Island of the Aunts

by Eva Ibbotson

  “Wait for me, wait for me,” shouted Old Ursula to the other mermaids, and this time they did wait for the poor old thing and swam out to the rock they had chosen, holding Walter aloft, and sat there practising a song that Myrtle had taught them. It was a Lapp reindeer-herding song and not particularly suitable but it was the most Northern song that Myrtle had been able to find.

  In Art’s kitchen, the iced buns he’d made from the boobrie’s egg overflowed the larder, were stuffed into flour bins…and still they came from his oven.

  The Sybil’s face turned from blue to purple; her washed feet glistened in the light.

  The Captain had pushed his bed right against the window and wouldn’t take time off even to eat.

  Only Lambert felt nothing and noticed nothing and spent the day crouched over his telephone trying to get through to his father, even though his battery was now completely flat.

  By the late afternoon the shore was packed with creatures of every sort. Like people lining the route of a royal wedding or a funeral, they had come early to get a good place from which they could see. There were sea otters and jellyfish, there were anemones and starfish peering out of their pools; there were shoals of haddock and flounders and codlings…Some of the animals lined the north shore, others waited in the bay by the house; the birds and rabbits and mice and voles watched from the hill. The children could hardly eat their tea and the aunts did not nag them. They too were having trouble with Art’s boobrie buns.

  The sun began to dip behind the horizon. The Hum, which had been steady all day, began to change its rhythm and every so often there was this strange gap filled with a kind of exasperated rumbling.

  “Please don’t make us go to bed,” begged Minette, and Fabio said he wasn’t going to bed and if they tried to make him there’d be trouble.

  But when darkness came and the old clock in the kitchen struck nine, and ten, and eleven, everyone lost hope. At midnight the children went to bed of their own accord; the lugworms and the water fleas and the starfish crawled back into the sand or burrowed under stones. On their rock, the mermaids stopped singing and the boobrie fell silent on her nest.

  “We must have been mistaken,” said the aunts bleakly—and they too went to bed.

  But when they woke in the morning, there was a new island out in the bay.

  The island slept. It slept the sleep of the dead after the long journey—and round it and on it and under it, the creatures who had come with it slept too.

  The Hum had stopped. Only a slight sighing, a soft soughing, could be heard as he drew in breath and let it out.

  For the watchers on the shore, this second welcome was different from the first. It seemed to have nothing to do with velvet bows and polished shoes. It came from somewhere deeper down.

  Fabio and Minette stood side by side, half hidden by an old bent alder which grew by the brook where it ran into the sea. They couldn’t find any words. There weren’t any to find. The aunts, down on the shore, were holding hands like children.

  On their rock, the mermaids were not singing and when Walter began to grizzle, Loreen shushed him angrily. For the kraken slept and the excited welcome they had planned had become a vigil. No one would wake the great beast: not the naak with his cane, not the boobrie on her nest; no one.

  They waited for one hour, for two…The sunshine grew stronger. The sea was turning the most amazing colours, as if a rainbow was hidden underneath the waves, and the air as they breathed in tasted like gorgeous fruit.

  “It’s like the beginning of the world,” whispered Minette.

  And then the kraken sneezed!

  Everything changed after that. The moles and the mice and the rabbits on the hill were blown backwards and righted themselves again; Aunt Etta’s bun flew from its mooring of hairpins; the boobrie let out a startled squeal…and everybody laughed.

  And the kraken lifted his head out of the water and began to swim very slowly, very carefully so as not to swamp the shore, towards the bay.

  He was facing the house now, facing the aunts and the children.

  Minette, and Fabio beside her, made exactly the same noise: a gasp of wonder and surprise. For in spite of all they had been told about the kraken—about his goodness, about his effect on the sea, about his healing powers—they had not been able to imagine anything very different from a gigantic whale.

  But the kraken’s eyes were not in the least like the eyes of a whale. They were huge and round and golden: to gaze into them was like looking into a lamp which did not burn or dazzle but warmed and comforted. His nostrils were small and deep, but his mouth was large and generous, curving across his face like a bow, and tilted upwards at the corners.

  As he moved towards them, the mermaids started to sing, croakily at first, then more strongly. Herbert swam beside the kraken’s head, solemn and proud.

  And now they saw that his body was not black as they had imagined but dappled in soft colours—the chestnut of a chaffinch’s breast, the rose of a stippled trout, the blue grey of a moonstone—all were in his skin as it caught the light.

  But he had stopped. He was looking at the aunts. He began to speak.

  Unfortunately he spoke in Polar. It sounded like the rumbling and clashing of icebergs and no one understood a word.

  Aunt Etta hurried into the house and fetched a megaphone. “I’m sorry, we don’t understand,” she shouted.

  But the kraken had already gathered that. He tried again. This time he spoke Norwegian because Norway is further south than the Pole, and he tried only one word but still nobody understood.

  “Could you try English?” shouted Aunt Etta through the megaphone.

  There was a long pause while the kraken thought about this. Then he took a deep breath and said:

  “Children?”

  His accent was strange but they understood him perfectly and the relief was tremendous.

  “What about children?” yelled Aunt Etta through her megaphone.

  The kraken repeated the word.

  “Children?” he asked. “Are there…here…children?”

  The aunts talked excitedly among themselves. Did that mean that the kraken wanted children, or that he didn’t?

  But anyway none of them were able to tell a lie. They moved over to the alder tree, pulled out Fabio and Minette and led them down to the sand. They didn’t even think about Lambert who was still shut in his room. Lambert wasn’t a child; he was a stunted adult.

  There was a pause while the kraken looked at Fabio and Minette. Have we got it wrong? thought the children. Are we going to be eaten after all?

  Then the kraken smiled. It was the most amazing smile; his great mouth curved up and up and his eyes glowed with warmth.

  And then he sank and the birds that had been resting on him flew upwards like a white cloud.

  He was gone for a few minutes—and when he surfaced again there was someone on his back.

  The someone was very small compared to the kraken; not much bigger than a mini car or a dolphin—but it was absolutely clear who he was. He had the same round eyes, the same wide mouth, the same rainbow-coloured skin…

  But he was worried.

  “Will I be all right, Father?” said the kraken’s son, as he had said again and again on the journey.

  “You will be all right,” said the kraken as he had said a hundred times. And then: “Look—there are children to play with and care for you,”

  They spoke in Polar but what they said was perfectly clear to everyone. In particular what was clear was the look the infant kraken gave to Fabio and Minette as they stood quietly on the shore.

  And to the aunts there came a great thunderclap of understanding. When they had kidnapped the children they had done it because they wanted help, but even at the time it felt strange to find themselves behaving like criminals. Now they realized that there had been a Higher Purpose, as there so often is.

  For they understood that the kraken was bringing his child to the Island to be cared for whil
e he circled the oceans of the world, and that he wanted him to be with people of his own age, not elderly aunts.

  “We are most truly blessed,” said Aunt Etta. She still had her megaphone to her mouth and the word “blessed” echoed over the whole Island, and was taken up by all the watchers on the shore.

  “Blessed,” nodded the stoorwom, and “Blessed,” said the naak (but in Estonian) and “Blessed,” cried the mermaids from the rocks.

  Only Minette and Fabio were silent. Minette was remembering how she had wanted to serve the great beast when first she heard of him. Fabio, on the other hand, was wondering what infant krakens ate.

  Chapter 13

  The kraken stayed for several days, resting after his long journey from the Arctic. Mostly he lay quietly in the bay keeping an eye on his child, but just having him there made everything flourish.

  The children would run down to the shore barefoot every morning.

  “It isn’t just that the sand is more yellow,” said Minette. “It’s as if it feels more like itself. Like sand is meant to be.”

  It was the same with everything while the kraken guarded them. The turf was greener and springier, the wheeling birds were whiter and the patterns they made in the sky were lovelier.

  Everybody on the Island felt it—everyone except Lambert who stayed huddled in his room.

  “Imagine we hadn’t been kidnapped,” said Fabio. “Imagine we’d never known there was such a thing as a kraken!”

  If the kraken had been anyone else—if he’d been one of those saints whose feet people wanted to touch because they were so holy, or a pop star from whose head silly people tried to cut bits of hair—the aunts would have been worried because absolutely everyone wanted to be where he was. Art rowed out in the little dinghy very early one morning, and they could see him talking earnestly to the kraken’s head, and when he came back he was different.

  “I told him,” he said to the aunts. “I never told no one else and I didn’t tell you neither, but, well…when he opened those great eyes of his I saw it didn’t matter, so I’ll tell you now. All those years it’s been on my mind but I was afraid to come clean.”

  And then he told them that he hadn’t killed a man at all. He’d been in prison for shoplifting but that didn’t seem very exciting so he’d told the lie because he thought the aunts would think him more manly.

  “But when I was with him, I reckoned you’d forgive me,” he said—and of course they did, and said that telling the truth was far more manly than killing people, which any creep could do if he set his mind to it and had the right tools.

  The stoorworm swam out every day and slithered on to the kraken’s back and they could hear the clatter and boom as they spoke together in Icelandic. No one knew what the kraken said to him but when he came back the worm was always calmer and never said anything about being too long for his ideas and needing to be made shorter by plastic surgery.

  The mermaids too became different. They left the de-oiling shed and swam round the wonderful beast and sang—and though Oona was still croaky her voice came slowly back as she laid her head against the kraken’s hide and the memory of the chinless Lord Brasenott became fainter and fainter.

  As for the boobrie, she did something extraordinary. She plucked Aunt Coral’s cloak from her shoulders and spread it over the eggs with her beak and then she flapped down to the bay and sat on the kraken’s back and honked at him.

  She honked for a whole hour and it was hard to believe that he understood her, but he did. She was telling him how sad she was without her husband and asking the kraken to look out for him when he swam on again in case he had lost the way.

  “He was always a forgetful bird,” she said.

  Herbert hardly came out of the water; he was always close to the kraken in the bay. He had a new strength and dignity now that he knew he would spend his life as a seal, because there is nothing more calming than making up one’s mind. Myrtle missed playing the cello to him very much, but she understood. As for Herbert’s mother, who was very old now and very frail, she completely stopped nagging him, for she realized that if Herbert had decided to become a man with trousers and a zip he would only have been able get up to the kraken in a boat and speak to him through a megaphone and that would hardly be the same.

  But it wasn’t just the special creatures, those with a touch of magic in them, who wanted to see and talk to the kraken. Everything that moved or crawled or swam wanted to be with him. Processions of sludge worms, schools of pilchards and puffer fish, platoons of lobsters and countless moon snails, all made their way towards him.

  “Is he getting enough rest?” Aunt Etta wondered.

  But when she asked the kraken he only turned his marvellous eyes towards her and said (at least she thought he said—his English was rather strange) that there was no living thing he did not welcome.

  There were two people, though, who did not row out to the kraken and tell him their troubles. Minette did not ask him how to make her parents kind to each other, and Fabio did not ask him how to blow up the headmaster of Greymarsh Towers. This was partly because their past lives now seemed quite unreal to the children, but it was mostly because they were busier than they had ever been in their lives.

  For the kraken wasn’t just resting. He was watching. And what he was watching was his son. Or rather, he was watching how Fabio and Minette coped with his son.

  It had been difficult for the kraken, deciding what to do with his child. At first he thought he would put off his healing journey round the world till his son was older. But baby krakens grow very slowly—he would have had to wait for more than a hundred years for the child to grow up, and when he realized what a mess the world was in, he knew he couldn’t risk it.

  Then he thought maybe he could leave his motherless infant in the Arctic among the walruses and polar bears and narwhals he was used to. But this plan had gone down badly with his son who wanted to travel with his father.

  “You can’t. It’s too far,” the kraken had said.

  It takes a year and a day to circle the oceans of the world and it was much too far. The baby swam slowly and often needed lifts on his father’s back and no one can really give himself to healing the world when they are worried about their child.

  The kraken had heard about the Island and the caring aunts as he heard about everything, and at last he had decided to see if it was a good place to leave his son. But he had not been quite happy. Aunts were fine things but these were aunts without children and the baby kraken needed people of his own age. Or rather people who were a bit older but could remember the troubles and the games and the tantrums of being very young.

  Which was why the first word he said when he arrived was “Children?” and why now he watched Fabio and Minette most carefully out of his golden eyes. If they were not suitable as childminders, he meant to give up his journey and go home. Once you have children nothing matters more than their safekeeping. Every parent in the world knows that.

  The baby kraken was not at all like his father. He was still soft and blobby as though his body hadn’t quite decided what was going to happen to it. Bulges came out of him sometimes, which were almost arms and legs but not the kind of arms you could do very much with, and not the kind of legs that were much use for walking. He would lose these later and become streamlined and suited to the sea, but at the moment he was rather like a large beanbag and one never knew what kind of shape he would decide to be.

  And yet one could see that he was the mighty kraken’s son. He had the same large wondrous eyes, the same wide mouth which smiled easily, the same interested nostrils which seemed to hoover up the scents of land and sea.

  Like his father, he too could make the creatures of the sea come to him and when he rested in a rockpool, the barnacles and whelks and brittlestars all seemed to glow with happiness and health.

  But there was one thing he could not do.

  “Can he hum?” Fabio asked on the first day.

  They were
having lunch. Lambert had bolted his food and rushed back to his room where he lay on his bed with the curtains drawn. He still believed that he was being drugged and that the strange creatures he was seeing were not really there, but seeing a whole island that wasn’t really there was driving him a little crazy.

  Aunt Etta shook her head. “He’s too young. A kraken humming is a bit like a boy’s voice breaking; it just happens when he’s ready. It’s a pity, because that’s how krakens speak to each other across distances.”

  “Is there any way of teaching him to do it sooner?” asked Minette. “Could his father…?”

  But Aunt Etta said, no—it would just happen when the time was right. She didn’t add that his father was worried, knowing that there was no way his child could call him once he went away.

  But if he couldn’t hum, the kraken was beginning to speak. The trouble for Fabio and Minette was what he spoke. With his father he spoke Polar but other languages got mixed up with it, and when he started off in English he quickly wandered off into Norwegian or Swedish or even Finnish which the children did not understand at all.

  But Fabio himself had needed to learn English not so long ago and he remembered that what he had learnt first was the name of things to eat.

  After that it was easy. For the young kraken did not just feed on the plankton in seawater like his father—he was still growing and needed solid food which he ground up with his gums rather like an old man with no teeth.

  “This is a sausage,” Fabio would say, holding up one of Art’s bangers and the kraken would repeat “Soss”, or “Spag” when it was spaghetti of which he was very fond, and of course he soon learn to say “More” or “No!” which all young creatures learn to say very early.

  By now he was letting the children play with him in the water, throwing a ball or pretending to hide behind a rock. He would even follow them in the dinghy—but always after a short time he went back to his father and stayed very close to his side, for the bond between those two was very, very strong. And though the great kraken was more certain with every day that passed that he had found the right place to leave his son, his heart was heavy at the thought of the parting that must soon come.