not do anything?’ asked Rachel, ‘that’s easy!’

  For a day or two they tried this, and it was easy. Home grew peaceful and Mrs Conroy appeared to relax. It lasted until two days before they were to set off to Cumbria, and was spoilt by the Earnest One, who appeared on the doorstep, rang the bell, and asked Mrs Conroy if Rachel and Phoebe would still be doing it in the holidays.

  ‘Because I think it would be a good thing,’ he explained earnestly. ‘People still get hungry! Even those marmalade ones would do if they did. I came to ask, in case they were and I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Mrs Conroy.

  ‘I’ve been away,’ explained the Earnest One, ‘on holiday, so I might not have heard.’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘If Rachel and Phoebe still do them in the holidays. I know some people thought they ought to stop but I never did. They said it was a clean dog and it is, I’ve seen it. It’s that one, isn’t it?’ and he pointed to Josh, who was enjoying the sun in the Collingwood front garden and looking, as the Earnest One truly remarked, beautifully clean.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Mrs Conroy, ‘exactly what you are talking about. As if I were a very stupid person.’

  ‘Are Rachel and Phoebe still selling those homemade spare packed lunches?’ the Earnest One asked, as plainly as he could. ‘The ones they used to make in that dog’s kennel last term?’

  ‘So much,’ said Naomi sarcastically, ‘for keeping a low profile and sloping around and not doing anything to be noticed!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruth.

  ‘There’s only me with any sense,’ continued Naomi, conveniently forgetting that less than a week before, she had paraded through the market place dressed as an old man and had, thus disguised, robbed a street artist in front of a policeman, a solicitor and a vicar.

  Ruth pointed this out to her, and Naomi said it didn’t count because their mother had not found out.

  ‘Only because Mrs Collingwood didn’t tell on you like she did on me,’ said Ruth. ‘Anyway, arguing doesn’t help.’

  They sat together on the stairs and listened to the snivelling sounds that came from their little sisters’ bedroom. Rachel and Phoebe had been cross-questioned and thoroughly told off.

  ‘And you two can come down!’ called Mrs Conroy up the stairs: ‘Goodness knows, they need no encouragement from you! Do you realize what might have happened if anyone had been ill? Your father and I might have ended up in court! I’ve taken the money off them they said they’d made; what’s left of it anyway. Six or seven pounds and apparently they’ve spent another ten on heaven knows what, sweets and rubbish I suppose . . .’

  Ruth and Naomi cringed into opposite corners of the sofa.

  ‘You’d think they weren’t fed at home! First one thing and then another! The money that’s left will have to go to charity, I suppose. I couldn’t begin to try and give it back . . . I’ve told them if I hear one word about any sort of trouble at your grandma’s, they won’t be trusted to go there again. And the same goes for you two! Street artist indeed! I haven’t forgotten!’

  ‘They were doing it in London,’ Ruth argued. ‘No one minded there. It looked good fun!’

  ‘Begging!’ said Mrs Conroy. ‘And that reminds me, you can bring down any money you got and it’s going to charity, too!’

  ‘There wasn’t any,’ said Ruth, ‘not by the time I’d bought the chalks.’

  ‘I’m speaking to your grandmother,’ said Mrs Conroy, ‘and warning her about everything that’s happened this year, and if anything goes wrong, you’ll be home on the next train!’

  ‘What’s worrying you?’ asked Big Grandma. ‘Have you been worrying non-stop since Easter, or does it come in waves? What have you all been up to? Strange tales have arrived from your mother! Is there anything you’d feel better telling me about?’

  The long journey to Cumbria was over, the celebration tea was eaten, Graham, their friend of the previous summer, had departed for home. They sat together on the front steps of Big Grandma’s house and watched the sun slide down towards the sparkling sea.

  ‘Are you in trouble with the law?’ asked Big Grandma cheerfully.

  ‘Not now,’ said Rachel, remembering with horror her run from the Post Office. No one else replied, so Big Grandma said no more until Ruth asked, as casually as she knew how, what people did to earn money in Cumbria.

  ‘Farm mostly,’ said Big Grandma, ‘and tourism further inland, of course.’

  ‘I meant children,’ said Ruth.

  ‘What sort of money are we talking about?’ asked Big Grandma. ‘Hundreds or thousands? Pounds or pence?’

  ‘Ten pounds!’ All four spoke at once and far too quickly.

  The sun flamed brighter and brighter and Big Grandma, watching it, remarked, ‘In Africa the sun sets at six o’clock every night! Did you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Naomi, so abruptly that Big Grandma glanced at her.

  ‘Of course, it will do on the equator,’ Big Grandma agreed, ‘obvious when you think about it, but I was astonished when I realized it myself. Everything still all right in Africa, Phoebe?’

  ‘It’ll be nice,’ said Phoebe, after the shocked silence that followed this question, ‘not to have to sleep in the bottom bunk, with Rachel and her sledge in the top one waiting to fall out.’

  ‘You’re always being horrible about my sledge,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Did you think of bringing it with you?’ Big Grandma asked her politely, and Rachel replied that she had, and had in fact packed it in its sledge case in readiness, and had been quite prepared to carry it herself, but when she unloaded it at the station it had been taken from her by her mother.

  ‘I’d polished it ready to come,’ she said sadly.

  ‘Life is hard,’ said Big Grandma.

  Ten pounds!

  Big Grandma’s granddaughters were in bed, and Big Grandma was thinking hard. Ten pounds was the amount she had given them each at Christmas, and the sum that Rachel had extracted in so reckless a manner from the Post Office. Ten pounds had been the amount Mrs Conroy had not been able to account for, from the funds of the Spare Packed Lunch Company. It seemed highly probable that ten pounds had been the amount that Ruth gained and lost in her brief career as a street artist, and it was more than likely that Ruth’s Peter-sitting, and Naomi’s gardening were done in order to obtain more ten-pound sums.

  Big Grandma’s brain fitted together further pieces of the jigsaw.

  Strange that they were still obsessed with Africa. Big Grandma, helping with the unpacking that evening, had noticed that their holiday reading consisted of nothing but books on the continent. All these things, unconnected, had meant nothing reasonable to Mrs Conroy, but to Big Grandma, thoughtfully regarding Phoebe’s sketch of the money inside her train through the slit, they were beginning to form a picture.

  Ten pounds again, thought Big Grandma, and obtained with disastrous results to the train! Carefully she laid Phoebe’s picture back down in the drawer of her desk kept for letters from her grandchildren.

  ‘Extra pocket money! Holiday money! Call it what you like!’ Big Grandma laid a ten pound note on the breakfast table. ‘If it’s the cost of a peaceful holiday it’s cheap at the price!’

  ‘Thank you!’ said Ruth and Naomi together, amazed. Big Grandma was smiling at her granddaughters as if she was fond of them, and although they realized that of course she did like them, she usually managed to conceal it so well that such proof was quite startling.

  ‘Make it last,’ said Big Grandma.

  ‘It’ll last us right till the end of September,’ said Rachel and promptly doubled up with pain as three people kicked her under the table.

  ‘Pigs!’ said Rachel. ‘Anyway, give it to me!’ Reaching down into the stomach region of her sweatshirt she produced her jam jar, banked the money and stuffed it out of sight.

  �
��Are you rich?’ Phoebe asked Big Grandma. ‘Where do you get it from?’

  ‘Get what from?’

  ‘Money. That ten pound note.’

  ‘That particular one came from the Post Office,’ said Big Grandma, grinning at Rachel, ‘an institution which I hear you no longer patronize! Surely that jam jar is very uncomfortable?’

  ‘Yes, very,’ said Rachel, ‘especially running.’

  ‘Years since I ran anywhere,’ mused Big Grandma, ‘probably couldn’t any more. Well, I’m glad you’re pleased. You people worry too much! Stop it until September! Get outside and enjoy yourselves!’

  In the middle of August the end of September seemed an age away. It was six weeks until they need start panicking about the October instalment of Joseck’s money. Nothing happened to spoil that holiday; nothing bad enough to be reported to Mrs Conroy, anyway. They climbed the hills, made bonfires on the beach, picked blackberries and found mushrooms. Naomi discovered a pair of ancient sheep shears, and aided by Graham, who should have known better, sheared half of one of Graham’s mother’s pet lambs. The lamb, which had become quite a large sheep, escaped and took refuge in Graham’s mother’s kitchen.

  ‘Thought you said it was a pet one,’ said Naomi.

  ‘It is, that’s why it ran into the kitchen.’

  ‘You didn’t house-train it very well.’

  Graham’s mother, who had equipped Graham with a shovel and Naomi with a mop, explained that one could not house-train sheep, and Naomi, mopping round the cooker, privately thought that if that was the case it was silly to keep them as pets, but she didn’t say so. She was very fond of Graham’s mother.

  ‘Lucky you have tiles,’ she remarked as she sloshed busily around her hostess’s feet, and Graham’s mother agreed that it was.

  Rachel did nothing alarming at all; she ate a lot, and what she could not manage during the day she took to bed and ate at night, but that was her own affair. She slept just as comfortably among the crumbs, egg shells and apple cores as she did in her own bed at home. Phoebe managed to fulfil a long-held ambition, starting Big Grandma’s car and driving it unhurriedly into the forsythia bush. Fortunately, she neglected to take the hand-brake off, so it moved very slowly and no great damage was done. Big Grandma gallantly chose not to relate anything of it to Mrs Conroy, and they left for home with their reputations intact.

  ‘How are you?’ Graham’s mother asked Big Grandma, meeting her the day after the girls had departed.

  ‘Missing them, I’m afraid!’ said Big Grandma.

  Back at home, the girls missed Big Grandma. Despite her toughness and her sometimes unflatteringly honest opinions, she had always seemed to be somehow on their side.

  ‘On the very first morning she gave us ten pounds!’ Naomi told Toby and Emma.

  ‘For yon lad in Africa?’ asked Toby.

  ‘She doesn’t know anything about him.’

  ‘Bet she does,’ said Emma.

  ‘Emma,’ said Phoebe, remembering the conversation that first breakfast time in Cumbria, ‘can you run?’

  ‘Run?’

  ‘Big Grandma said it was years since she’d run anywhere. Is it years since you have too?’

  ‘May be. Dare say I still could though, if I wanted.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Don’t want to, do I? Why should I?’

  ‘What if you wanted to run away from something?’

  ‘I’m no coward,’ said Emma, ‘I told you that before!’

  ‘No, and never was,’ agreed Toby, watching Emma’s head drop sleepily forward, ‘and neither you be, either! You never get anywhere worth going by running away!’

  ‘We don’t run away!’

  ‘You grab your chances,’ said Toby. ‘Like I did, when you come to see my garden. It’s been a picture all summer!’

  ‘Good,’ said Rachel, who beyond digging up Roger, had done nothing at all to contribute to the brightness of Toby’s garden.

  ‘What’s the plan for this afternoon, then?’ he asked. ‘We’ve a dozen cream buns wants eating when you’re hungry. Would you like them now?’

  ‘Big Grandma said if we cut the dead heads off things like cornflowers, they’d all flower again, so we thought we’d do that.’

  ‘I’m going to dig for treasure,’ Rachel told him. ‘I haven’t for ages.’

  ‘Well, I can’t say we’ve buried any since you last looked,’ Toby remarked, ‘however, no harm in trying. You’re in the wrong spot altogether though; you want to be down by the marshes. That’s where I used to look when I was a boy.’

  ‘Why, what’s down by the marshes?’

  ‘King John’s treasure,’ Emma woke up as suddenly as she had fallen asleep. ‘Have you never heard tell of that?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Every child in the district looked for King John’s treasure in my day,’ said Toby. ‘King John, a bad man by all accounts, run off with the crown jewels and money and gold and goodness knows what. Dropped the lot crossing the marshes. That’s history, that is; you should have learned it at school.’

  ‘Why was he crossing the marshes?’

  ‘To escape,’ said Toby, ‘though I don’t recall what.’

  ‘Why didn’t he stop and pick it up again?’

  ‘That’s what I used to ask,’ said Emma.

  ‘How d’you know it’s still there?’

  ‘Because no one ever found it,’ answered Toby reasonably.

  ‘Be all muddy now, and rusty.’

  ‘Jewels’ll wash,’ said Emma, ‘and gold don’t rust; that’s what I used to think.’

  Even Rachel was sceptical about the possibility of gold and money and the crown jewels lying round waiting to be found by some lucky schoolchild.

  ‘How long ago was it?’ she asked, ‘because Ruth saw the crown jewels on her school trip to London before the end of term. Somebody must have found them and given them back.’

  ‘There couldn’t be two lots,’ agreed Ruth doubtfully.

  ‘I bet he picked them up again,’ said Phoebe, ‘even a really stuck-up king would bend down and pick them up again if he dropped the crown jewels! Even I would!’

  ‘You’re not a king,’ Naomi pointed out.

  ‘That proves it then,’ said Phoebe dismissively. ‘If I’d do it when they weren’t even my jewels, then King John would definitely . . . there’s Mrs Reed.’

  Mrs Reed paused at the fence to admire the bright patchwork flower-beds, and called out, ‘Bless you!’ as she passed.

  ‘Why’d she say that?’ asked Naomi and Emma suspiciously.

  ‘Oh, she says that every morning,’ explained Phoebe, ‘after school assembly, after she’s read out what’s banned. Last term she banned chewing gum, bubble gum, grass fights, running in the corridor, screaming competitions, talking Australian and my collection of ants I was taming in my desk. I expect she’s just practising for school next week.’

  ‘All them rules,’ said Emma scathingly. ‘You don’t want to take no notice!’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Phoebe reassuringly.

  CHAPTER TEN

  In the second week of September, school began again. The day before the beginning of term, Martin-the-good came round and formally announced that he would no longer be holding up the school bus for them in the mornings.

  ‘But that means we’ll miss it nearly every day!’ said Ruth astonished, and Martin said he was afraid that was the case and he hoped they would not take it personally.

  ‘What shall we do about waiting for the post?’ Ruth asked Naomi. ‘Letters from Joseck might arrive any day!’

  ‘We won’t do anything,’ replied Naomi calmly, ‘and Martin will hold up the bus for us just the same as usual. You wait and see!’ They were deliberately late the next morning, and sure enough, there was Martin, one foot on the kerb and the other on the bus, vowing he would never do it again.

  ‘It shouldn’t be allowed!’ Egg-Yolk Wendy broke off a detailed description of her summer to complain
. ‘Did you know I’ve just come back from Europe?’

  ‘No,’ said Ruth shortly.

  ‘Seven countries,’ said Wendy, ‘in two weeks! Eight counting England! Didn’t Gavin tell you? I sent him a postcard and told him to pass it on.’

  ‘Forgot,’ mumbled Gavin. For once he was sitting on his own, Wendy’s new sports equipment requiring all of the spare seat beside her.

  ‘France, I was sick,’ said Wendy, jabbing across the aisle at Gavin’s foot with her new hockey stick, ‘Switzerland, we bought four cuckoo clocks; Italy was all right except for the mountains and horrible toilets; Austria I quite liked; Luxembourg we just drove through, Dad said it wasn’t worth stopping; Belgium really boring, then we had to go back to France though we’d seen it once already . . .’

  Just to annoy her, Naomi moved and sat next to Gavin. Wendy tossed her egg-yolk yellow ponytail and said Naomi could if she liked because she was thinking of finishing with him and Gavin looked hopeful for the first time for months, but then grew gloomy again as Wendy added she intended to keep him for a friend.

  ‘Who are you going to have instead?’ enquired Ruth, and Wendy replied that she didn’t know, but she was wondering about Martin who was so much more mature than Gavin. Martin laughed good-naturedly and said he would rather die and Gavin said, ‘Oh please, Martin!’ At which exchange of remarks, Wendy took offence and said she hated boys and wasn’t going to be free at weekends any more anyway, because she was concentrating on sports this year: hockey, gymnastics and ice skating.

  ‘Ice skating?’ repeated Ruth, unable to hide her envy, and Wendy tossed her yellow ponytail and smirked.

  ‘You’ll be able to do what you like now on Saturdays,’ Naomi said to Gavin.

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘’Course you will! Didn’t you hear? You won’t have to go trailing round town after Wendy!’

  ‘Won’t I?’

  ‘You’ve been dumped!’

  ‘What can I do, then?’

  ‘What did you use to do?’

  It was so long since Gavin had done anything of his own free will, unorganized by Wendy, that it took him some time to remember.

  ‘I used to go bird-watching down the marshes!’ he announced, and was astonished to see Naomi’s face brighten with interest.