“I must get them a kitchen,” said Gwinny. “They insist on a hot meal a day. But Malcolm lends me his lamp very kindly.”
Malcolm was looking shyly at Johnny, to see what he thought of the people. “It’s a terribly good idea,” Johnny said. “I wish I’d thought of it.”
“We didn’t do anything as good as the Ogre’s pipe,” said Malcolm. “I thought Douglas was going to burst when he saw it.”
“My people are quite as good!” Gwinny said indignantly.
“What else did you do?” asked Johnny.
Malcolm looked a little shamefaced. “Well – Douglas did it actually. He said it was to pay Caspar out.”
“Did what?” Johnny asked suspiciously.
“I think I’d better show you,” Malcolm said glumly, and got up.
Since Gwinny was quite as anxious as Johnny to know just what Douglas had done, she followed the boys downstairs, into the noise and smell of the party again. To their surprise, Malcolm took them into Johnny’s and Caspar’s room this time, and over to the cupboard.
“In here,” he said, opening it. “You’ll curse.” Then he said, in considerable dismay, “Oh dear!”
Johnny thrust him aside and looked in. On the bottom shelf, comfortably curled up in the remains of Douglas’s old sweater, were the two largest toffee bars yet. They were the dark treacly kind and had probably been the large sevenpenny size to begin with. By now, they were as big as conger eels. And, in a wriggling heap beside them, were at least a dozen tiny toffee bars, still too small to have cast their red and yellow wrappers.
“Oh!” exclaimed Gwinny. “They’ve had babies! How sweet!”
“Sweet!” Johnny said bitterly. All he could think about was the number of them. “Oh, blast Douglas! And I daren’t tell Caspar. He’d go mad!” Talking of Caspar took his mind to other things. A troublesome thought struck him. “I say! Did I turn the bathwater off, or not?”
Caspar, meanwhile, was still trying to get hold of Douglas. He could see him in the doorway of the sitting room as he came downstairs. But Sally was at the foot of the stairs talking to the lady who thought he was Douglas’s brother.
“Darling, what have you been doing?” she said. “Do, please, stop disappearing like this.”
“Sorry,” said Caspar. “It’s the younger ones, really.”
“Ah, you take your new responsibilities seriously, do you?” said the lady, and made Caspar want to scream quietly.
He rescued his tray and set off towards where he had seen Douglas, but Sally said, “Not that way, Caspar. You go to the dining room.”
Caspar pushed his way towards the dining room, meaning to go the other way as soon as he was out of sight. The more he thought about it, the less he trusted Johnny and Malcolm either to throw the toffee bars out of a window or to melt them without letting most of them loose. Only Douglas, he felt, could see that they did it. And he thought he ought to set Douglas’s mind at rest about Malcolm too. But luck was against him. The Ogre was in the doorway of the dining room. He was not pleased with Caspar, and let him know it.
“Oh, are you with us again?” he said in a loud voice. “I hoped you’d gone for good.” A number of people around the Ogre laughed heartily. Caspar thought it a typically mean and Ogrish thing to say. “They’re shouting for food in the dining room,” added the Ogre.
So Caspar was forced to go into the dining room without having found Douglas. He thought the best thing to do was to work his way to the other end, go out through the kitchen and from the kitchen to the hall. But it took him some time. All the people packed into the dining room seemed ravenous for food suddenly. They called Caspar this way and that and wanted to know if there were any sausages.
“I’ll go and see,” Caspar promised. He was more uneasy than ever, and he felt he simply had to find out what Johnny was up to. Leaving his nearly empty tray on the sideboard, he pushed his way to the other end of the dining room.
He had nearly fought his way to the kitchen door, when something warm splashed on his wrist. It was followed by a warm wet splash on his nose. He looked up. Most of the people round Caspar were looking up too, and looking annoyed. The reason was a brownish spreading stain on the ceiling. It doubled in size while Caspar looked at it, and the drips came faster and faster.
Caspar dived for the kitchen door. The drips, at the same moment, turned into a waterfall. Water fairly thundered down. Sally opened the kitchen door, holding a tray of sausages. She and Caspar stared at one another through a steaming cascade.
“What’s happening?” said Sally.
“I’ll find out,” said Caspar. He rushed through the waterfall into the kitchen and ran, steaming and gasping, into the hall. Water was coming through there too, and he got another ducking, shut his eyes and ran into Douglas coming the other way.
“What the—?”
“They’ve let the bath run over,” said Caspar. “Come on.”
He and Douglas struggled for the stairs. From the dining room came the sounds and smells of a tropical rainstorm. Sopping people, crying out with dismay, came surging out into the hall and made it difficult for the two boys to get through at all. When they reached the foot of the stairs, the lady who thought they were brothers was no longer there. Her place had been taken by a fat jolly man who playfully prevented them from getting by – unless the lady had turned into a man. Caspar felt anything was possible just then.
“What’s going on, eh?” said the fat man, blocking the end of the stairs.
“Accident,” said Douglas. “Please let us through.”
“Reinforcements at hand! Taran-taran-tarar!” shouted the fat man and sat heavily on the bottom stair. They climbed over him desperately and he tried to hit them as they went.
They pounded up the stairs and reached the bathroom at the same time as Johnny, Malcolm and Gwinny. The door was open. The landing was a fog of steam. Through it, dimly, they saw the bathroom floor awash and the bath brimful of slightly toffee-coloured water.
“You stupid little oaf!” Douglas thundered at Johnny.
“I told you not to!” bawled Caspar.
“I didn’t mean—” said Johnny.
The Ogre breasted the steam and materialised in the bathroom door. He was carrying the backbrush. “Which of you did this?” he enquired in an unpleasantly quiet voice.
“Er,” said Johnny. “Me.”
“And me,” said Malcolm bravely, though he was white with terror. “I distracted his attention at a crucial moment.”
“Then,” said the Ogre, “the rest of you get downstairs and share out umbrellas or something. You two come in here.”
Johnny found he had been right to postpone being hit by the Ogre. It was an exceedingly unpleasant experience. To Caspar’s mind, the most unpleasant part was what the Ogre said to Sally after the last draggled guest had departed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sally did not appear at breakfast the next day. “Your mother’s feeling rather tired,” the Ogre said, when Gwinny asked. No one was surprised.
The Ogre’s idea of breakfast was thick, lumpy porridge, which he ate with salt and seemed to enjoy. No one else found it easy to eat, and Malcolm, who was looking white and ill, had none at all. And, as they set off for school, Caspar was positive he saw a toffee bar crossing the sitting room floor. It looked as if Johnny’s disaster had not got rid of them after all.
When Gwinny got home, the house was queerly silent. At first, she thought the queerness had to do with the stale wine smell left over from the party. Then it dawned on her that she could not hear Sally moving about anywhere. Sally always reached home before Gwinny did.
“She must be ill,” Gwinny thought. “Poor Mummy, all alone ill all day.”
She went quietly and considerately upstairs and softly opened her mother’s bedroom door. The room was empty and the bed unmade. A heavy smell of toffee hung in the air. The reason, Gwinny saw, was that every remaining toffee bar in the house had made for the warmth of this room’s radiator
and melted to death on it. More than half of them were Douglas’s dark ones. Parents and babies too had flocked to the radiator. Little red and yellow wrappers fluttered in the updraught or slowly slid down the sleepy dark rivers of melting toffee. Pale toffee overlaid dark toffee, and dark toffee trickled on top of that. The radiator was fat with it, and it had dripped to the carpet in a dozen small, growing mountains.
“That must have upset Mummy,” Gwinny thought. But she was too puzzled about where Sally could be to bother with the poor, silly toffee bars. Sally was not in the still damp bathroom, nor in any other bedroom. She was nowhere downstairs. Gwinny went back to the toffee-scented room and thoughtfully opened Sally’s wardrobe. The silvery party dress was hanging there, but most of the everyday clothes had gone.
With an anxious, heavy, foreboding feeling, Gwinny went downstairs to the Ogre’s study and sat in the Ogre’s leather chair to wait for the Ogre. After a minute, there was a slight clatter, and the Ogre’s pipe hopped up from the garden on to the sill of the open window. It looked at Gwinny enquiringly. Gwinny stretched out a hand and made a fuss of it, but her heart was not in it. She was waiting. At length, the Ogre’s car growled past the side of the house and crunched on the gravel. The door slammed. The Ogre’s heavy footsteps filled the empty house. The pipe, knowing the sound, scuttled across to the pipe rack on the desk and put itself there, ready to be smoked.
The Ogre opened the study door and came in, with his least likeable expression on his face. “What do you think you’re doing here?” he said when he saw Gwinny. “Get out.”
Gwinny stood up. “Will you please tell me where Mummy is,” she said bravely.
The Ogre glowered. “She went to your grandmother’s. She needed a rest.”
“Oh,” said Gwinny. “Did she go straight from work?”
“She did,” said the Ogre. “Out.”
Gwinny, very straight and upright, walked past him and along the hall. She knew something was not right. And she felt heavier and more anxious than ever. The front door opened as she reached the hall. Gwinny stood still and watched Caspar, Johnny and Malcolm come in.
“Is something wrong?” Caspar said, seeing her face.
Gwinny nodded. “Mummy’s gone. The Ogre said she’s gone to Granny’s straight from work.”
All three looked at her in dismay. None of them were exactly surprised, remembering the expression on Sally’s face the night before, and the things the Ogre had said to her. But it was odd.
“Why didn’t she tell us?” Johnny said.
“I don’t know,” said Gwinny. “But I don’t think the Ogre was telling the truth.”
“Why not?” said Caspar.
“Because she hasn’t made her bed,” said Gwinny. “She always does.” Johnny and Caspar looked at one another in alarm and bewilderment.
“You could check up,” Malcolm suggested. “Is your grandmother on the phone?” He was very pale and tired-looking. Gwinny thought he might be ill.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Perfectly,” said Malcolm.
Caspar threw down his schoolbags and seized the address book by the telephone. He found the number and dialled. “Where’s the Ogre?”
“Study,” said Gwinny. “Don’t talk loud.”
Granny answered the phone. “Caspar! Well I never!” She was both surprised and delighted. “And how are you all?”
With his stomach sinking a little, Caspar said, “Fine, Granny. Has Mum arrived yet?”
“Your mother?” said Granny. “No, I’ve not seen Sally, dear. Why?”
Caspar did not quite know what to say after this. “Well,” he explained hesitantly, “I thought she was supposed to be coming to see you straight from work.”
“Oh, I see!” cried Granny. “Thank you for warning me, dear. Sally knows how I hate being taken by surprise. I’ll go and put a cake in the oven for her. Thank you, dear. Goodbye.” Since Caspar had no idea how to explain what he meant without alarming Granny thoroughly, he was thankful when she rang off.
“Well?” asked Johnny.
“Granny didn’t know she was coming. But she might just not have got there yet,” Caspar said, hoping for the best.
“Well, she ought to have done,” said Gwinny. “Because I think she went this morning.”
“So do I, now I think about it,” said Malcolm.
They looked at one another, all thoroughly alarmed, wondering what this meant. And while they were standing in a group, staring, the front door opened again and Douglas came in. He stopped short when he saw the look on their faces. “What’s up?” he said.
“Mummy’s gone,” said Gwinny. “And the Ogre told me a lie about where she was.”
Douglas looked as dismayed as they were, and more dismayed still as they explained. “You have to hand it to my father,” he said at length. “He certainly has a knack of getting rid of his wives.”
The story of Bluebeard burst into Johnny’s head. “You don’t think,” he said, “that he’s killed her and buried her at the end of the garden, do you?” Gwinny was horrified.
“Don’t be a nit!” said Douglas. “People don’t do that.” Somehow, neither Gwinny nor Johnny was reassured by the way he said it. And, unfortunately, Caspar was too worried himself to think of backing Douglas up. So Gwinny and Johnny both gained a distinct impression that, if it had chanced to be the fashion to kill your wife and bury her at the end of the garden, Douglas would have expected the Ogre to do it. “You see,” said Douglas, glancing at Malcolm. Then he saw how ill Malcolm was looking. “You’d better get to bed,” he said.
“If you don’t mind,” Malcolm said politely, “I think I will.”
At that, Caspar and Johnny noticed how poorly he seemed and loudly told him not to be a fool and to go to bed at once. Malcolm went away upstairs rather gladly.
“He always gets ill if people hit him,” Douglas explained. “I was up half the night with him and—”
“Don’t you hit him, then?” Caspar asked, in some surprise.
“Of course not!” Douglas said irritably. “But the point is, I think Sally may even have left last night. They had a flaming row, anyway. They were shouting at one another until gone three o’clock.”
“What about?” Johnny asked miserably.
“You, I think,” said Douglas. “Then I heard Sally slamming round the house afterwards. And I don’t think she was here this morning, whatever Father said.”
“Then where do you think she went?” said Caspar.
“Couldn’t tell you for toffee, I’m afraid,” said Douglas.
Gwinny clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh! The toffee bars! They’re all over that radiator again. I forgot.”
“Oh no!” said Johnny.
They all streamed upstairs to look. The mess was, if possible, worse now. “Wow!” said Douglas, when he saw it.
“The ones you hid in our cupboard had babies, in case you didn’t know,” Johnny told him. Caspar was too depressed to do more than give Douglas a disgusted look.
“I’m sorry,” said Douglas. “How was I to know they’d do this? We’d better get it cleared up before the Ogre sees it.”
Nobody argued about that. Douglas fetched the fateful bucket again. Johnny brought six face flannels – Sally’s was missing. Gwinny found soap and soda and washing powder, and Caspar collected all the fluttering wrappers. Then they all set to work to peel the upper layers of toffee off the radiator.
The Ogre, alerted by the clattering of the bucket and the running of taps, appeared in the doorway while they were doing it. Johnny uttered a yelp of dismay. They all froze. “Who did it this time?” said the Ogre.
Since nobody exactly had done it, nobody answered.
“Are you here in an organising capacity, Douglas?” the Ogre enquired. “Or have they corrupted you too?”
Douglas went red. “It may surprise you to know,” he said, “that it was at least half my fault.”
The Ogre shook his head. “It doesn’t
surprise me at all. Johnny and Caspar could corrupt a saint. And I’ve had enough of them. I’m going to get rid of them if I can.”
“Get rid of them?” Gwinny said, quite appalled. “Like you got rid of Mummy, you mean?”
“I haven’t got rid of Sally,” the Ogre said irritably.
“Then what have you done with her?” demanded Caspar. “You didn’t tell Gwinny the truth, did you?”
“You lied,” said Johnny.
“Yes, whatever you did, you’d no call to lie to them,” Douglas said angrily.
The Ogre looked along their four defiant faces in the greatest surprise. He could not in the least understand why they should be so angry. It never once occurred to him that they needed to be told the truth. “You’re all being quite ridiculous,” he said. “Sally’s simply gone away for a short holiday. You wretched children had tired her out between you.”
“She hasn’t gone to Granny, though,” said Caspar. “And why didn’t she tell us?”
“If you must know, she’s gone to a hotel by the seaside,” said the Ogre. “And she didn’t tell you because she was sick and tired of you.”
“Is that the truth this time?” Douglas demanded.
“Douglas,” said the Ogre, “you may bully Malcolm, but you are not going to use that tone with me.” They all knew at once from this that he had not told them the truth. And, if they needed anything more to complete their hatred and distrust of him, they had it in what he said next. “This is your fault, Caspar and Johnny,” he said. “You two are destroying Sally’s health, what with your water and your toffee and climbing on roofs, and I’m going to send you away to boarding school after Christmas to learn some decent behaviour. I’ve had enough of you.”
Caspar and Johnny were too appalled to speak. Douglas said, “That’s quite unfair! It’s just that these two haven’t learnt how not to be found out yet, and we have!”
“I take it you’re asking to be sent away too?” said the Ogre.
“No fear!” said Douglas, with deep feeling.
“Then don’t provoke me,” said the Ogre. “Get this revolting mess cleaned up, and then get down to the kitchen and find something we can eat.”
The Ogre Downstairs Page 13