The Shadow Guests

by Joan Aiken

  She cast a quick glance at him and said, ‘We’ll see. Perhaps, in the summer, when you’ve settled. But it’s a longish way. And I thought, to start with, you’d find it easier to get to know people if you were a boarder. I was always a day girl when I went to school, and the boarders used to despise the day people; we always felt inferior and out of everything.’

  Cosmo didn’t voice his views about this. He could see that Cousin Eunice was trying to do her best for him. He said,

  ‘When do I start there?’ not knowing whether school terms in England were the same as those in Australia.

  ‘Next Monday. The term’s half through already; you’ll only have five weeks of school before the Easter holidays. I hope you won’t be lonely at the mill,’ she said, sounding doubtful for the first time. ‘There’s absolutely no one living round about. The village is five miles off – it isn’t an ideal arrangement.’

  Here, too, Cosmo kept silent, and refrained from uttering his very different feelings. He would be meeting all those total strangers at school – two hundred of them – the prospect of solitary weekends at the mill was something to hold on to. He asked,

  ‘Isn’t there anybody living at Courtoys Place now? I thought that was not far from the mill?’

  ‘It’s about three-quarters of a mile away. But you can’t talk to the people there.’

  ‘Why ever not? Are they mad or something?’

  ‘No, but it’s a Ministry of Health research station now. They give people colds and experimental diseases, so they have to stay strictly within bounds and not mix with the general public. They aren’t allowed out of the grounds. And all the land round the house – about twenty square miles – is run as an experimental farm. You’ll be coming across Mr Marvell, who runs it. He’s a nice man. He uses the farm buildings at the Mill House. He has a theory about horses instead of tractors – won’t have a tractor on the place. He has Suffolk Punches instead.’

  ‘How many?’ Cosmo asked with a pricking of interest.

  ‘Five – Queenie, Blossom, Duchess, Prince and Duke. There’s Oxford,’ said Eunice, without any change of tone, nodding sideways to some spires and chimneys, faintly visible through the haze of an early-spring afternoon.

  ‘Shan’t we go through it?’

  ‘No, we go round the bypass. It’s quicker. You’ll soon be seeing plenty of Oxford.’

  Lob, who had been lying, a huge inert mass in the back of the car, waiting for the journey to pass, evidently began to sniff the air of home and sat up, displacing a strong waft of his strange musty, yeasty smell. Cosmo supposed that Cousin Eunice must have grown accustomed to it by now but, as if drawing the thought out of his mind, she said,

  ‘He does smell … He’s an old, old dog. You can open the window wider if you want. Now it’s only fifteen minutes from here.’

  They left the motorway at a roundabout and took a smaller road; soon turned off that into one smaller still, and then into a really narrow lane between steep banks that cut off the view; then shortly on to a rutted farm track with gates along it at intervals. The air, when Cosmo got out to open the gates, was moist, fresh and cool; sniffing it, he had a sudden piercingly vivid memory from long, long ago, of wading in a ditch with his brother Mark, the water full and rushing from spring rain – green waterweeds like mermaids’ hair swept out in long straight lines – the water going over the tops of his wellingtons …

  ‘It’s grand for me having someone to open the gates,’ Cousin Eunice said. ‘Up to now I’ve had to do it all myself. Lob is no use at all.’

  ‘The gates are a nuisance, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but they keep out trespassers and picnickers. Mr Marvell’s very particular about gates being always kept shut, otherwise people leave smashed beer bottles in his fields, and the Jerseys eat bits of glass and die a horrible death.’

  She nodded sideways again at some elegant mouse-coloured cows with huge black-rimmed eyes. ‘That’s why there are such fierce signs on the gates.’

  The signs said, ‘Department of the Environment Experimental Farm. Strictly NO admission except on Official Business’.

  ‘That’s the last gate,’ Cousin Eunice said as Cosmo clanged it shut. ‘Now we’re nearly home.’

  The track ran here, unfenced, between two prune-coloured fields of ploughed earth with faint green shoots in straight lines; then they skirted round a long high furry ridge of leafless trees, and Cousin Eunice put the Rolls into low gear.

  ‘It gets quite steep here, and there are badgers sometimes.’

  The track dropped downhill between high banks – a tunnel, with trees meeting overhead; then they came out into a circle of green meadow with the steep wooded hillside curving round it in a horseshoe.

  ‘Oh, I remember this,’ said Cosmo.

  ‘How old were you when you came here? Six? Well, it’s not a place to forget.’

  Ahead of them stood the house: old red-brown brick, partly timbered, black beams crossing it in a zigzag pattern, the roof gold with lichen, and big trees close by. Then the river, looping round, meeting the wood on either side, making an almost-island of the great meadow; and beyond the house a wooden footbridge leading to a real island, and the mill buildings.

  ‘Can you swim?’ said Cousin Eunice in sudden doubt. ‘You’ve been in the middle of Australia for so long – how many years?’

  ‘Five. Nearly six. But we used to go for holidays to a place called Coff’s Harbour. I can swim quite well,’ Cosmo assured her.

  ‘That’s a relief. Just the same you want to watch it by the weir. There’s a terrific undertow – you’d be scraped along the bottom for a hundred yards if you fell in there. So be careful, won’t you. The river’s okay – the Dribble, your father and I used to call it. There’s Mrs Tydings.’

  Cosmo had another sudden rush of memory at the sight of the figure – like a stocky, active shrew-mouse in a blue-and-white print apron, with black strap shoes and bobbed white hair kept fiercely back by one grip – who shot out of the door as the car slowed to a halt. Lob was already standing up, impatient to have the door opened.

  ‘Well, Miss Eunice, you found him all right then, I see. Made good time home, you did. Tea’s all ready. And after he’s had his tea, I expect he’d better go straight to bed. Thirty hours in the air – dear, dear! Well, you have shot up and no mistake,’ she said, surveying Cosmo. ‘I daresay it’s all them eucalyptus trees – they say it makes the climate healthy. I don’t suppose you remember me, do you?’

  ‘Yes I do,’ said Cosmo. ‘You gave me a duck’s egg, and lived in a little house across the lawn, and kept chickens, and had a cat called Bubbles, a grey cat.’

  ‘Well I never! I’ve still got her – she’s twelve now. Fancy you remembering. Come along now – I just put the tea to mash. And how’s your father keeping?’

  Cosmo made some noncommittal reply as he followed her indoors, carrying most of the luggage. The first room was huge – he found he remembered that too – brick floor, stairs leading up, a big hearth where a wood fire burned, a comfortable sagging sofa and armchairs, a refectory table strewn with papers and books. And a smaller table near the fireplace, set for tea.

  After tea – potato scones, blackberry jelly and nut cake – Cosmo did begin to feel as if he could sleep for a hundred years. But he said,

  ‘Can I go out and have a look round? Just for a little?’

  ‘Don’t get lost now, or fall in the weir!’ snapped Mrs Tydings, but Cousin Eunice said easily,

  ‘He’ll be all right, Emma; a bit of fresh air will help him get off to sleep. Go ahead, Cosmo; you’ll have to come in soon when it gets dark anyway.’

  The air outside smelt mysterious – of water, and twilight, and growing things. A path of huge stone flags led across the velvet square of mossy grass in the angle of the L-shaped house – and he had another memory: trying, at six years old, to jump from one to the next, and not quite being able to. Mark, four years older, could do it easily …

  He went t
o the footbridge first and stood on it for a long time, looking down into the clear water beneath, pouring, plaiting, racing past; it made very little noise, it was in such a hurry to reach the end of the island. But on the other side, past the mill buildings – he would not go into them tonight, they looked too dark and spooky, and Cousin Eunice had warned him that the floors were rotten and treacherous, and the machinery likely to fall through at any moment – on the other side of the island, there was the weir, tons of water hurling down in a smother of foam. The noise on this side was tremendous – funny that by the bridge it was so quiet. Indeed, when he had recrossed the island, and stood on the bridge again, he quite clearly heard a voice that seemed to be addressing him. It said, in a mild, conversational tone,

  ‘Oh, you’re back then. Where’s the other boy? Weren’t there two of you?’

  Surprised, he looked round; he had thought he was alone. He could see nobody, but the voice had seemed to come from the track that followed the riverbank to the corner of the meadow where the wood sloped up – opposite to the way they had come in the car. It was there, he remembered, that the brook came hopping down in a series of waterfalls – the brook he and Mark had dammed. And there had been a third boy helping them – what was his name? The voice had brought his memory back.

  But although Cosmo followed the track right into the wood and up the steep ascent, he saw no one. Whoever had spoken to him must have slipped away very quickly and quietly. He found the brook, though, smaller than he had remembered, and rather choked up with dead brushwood and leaves. I’ll clear it out tomorrow, he thought. Perhaps then whoever it was will come back.

  Up in the field above the wood he heard a sudden tremendous thunder of huge hoofs, and remembered Mr Marvell and his five Suffolk Punches, Prince, Blossom, Queenie, Duchess and Duke. One of them must be up there kicking his heels in a last massive caper before dark fell. They would be something to see tomorrow …

  From the house he heard Cousin Eunice’s shout.

  ‘Cosmo! Cooee! Time for bed.’

  His room was the same one that he had shared with Mark: long and cornery, with a wardrobe covering the whole of one end, a very low windowsill, and a sloping ceiling. A bookshelf held old books with gilt-edged pages that had belonged to Cosmo’s father.

  ‘Here’s a torch for the night,’ Cousin Eunice said. ‘Don’t forget where the bathroom is – down three steps and on the left. That’s new since you were here last. And my room is opposite, in case you need anything, or can’t sleep.’

  ‘Where’s Mrs Tydings?’

  ‘Oh, she’s still in her own cottage, across the lawn.’

  ‘Cousin Eunice,’ he said, ‘do you remember a boy who used to come and play with Mark and me when we were here before? His name was Len or Ken or Tom – something like that?’

  But Cousin Eunice – who had not, after all, been at home during that visit – could not remember any such boy.

  Stretched in his comfortably sagging bed, feeling like a wrung-out rag, Cosmo took his diary – a small, thick book – from his jacket pocket, and wrote: ‘Came to Courtoys Mill. Cousin Eunice seems okay. The island …’

  Then the pen rolled from his fingers and he slept.

  2. Elder Brothers

  A slapping, gusty rain was falling on Monday as Cousin Eunice drove Cosmo in to Oxford. He was wearing for the first time the Morningquest school uniform which had been ordered beforehand for him (his father had sent the measurements from Australia). The uniform was severe – black raincoat and blazer, white shirt, grey trousers, and a grey, black and white striped tie.

  ‘You look like a stockbroker,’ Cousin Eunice said.

  But she herself looked unexpectedly businesslike and formidable too, in a tailored suit and tights and her yellow hair done up very tight, instead of the jeans, sweater and loose plait she had worn over the weekend. In the back of the car she had chucked a voluminous black gown, to be worn when she gave her lectures, she said. ‘It frightens the students and makes them pay attention because I look like Dracula’s aunt.’ What was the lecture about, Cosmo wanted to know.

  ‘It’s about solving equations of the fifth degree, which are supposed to be insoluble.’

  ‘Are they? Why?’

  ‘Lots of things are still insoluble,’ Cousin Eunice said. ‘Even though solutions may exist, we can’t get at them. Or explain happenings, even though we can see them happening. I was reading, the other day, about a boy who makes sculptures out of paperclips, without touching them. He can do it even if the paperclips are sealed up inside a glass globe.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It isn’t known how. But he does it. And not by magic. Or rather, it’s what would have been called magic two hundred years ago – he’d probably have been burned as a witch. Now we know it’s something to do with radiation, with vibrations; people have moved bits of metal through walls in the same way, without making a hole in the wall, without bending the metal. What it amounts to is that we have got a wrong idea about matter. Some things can be in two places at once.’

  Cosmo felt that he was losing his grasp, but he hung on grimly.

  ‘Perhaps it’s our idea of time that’s wrong? At once – when you say two places at once – maybe that’s not what we think? When I was coming here from Australia, time kept sliding about; the plane got to some places before it had started. And if we were on a distant star looking at the earth, we’d still be seeing things that happened long ago.’

  ‘Yes; something like that.’ A great slap of rain poured over the windscreen, and she doubled the speed of the wipers. ‘I do hope you have a good science teacher at the Morningquest; Dick Soames said he thinks the man isn’t too bad. He’s called Mr Ramsden.’

  ‘I wish I didn’t have to go to school,’ Cosmo said. ‘I’m sure school was invented just because parents can’t be bothered to look after their children.’

  Cousin Eunice considered this.

  ‘Very possibly. But there are some advantages to it. After all, specially nowadays, you do have to learn a lot of things, just to keep alive; look how useless babies are, they don’t even know how to prise the lids off treacle tins. They wouldn’t last a day without help. What schools ought to be – I don’t say they are – is places where you can pick up all that kind of know-how very quickly and compactly. And, of course, make friends, learn how to get on with other people.’

  Cosmo felt he could have done without that part.

  Cousin Eunice said,

  ‘I haven’t talked to you about your mother and Mark.’

  He had been grateful for this.

  ‘I thought you’d probably rather not, just yet,’ she went on. ‘But, if you want to, at any time – sometimes it does help to talk –’

  Just at that moment he could not have talked. His throat was stuck. He could not even nod. Seeing this, she went on, changing the subject, ‘Now you must be sure and let me know if there’s anything at school that you need and haven’t got. I went all through that fearsome printed list, but lists don’t always cover everything. Mrs Robinson (she’s the matron) said it would be all right for me to phone you this evening at about five. And then if you find you need a – a briefcase, or a magnet, or something I haven’t thought of – I could get it for you and drop it at the school during the course of the week.’

  ‘But I thought you didn’t come in to Oxford again till Friday?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘sometimes I come in to go shopping. Old Lob likes a shopping trip now and then – he enjoys the town smells. And so does Emma.’

  Lob had elected to stay at home today after one look at the weather, settling down with a sigh on the big hearthstone that still held the warmth of yesterday’s blazing fire.

  It had been a good weekend, on the whole. Cosmo had discovered, on Saturday, that he did not, after all, want to dam the brook again, or not just yet; it made him remember Mark too vividly. Instead he climbed up through the wood and made friends with Mr Marvell and Prince and Blossom, who were pul
ling a plough through black, sticky, chocolate-cake earth, and then with Duke and Duchess, who were drawing a tumbril with mangolds for the sheep; he had been allowed to ride on Duchess’s broad back. And then he had explored the island, which was all grown over with elder bushes and was going to be very nettly soon; it would make a grand place for a fort. On Sunday he helped Cousin Eunice prune trees in the orchard and clip a yew hedge with very efficient electric clippers. In the afternoon it had rained, but then there was the great fire in the stone hearth, and all father’s books.

  His own were following by boat.

  ‘When you start making friends at school, you can bring people back for weekends,’ Cousin Eunice said. ‘There are lots of bedrooms.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t suppose I’ll want to do that.’

  ‘Here we are,’ she said.

  They had been driving down the Woodstock Road for what seemed an endless time; it was a wide road with large middle-aged houses on each side, set back behind low walls and shiny laurelly evergreen trees; some of the gardens had crocuses in them and a few daffodils. Now the Rolls drew to a stately halt in the semicircular drive of a particularly large, high house with a front all decorated with pinnacles and stone balconies; there were two huge stone balls ornamenting the balustrade on each side of the three front steps.

  ‘The Rolls ought to get you off to a good start, anyway,’ Cousin Eunice said.

  An old man (Goodger, the odd-job man, Cosmo later learned) came and took his luggage out of the boot, giving the car a respectful and affectionate look as he did so. Boys and girls of varying ages were pouring in through front and side gates; the boys wore the same uniform as Cosmo, the girls, under their black raincoats, had grey skirts and long black socks.

  A grey-haired woman (‘Mrs Robinson, the matron,’ hissed Cousin Eunice) was in the front hall to meet them. She had kind dark eyes and skin like uncooked pastry, pale and a little soggy; she wore a twinset and a houndstooth check skirt. ‘So this is Cosmo,’ she said in a gentle Scottish voice. ‘Well, and we’re very glad to have you with us, Cosmo, even so late in the term. Now I’m sure you have lots of things to do, Professor Doom, so I’ll not be keeping you.’