by Joan Aiken
“Baby?”
“Yes, and the dog. Here, Tweetie, Tweetie!” A skeletal poodle raced out from under the bus.
“He didn’t say anything about a baby to me. He thought it was a clock.”
“It’s not for long,” she said reassuringly. “Just for a few days till I find somewhere to live. I’m staying with my lawyer at the moment—this is my lawyer, Mr Glibchick—and he’s only got a service flat, no place for a baby.”
“But I don’t know if I’ll be able to look after it,” I said more and more doubtfully. “And what about the dog?”
“Oh, they’ll both be as good as gold, no trouble, I promise. I’m sure you can manage. Your father said you were an awfully reliable boy, and you look it, I must say.”
“Come along, my dear,” said the tiny Mr Glibchick, looking at his gold watch. “We shall be late for the magistrate’s court, and it’s most important to make a good impression.” I didn’t see how Mr Glibchick could fail to make a good impression; he was so smooth and prosperous-looking in his fur coat.
“Oh dear,” said Beryl, suddenly crying a little. “I do hate to part with them really.”
“Now, now, my dear, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can do for them. That husband of yours is a brute, regular rotter, come now, isn’t he? Much better where he can’t find them.” Mr Glibchick’s delivery was very clear and rapid; he talked like someone trained on tongue-twisters.
They began to walk away. There were so many questions to ask that they jammed in my mind.
“What do they eat?” I yelped.
“Meat for Tweetie; and the baby eats absolutely everything—rhubarb, custard, mashed potato, cereal, egg—you know.”
The huge grey car drifted away, silent as an elephant in the jungle. I was left alone, full of forebodings, with my two charges. Just let Father get home, I thought, and I’d have a word or two to say to him. Unfortunately he wouldn’t be home till after midnight.
The main inconvenience about Father was his habit of helping people in difficulties. He’d do anything for them; nothing was too much trouble. He had an extraordinarily kind heart. The year before, he had discovered that one of the Americans in his office was homesick. He spent two days catching a cricket in the dry stone wall at the side of our field, and another two days standing over me while I made a cage for it to live in, so that the homesick American should have a noise to remind him of Tennessee. That’s the sort of person father was.
I will draw a veil over the rest of my day. Anyone who has looked after babies knows how they behave when they don’t care for their surroundings. Anyone who hasn’t looked after babies is in a state of enviable ignorance, and I will leave them that way. I will only mention that, after a good deal of experiment, I found one infallible method of stopping the baby’s howls. This was to put it in the pram and race it at top speed (I should say here that I had won the fifteen years and under three-quarter mile at the village sports) round and round the field. The baby liked this. Unfortunately Tweetie the dog didn’t care for it; he was nervous about my running, maybe he thought I was trying to kidnap the child, and insisted on racing beside me, taking a nip out of my calf every so often and barking in a high-pitched hysterical manner.
The evening wore on. At about half-past eleven the baby suddenly fell into an exhausted slumber. I could have gone to sleep, too, but I was hungry, having had nothing to eat since lunch. I cooked bacon, and gave some to Tweetie. He wouldn’t touch it, but began to whine and snuffle despairingly. I think he was not a very intelligent dog and it had only just come home to him that his mistress had abandoned him in this uncongenial place.
Around this time, too, I realised that the low continuous noise from above, which I had taken for thunder, was actually Coffee the cat, who had retired to the luggage rack that ran below the roof of the bus and was making it plain that he didn’t care for our guests.
I had lulled the baby to sleep in the pram outside, where it was easier to joggle. Now I decided reluctantly that as a heavy mist was coming up I’d better bring it in. I parked it in its carrycot in the driver’s cab. It woke up and started to yell again.
Of course if I’d had Dr Spock’s book in the bus I’d have known that it was probably suffering from three-month colic. And if we’d been on the telephone I could have rung up the Mansion House number that gives soothing advice to would-be suicides. As things were I just stood stock-still, in a sort of stupor of fatigue, wondering what to do next.
My gaze fell idly on the newspaper cutting stuck into the clock-face. It said, “Harp for sale, cheap,” and gave an address in Essex. For the first time in nine hours I remembered that father had gone off to buy a harp. A harp, I thought, what does he want a harp for? And then the yells from the cab redoubled and I decided savagely that I wished he were getting a pair of wings and a halo, too, while he was at it.
I went and fished the baby out of its cot again, and walked up and down with it. Tweetie followed and sometimes bit me. Coffee growled overhead. Presently there was a loud bang at the door, and Tweetie burst into a fusillade of tremulous barks.
Meanwhile, Father had gone up to London and caught a train from Liverpool Street into the depths of Essex, finished his journey by taxi, and bought the harp. He said afterwards that it was cheap, but he wouldn’t tell me how much. Anyway I don’t know how much a harp ought to cost.
Father was always very much swayed by impulse, and since Mother died the impulses had been more and more impulsive. He couldn’t just live along in an easy, day-to-day manner like everybody else, he needed a goal to aim at, or else something to fight. Just now the harp was his goal. Ever since he’d first seen the advertisement he couldn’t rest or eat or breathe or sleep easy till he had it. His father—my grandfather—had had a mandolin on which he could play any tune by ear. Grandfather had perfect pitch, too, and could sing a natural tenor part, so I suppose it was reasonable that Father should suddenly want a harp. He had a very fine voice, too, and when mother was alive she used to play the piano for hours on end and Father used to sing.
He had to rush straight back from Essex to his office, taking the harp with him. It aroused a lot of interest among the men on the desk, but there was no time to play it; a Latin American president had been shot in a revolution and the wires were fairly humming. Father only just managed to get away for his train, and he had to gallop from end to end of Waterloo station, carrying the harp on his shoulder; a porter driving one of those long baggage-trains happened to cut across his line of progress, suddenly saw him, gasped, and muttered, “Blimey, it must be one of the perishers I run over come back to haunt me.”
Father jumped over the link-rod and just caught his train.
All this time he had been borne up by the superhuman, manic strength and endurance which carried him along on such occasions. Ordinarily I doubt if he could lift a harp, but when he was in that state he could perform in a couple of hours feats that would take five men a week in normal conditions. By the finish he’d be chipped, scarred, panting, bleeding, and at the end of his resources, and would probably sleep for two days.
When he got out at our station he didn’t try to ride his bike with the harp, however; he knew his limits. He started out to walk the last mile with the harp on his shoulder. Of course at that time of night the road was dark and quite deserted as a rule, but about halfway along father fell in with a man wheeling a pram.
“Nasty night,” said father. It had begun to rain, and he was hurrying, anxious to get his precious harp under cover.
“Very,” said the man. “Can you tell me if I’m going the right way to the station?”
“No, brother,” said Father. “It’s just the other way. But if you want a train, you’ll be unlucky; the last one’s just gone.”
“Oh, Hades,” said the man with feeling. “Now what am I going to do?” A faint squawk came from the pram.
“When’s the first train in the morning?”
“Do you want somewhere to stay the nig
ht?” said Father at once. “Is that a baby in there? Can’t let it spend the night on the station. I’ll tell you what—you come back with me, I can put you up. You can share a bed with me. My boy won’t mind sleeping on the floor; often done it.”
“Well—” said the man, “that’s very decent of you. If you’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Glad to,” said Father enthusiastically. “Specially if I can dump my harp on your pram for the rest of the way.”
“I suppose you play in an orchestra,” said the man. He went on rather awkwardly, “I should explain that I don’t usually tramp round with my baby in the small hours, but my fool of a wife’s suddenly decided she wants a divorce, wants to marry her old wing-commander, and so she runs off with the nipper and for reasons best known to herself leaves it down here with some crazy journalist who lives in a bus. I only got the address by blasting it out of the secretary of her lawyer, who’s a crook if ever there was one.”
They came to the gate of the field.
“I live just through here,” said Father . . .
Next morning we slept late. We were all dog-tired. There had been a good many explanations the night before. At first Mr Sippett wanted to take his pram and get right away from there; he thought we were a nest of kidnappers. But it was raining hard by then and the bus was very snug and cosy; moreover, luckily, he had taken a liking to Father, who always inspired instant trust and affection in people—unless they hated him on sight.
Father wanted to try the new harp, late though it was, but I put a stop to that; if the baby woke again, I said, I wasn’t going to be the one to race round the field with it in the rain and dark. I shall never forget the wonderful relief it was when Mr Sippett knocked on the door and claimed his offspring. I have never been so glad to part with anything. It was a shock to see them coming back again with Father.
So we were all in a coma still next day, the two fathers on the bed with Coffee, the baby with me in the end room on layers and layers of Timeses, and Tweetie on the doormat, when Beryl Sippett returned.
“Charles!” she exclaimed in amazement.
He stuck a bleary head out of the bedclothes and slowly took in the situation.
“Beryl,” he said. He looked rather pleased to see her.
Then he became all of a sudden very angry.
“Do you know what you did?”
“No,” she said, “what?”
“Went off, leaving the kitchen fire switched on and the fridge door open! Of all the feckless, extravagant—”
“Oh darling,” she said, “did I? How awful. I am sorry.”
Father had tried to pretend to himself while this was going on that he was not awake, but it was no use, so now he got out of bed and stumped past Mrs Sippett to the kitchen, giving her a gloomy nod on the way. He proceeded to shave while I made breakfast. Mercifully the baby was still asleep; I daresay it had some overtime to make up for.
During breakfast it was plain that the Sippetts had reconciled their matrimonial difficulties. Something had made Beryl lose faith in Mr Glibchick, or she had thought better of the wing-commander. They were both extremely warm in their thanks to us.
“I do love your bus,” Mrs Sippett said, looking sentimentally round it, “and what a lovely view with the field and the pond. Really you and your little boy are lucky to live here.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Father in a glum voice. “Used to have a house when my wife was alive. Too much trouble now.”
He looked moodily down at his slippers, which my frivolous mother had made him shortly before she died, out of coconut matting because she said it was the only material that would stand the wear. They had stood it pretty well for seven years.
After breakfast the Sippetts went off, arm in arm, with their pram and their dog, happily down the road to the station. At last Father could get to his harp. But somehow the fire had gone out of his desire to play it. He took the bicycle tarpaulin off it, surveyed it with a morose eye, and struck a couple of experimental chords. They sounded terrible. He tried another. It was worse.
“Bloody hell,” my father said.
He looked once more, bitterly, after the silly, happy family of Sippetts, then picked up his harp with a last access of strength, carried it across the field, and hurled it into the pond.
The Sale of Midsummer
The van, which was labeled Modway Television, chugged up a long, steep hill, slipped thankfully into top gear, and ran down through fringes of beechwood bordering a small star-shaped valley which lay sunk in the top of the downs. Presently the trees ended and sunny curves of cowslip-studded grass began; ahead, clustered elms half revealed a few grey stone roofs.
“This ought to be it,” Andrew said, looking at his map. “There’s a village green; that’d be the best place to leave the van. I’ll take the mike and you bring the camera, Tod, and we’ll wander.”
“What shall I do?” asked Bill, the van driver.
“Find the pub and get their recipe for cowslip wine. It’s a speciality of the place.”
“That’ll suit me fine.”
Among the elms grouped in pairs through the village there were also lime trees, and the scent of lime blossom plus cowslip meadow was almost overpowering. The village drowsed in it; a solitary dog barked, a cuckoo called, nobody was about in the street or on the green.
“Quiet sort of place,” Bill said, mopping his forehead. He parked the van on the grass verge and walked off towards the inn, the Fan-tailed Pheasant, pausing incredulously to stare at the sign. It depicted a pheasant with a most improbable tail, two feathers curved like a pair of washing-tongs.
Andrew picked up his microphone and looked about for material. A rhythmic thudding drew his eyes in the direction of a low wall. Beyond it lay a paddock shaded by walnut trees where a girl in shirt and jeans was schooling a pony. When the two men approached a wicket gate in the wall and stood by it, the rider trotted towards them inquiringly.
“Very photogenic,” murmured Tod as his camera whirred. The girl was black-haired and her grey eyes seemed to reflect all the light from the sky; she was rather pale and had a long, graceful neck.
“Can I do something for you gentlemen?” she asked, dismounting from her pony.
“Excuse our troubling you—is this Midsummer Village?” Andrew asked.
“Certainly. Where else could it be?”
“You live here?”
“All my life, of course.”
“Do you know that the village is up for sale, that the Trust which owns it is obliged to raise money by selling off this parcel of land?”
“Of course. Everybody in the village knows.”
“And that the highest bid has come from Carrock, the millionaire, who has announced his intention, if he gets it, of turning it into a garden city?”
“Yes?” Her luminous eyes turned each of her responses to a question.
“Are you at all perturbed about this?” Andrew asked, slightly impatient at her lack of reaction.
“Perturbed.” She turned the word over in her mind. “If I were at all perturbed,” she said at last, “it would be for the man—Carrock. He is trying to buy a dream. He is bound to be disappointed.”
Her pony tossed its head and snorted. She dropped the reins on its neck and let it go free.
“Of course you are familiar with the legend of Midsummer Village—that it is so beautiful it exists for only three days each year?”
“You were lucky in picking your day to come here, weren’t you?” she said, and smiled slightly. He heard a little grunt of satisfaction, or anguish, from Tod with the camera.
“There must be some tale in the village to account for this belief,” Andrew said. “Can you tell us?”
She leaned against the wall twirling a walnut leaf.
“Certainly. It originated in the eighteenth century when Morpurgo, the Poet Laureate, came to live here. He had been a fine poet, but by the time he became Laureate he was an old man. He slept all the year round and wok
e only for three days in the summer to compose an ode for the queen’s birthday and earn his tun of wine. He had been crossed in love—in his youth he wanted to marry a beautiful girl called Laura who was so devoted to her twin brother that she had sworn she would never take a husband. Some say Morpurgo slept all year to forget his unappeasable grief. He was struck by lightning one summer day in his garden and died in his sleep.”
“Did he never marry?”
“Oh yes, he married,” the girl said rather scornfully. “He married a woman called Edith, a farmer’s daughter thirty years younger than himself. As she had a smattering of witchcraft—nearly everyone knew a bit about it in those days—the tale goes that she put a spell on the whole place, that it should come alive only for three days every summer while Morpurgo was awake, writing his poem.”
“Sleeping Beauty stuff,” Tod muttered.
“And that is the legend of Midsummer Village?”
“That’s the legend,” the girl said, twirling her leaf. Then she threw it aside and clucked to the pony, which came to her willingly.
“Well, thank you very much,” Andrew said, and they left her to her schooling, though both men looked back at her several times.
“Now who?” said Tod.
“Here’s an old boy; looks like the squire.”
An elderly man, upright, tall, and grey-headed, was approaching them.
“Might I trouble you for a few moments, sir?” Andrew inquired.
“By all means,” said the man, though he gazed with a certain dislike at the camera and microphone.
“It’s about this sale of Midsummer Village—have you any views on the matter, sir?”
“Naturally I have views,” the elderly man said disdainfully, “though I doubt if they are of interest to the community at large. If this person, Carrock, who has the impertinent intention of buying our home, should care to pay us the common courtesy of a visit before completing his purchase, I shall be delighted to give him my views.”