Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  “Who are these Toes?”

  “A large clan. Professor McToe, Archdeacon Toe, Colonel Toe, Sir Jasper Toe, Lady Emily Toe and their four children, Mercy, Percy, Chris and Bliss.”

  “I see.” Pat reflected for a moment, then said, “No wonder the nuns were glad to see the back of her. Does she need a new calculator?”

  “I got her one in Dorchester today. She is a thoroughly well-behaved, sensible child,” Elspeth countered calmly.

  “Well, it’s a good thing Fortuneswell won’t allow houses in Glifonis to have TV sets; she may have a chance of remaining so.”

  A few days later Lord Fortuneswell arrived on one of his periodic visits of inspection, landing by helicopter at the top of the combe through which the main thoroughfare of the village wound its zigzag course.

  Carefully picking his steps, he crossed the builders’ operational area studded with lumps of raw cement and piles of sand (the plot scheduled to be occupied, at a later date, by the village hall) and walked down to No.2, Glifonis, the cottage occupied by the two friends and their adopted child.

  Already, thanks to Elspeth’s gardening expertise, the small paved forecourt in front of the house dazzled with pots of geraniums and begonias, and some late lilies; a thriving young fig-tree and a healthy vine were trained up a trellis. Underwear on the clothesline added a touch of Greek domesticity.

  Elspeth Morgan owned several worn but good oriental rugs, and these she had brought with her since they were compatible with the Greek furnishings; two of them had been laid to air in the forecourt, and a child sat on one of them, making a careful intricate pattern of pebbles and tiny scraps of paper which she had laid in groups among the triangular birdlike shapes of the woven pattern. She was addressing her arrangements in a low, precise, authoritative tone.

  “So, Colonel Toe, you will lead the attack through the Azure Gap. Your troops are arrayed behind you. — On your toes, all of you. And toe the line,” she added in a louder voice. “You must watch out for dragons — they are unfortunately numerous just there. Professor McToe, your camp is here, on the island. You can only escape by boat across the lake. Archdeacon Toe, you and the doctor must remain with the women and children. You had better hide underneath those hooks — they are great rocks, which may fall down on you if you shout. Sir Jasper, you must ride your faithful steed through the rocky mountain pass, here, to summon help from Gold Kingy — you have to pass dreadful dangers on your way, winged lions and three-tailed eagles. All around the edge of the lake are the armies of Black Marby. They have bows and spears and crossbows and rockets full of soap — oh, look what you have done!” she broke off to exclaim, admonishingly, to Lord Fortuneswell, who, as he ducked under the clothesline, had destroyed a large part of her dispositions by walking on them. He stopped, vaguely aware of the child’s disapproval, though not of its cause.

  “Can you tell me if Miss Limbourne is in, or Miss Morgan?”

  Wholly unused to children, he did not welcome her presence; she had not yet arrived on his previous visits. He addressed her in a cold, constrained tone, being doubtful if she were of an age to reply rationally. She seemed too small, he thought distastefully — almost miniature in her proportions — a puny little creature with hair braided up on top of her head and a round face whose neatly defined features and large dark grey eyes surveyed the visitor with dispassion.

  “They have gone down to the harbour; they will be back very soon,” was her reply, delivered in a clear, self-possessed tone.

  “I see. Then I had better go down and find them.”

  “You may stay here if you like.”

  “No, I’m in a hurry.”

  He had not the least intention of remaining to make conversation with the child. But as he turned to retrace his steps — destroying yet more of her battle deployments — she asked him:

  “Have you ever been to a funeral?”

  “Er — yes, I suppose so; yes, I have. Why?”

  “How many people were there? As well as the dead person?”

  “I — I imagine about a dozen. Do —”

  “When do they put the dead person in the box?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see,” he said shortly. “Why don’t you play with your toys and stop asking questions?”

  “You have made a dreadful mess of Black Marby’s army. I shall have to arrange it all over again.”

  She looked at him, frowning, obviously waiting for an apology. Since none would have been forthcoming, it was lucky that the voices of Pat and Elspeth were heard at this moment, as the two friends climbed the footway.

  “A sand beach would be more in keeping, I’d say —”

  “But you have to be realistic, Bets —”

  Pat’s voice was clear and authoritative, Elspeth’s clear and resonant. It was plain from whom the child had acquired her precision of diction. The two women greeted Lord Fortuneswell cheerfully and invited him in for coffee, but from this he excused himself, explaining that he had to be in Dorchester by eleven for a meeting of the Planning Committee. He hated impromptu hospitality.

  “I just called to ask if you would keep an eye out for the dredger, which is due to arrive from Poole today; when it comes, could you phone me at this number? It should be here by now. You have to keep these fellows up to the mark.”

  He wrote on a card which he gave Pat. As yet the two friends possessed the only telephone in the settlement.

  “Certainly.” Pat was brisk. “No trouble, we’ll be here all day. The rest of the marble slabs have arrived, you’ll be glad to know, and Vassily is going to lay them tomorrow. After that, access to the harbour will be much easier.”

  “Yes, well, about time, too —” he was on his way back up the hill already, quick and absorbed in other matters; but he turned to give them the smile which was their due.

  He flicks it on like a torch, thought Elspeth with detachment, moving off to test for dryness the tea-cloths which she had laid along the cypress hedge.

  “Who was that man, Aunt Elspeth?” inquired the child, occupied in careful rearrangement of her pebbles and scraps of paper.

  “That was Lord Fortuneswell, who owns this land.”

  “The houses too?”

  “Yes.”

  “He is a very careless person,” said the child coldly. “He should not have kicked over my armies and never said he was sorry.”

  “He probably didn’t notice what he had done. He’s a very busy businessman with a lot of things on his mind.”

  “Just the same, he should have said he was sorry. Do businessmen have worse manners than ordinary people? And when I asked him if he had been to a funeral, he couldn’t tell me when they put the dead person in the box.”

  “Very likely he didn’t know. Grown-ups don’t always know everything.”

  Miss Morgan paused a moment, however, thoughtfully, hugging the bundle of clean dry washing, as she surveyed her ward over the top of it. Then she said, “Come along in. It’s time for your glass of milk and your computer lesson.”

  Negotiations were already under way regarding Shuna’s admission, when she should have reached age twelve, to an Oxford women’s college; her mathematics were already well in advance of the sixth form standard at the local school.

  “Your friend seems to be coming down the hill again,” observed Elspeth, ten minutes later, glancing up the steep bank that formed their garden boundary, to the road above. “He must have forgotten something.”

  “Unlike him,” commented Pat, skimming cream from a pan of goats’ milk just inside the front door.

  “Hullo — I’m back again; sorry to trouble you.” Fortuneswell’s annoyed twitch of smile conveyed that he was not sorry, and took it for granted that nothing he might ask would be less than a fitting tribute to him.

  “What can we do?” inquired Pat with brisk goodwill.

  “Some f
ool has dumped a whole mountain of rubble at the top of the hill. I can’t get past it to my helicopter. May I use your phone?”

  He was already making for it. “Asses!” remarked Pat with good-humoured vigour. “They’re always doing things like that. They never think.”

  She clomped off to put on a kettle. By the time Fortuneswell had expostulated, listened, expostulated again, and finally crashed down the receiver, old Elspeth, her crumpled face full of benevolence, was proffering a small round silver tray which contained a cup of Nescafe, black as tar, and two home-made scones on a plate accompanied by a large lump of butter, a dollop of gooey strawberry jam, and a huge clot of thick butter-coloured cream. “All made on the premises,” she chirped, beaming up at his thunderous countenance. “We’re planning to serve teas, once the tourists find Glifonis. — How soon can they shift the rubble?”

  “Not for an hour! The man’s round on the other side of the headland. — Oh — thank you — I don’t — as a rule —” he glanced at the scones with disfavour.

  “I know — I know — it ought to be ouzo and tsatsiki,” soothed Elspeth, easily reading his thought — though what he really had in mind was Bath Olivers and Clicquot — “but sit down, do, and relax; it’s all you can do.”

  “I suppose so.” With a very ill grace he sat, sipped his coffee and made little effort to conceal his shudder.

  “Since you have to wait, perhaps you’d care to go through the list of people who have applied for houses?” Pat suggested, pulling a typewritten sheet from a toppling pile of books and papers.

  “Oh, I’m quite sure anybody vetted by you will be perfectly —”

  “But still I think it would be best if you were at least familiar with the names.”

  “Oh — very well.”

  He was having hideous trouble with the scones, intensely fragile and crumbly, while the butter, straight from the monumental refrigerator, was hard as ivory. Elspeth watched his struggles indulgently. “If I’d only known you’d be here, I would have taken the butter out to warm up twenty minutes ago. All the equipment that you installed in these cottages is really first-class, Lord Fortuneswell,” she assured him. “Every appliance quite the best of its kind.”

  “Good,” he snapped, wrapping a lump of butter in crumbs and jam.

  “You’ve forgotten the cream,” remarked Shuna, gravely observant of his difficulties.

  “It can go in my coffee.”

  “There’s hardly room.”

  “Why aren’t you having some?” he demanded in exasperation, trying to deflect her attention.

  “It isn’t my lunchtime,” explained the child. “Also I’m not allowed cream. It makes me bilious.”

  Conscious that their unwilling guest’s irritation was rising high, Pat began reading aloud the list of names.

  “Llewellyn Pool and his wife and son.”

  “The architect? Shouldn’t have thought he’d need to apply for a —”

  “He’s working on the V & A project, he wanted peace and quiet,” Pat said quickly.

  “Oh well — in that case. He’s a first-rate architect, I believe. But wasn’t there something about the son? How old’s that boy?”

  “Seventeen. He’s got a place at Cambridge,” added Pat with a frowning glance at Elspeth who had opened her mouth to speak. “A brilliant boy, I understand.”

  “Very well. Just so long as there’s no —”

  “No eggs, no meat, no cheese, no coconut oil,” remarked the child Shuna to herself in a quiet, distinct tone. She pressed a button of her calculator and surveyed the result.

  “Hush, Shuna, we are talking business,” Pat reproved her mildly. Looking at the list she added, “Then there is Laurence Noble.”

  “The composer.” Pat nodded. “He won’t bring a whole troop of shrill boy friends with him?”

  “Only a dog, I understand.”

  “No dogs. Tell him I won’t have dogs here.”

  Pat shrugged and made a note, remarking as she did so, “He’s writing a life of Liszt and composing a Sea Elegy.”

  “Very well. Who else?”

  “A couple called Goadby from the Midlands. Their child died in an accident, they want peace and quiet to recover from the tragedy.”

  “Sounds all right. Next?”

  “Sophie Pitt, the actress.”

  “Oh yes, I met her while they were shooting that thing at Knoyle. Wants to study a part, is that it?”

  “Yes, she says now she’s older she finds it hard to memorize unless she is off on her own.”

  “Okay. Next?”

  “Chicot and Laura.”

  “The singers? Definitely no.”

  Elspeth opened her mouth, but Pat frowned, shaking her head. Fortuneswell went on, “I will not have anybody here who has been in any way connected with drug abuse. Is that understood?”

  “Can’t say I blame you,” Pat remarked, methodically crossing out the names.

  “It was a long time ago. I believe they are quite reformed characters now — busy helping youngsters to resist the habit,” Elspeth observed in a gentle tone, neither pleading nor extenuating.

  “Just the same, no! There must be plenty of other applicants.”

  “Oh, plenty.”

  “If there’s any problem with the preliminary screening, just get on to my office; they can provide all the research necessary.” Fortuneswell glanced again, impatiently, out of the window. “Who is that?” he demanded testily.

  A man was walking up the hill that crossed the window on a diagonal. As he walked he swept the paving from side to side with a birch broom.

  “That?” Pat glanced out. “Oh, that’s Odd Tom. He helps the Greeks. If it were not for Odd Tom, no cleaning would get done round here; at first they sent three men with a vacuum. Odd Tom can do in one day what took them a week.”

  Fortuneswell was not interested. “They must have shifted that pile at the top of the hill by now. I’ll be on my way —”

  “You should see our Greek pavement,” Pat said.

  He made a movement of wild impatience, but Elspeth chirped, “Yes, yes, show him the Greek pavement!” so, with visible lack of enthusiasm, he followed Pat to a side entrance. This opened on a small walled courtyard. Its floor, in faithful imitation of Greek village tradition, had been inlaid with black and white pebbles the size of walnuts, set in a conventional pattern of dolphins and wave-crests. The wall enclosing the yard, cut into the steep hillside, contained a flight of steps which led up to a terraced garden, already planted with vegetables, a shed, and another wall, topped with a cypress hedge bordering the zigzag main street.

  Even Fortuneswell, eager to be elsewhere, could not help admiring the pavement.

  “That really is charming. Excellent work.”

  “The pebbles come from Chesil Bank,” Pat told him.

  “Who did it? One of the Greeks?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. It was Odd Tom, the man you saw before. We showed him a photograph and he soon picked up the idea. Our niece Shuna helped him.”

  “Odd Tom is a splendid character,” added Elspeth, who had hobbled out by this time, accompanied by little Shuna, but Fortuneswell was already striding up the half-completed marble causeway without waiting to hear more.

  “He’s rather abrupt, isn’t he,” remarked Elspeth, looking after him. As usual, there was neither approval nor condemnation in her tone.

  “Oh well, I’m sure he’s never had to live with burst pipes, or clinkered boilers, or cars that won’t start,” said Pat. “People of his kind expect to get through life at a faster rate than we do. A heap of rubble in his path is probably something that hasn’t happened to him in twenty years.”

  “Yes; and such people are likelier to die of high blood-pressure or heart disease in their late fifties than we are,” observed Elspeth, who was seventy-five.<
br />
  “Here’s Odd Tom,” said Shuna. “He just missed meeting the Lord.”

  “I daresay he passed him on the road.”

  Odd Tom came drifting down the marble steps like a sheet of waste paper. He had a curious sidelong gait, light, uncertain, without apparent purpose, tacking a little from side to side, but in the end steering himself towards some dimly proposed goal. Taking no notice of the ladies, who lingered in the sunshine on the front step of their house, he veered sideways and entered the small yard that he had paved, passing through the wicket gate at the right of the house. In the yard he stood meditative, feet apart, staring down at his work, with no discernible expression on his face. Odd Tom’s mouth hung slightly open, as a rule, showing a slit of dark, for he had no teeth. His narrow little face was covered by white-and-grey stubble, which never seemed to grow any longer. A flat, navy blue cap sat on his balding head; if removed it revealed a fringe of downy white hair at the back, above a brown seamed neck. He wore a dingy white turtle-necked sweater, the collar drawn up under his chin as high as it would reach; the inner edge of this collar was black with grime.

  No one knew where Odd Tom lived. In a barrel on Poole Harbour, somebody had suggested. Over the white sweater hung a greasy and ragged black windcheater, his thin old grey trousers were frayed at the ankle and his grimy white sneakers had holes in their toes. He exuded a strong and salty smell, like bacon or smoked fish. This smell was one of the things that little Shuna had first liked about him.

  “Where’s Arkwright?” she asked him now, and he nodded briefly backward. A gigantic tabby cat was picking its way with majestic care across the mudpatch which would one day be the front garden of No. 3, Glifonis.

  “Did you see the Lord?” Shuna asked Tom. “That man who just left? He was Lord Fortuneswell.”

  “Eye aw i’” replied Odd Tom. “Eh ee aw ouee.” Due to the lack of teeth, his conversation was incomprehensible to most people, but Shuna understood him perfectly. She had helped him for hours over the paving of the court, and they talked all the time as they worked. It was she who had discovered the cat’s name. “It was because his wife was called Jenny,” she explained to Pat and Elspeth.