Charlotte Sometimes

by Penelope Farmer

  “What are you feeling your face for like that?” the little girl was asking curiously.

  “Oh . . . oh . . . Nothing in particular. . . .” And at that moment, luckily, the bell went, an old-fashioned clanging bell, not the shrill electric one of the night before.

  Charlotte jumped out of bed immediately, but the other huddled back into hers, saying, “I don’t feel a bit like getting up, but of course you do what we ought, Clare, you always do.”

  Charlotte was so desperate by now that she did not care if the girl did find her odd. She ran to the only mirror in the room, a square, rather stained and pitted one hung just beside the door, and the relief that came when she saw her own face staring back at her was huger than she could have thought.

  Except if she was Charlotte, why did the little girl take her for somebody else called Clare?

  •

  Just then the door opened and a woman came in; a tall, thin woman with her hair screwed up on her head under a white cap like a nurse’s cap, her head very small like the knob on a knitting needle. Her big white apron was starched to shine; indeed, she shone all over as if newly polished: shoes, hair, apron, even her nose. Her skirt, Charlotte noticed, was so long that it stopped not far above her ankles.

  “Emily? Isn’t it?” she said to Charlotte. “Are you so vain, Emily, that you must stare at yourself before breakfast?”

  Charlotte looked at her quite speechlessly, but Emily shot up in bed and said indignantly, “She’s not Emily, she’s Clare. I’m Emily.”

  “I do beg your pardon then, Emily,” said the woman sarcastically. “Just to remind you, I am Nurse Gregory. Did you not hear the bell, Emily? Get out of your bed at once. Just because you sleep here as a convenience—” (“And what does that mean?” thought Charlotte.) “Just because you sleep here as a convenience does not mean you may take liberties or disregard the rules.”

  “Oh, I don’t think she meant to. I don’t think she knew you had to get up at once.” Charlotte found herself automatically defending Emily, just as she had always defended her own sister Emma at home.

  “But it’s a whole half hour to breakfast,” Emily was protesting on her own behalf. “It doesn’t take me half an hour to get dressed.” The nurse looked from her to Charlotte with a smile that had a glitter but no friendliness.

  “Do I take it then you are a dirty little girl and never properly wash yourself?”

  “I wash very well, indeed,” cried Emily indignantly. “Don’t I, Clare? Our Aunt Dolly says I wash very well . . .”

  “Does she not also tell you, Emily, that it is rude to answer back? I shall return then in fifteen minutes and expect to find you both ready, save your hair, which I shall braid myself today.”

  “Clare always braids my hair for me.”

  “No doubt,” said Nurse Gregory, turning to the door. “But I shall do it for today.”

  If Emily was rebellious, Charlotte was relieved at this, never having braided hair before. She was also (foolishly she thought and irrelevantly) quite pleased at the idea of having her hair in braids, which she had always wanted secretly and never been allowed, for her grandfather, with whom she lived, did not like girls to wear their hair that way. To think foolish, irrelevant thoughts was more comfortable than fighting her way through the impossible ones: what was happening to her, and why and how.

  The uniform she had to wear was not unlike the one she had worn yesterday, if less well-fitting. Under it, despite the blaze of sun, went a thick woolen vest and bodice, thick navy-blue knickers, and thick black stockings. Charlotte had not worn stockings the day before.

  All the while she dressed herself and helped Emily do up her buttons, all the while Nurse Gregory was combing and braiding their hair—using the comb more as if to dissect heads—and while afterwards she and Emily knelt on the chilly linoleum to say their prayers, Charlotte was trying in her mind to describe how things seemed to her that morning: the room, Nurse Gregory, the clothes she wore. There was some particular word she wanted. She could not, in these confusions, think what it was. Nurse Gregory had pulled her hair so tightly into its single braid, tied ribbon so tightly at top and bottom, that her scalp ached and prickled still, which made her brain seem to ache and prickle, too. The more she hunted for this word, the more confused she felt.

  Outside the room was the same—or it looked the same—horde of blue-clad girls whose faces she did not know, the same thud of feet and clatter of voices, the same mazed passages and stairs as yesterday, except that she thought (or had she dreamed it) that the walls had been white then, while today they were brown. Yesterday they had eaten in a large white-walled room but today went beyond it to breakfast in a smaller brown-paneled one, where a picture hung of a man with eyes black as buttons and a stiff white clergyman’s collar. She thought she recognized the picture, though she did not recognize the room. The trouble was that she had found everything so strange and confusing yesterday in a new school that now, even when she shut her eyes and tried to remember, she could not really tell what had changed about her and what had not. She began to wonder whether perhaps she had dreamed before or even was dreaming today.

  The porridge for breakfast was brought round by maids in uniform. There had been no maids yesterday, Charlotte was sure. The uniforms were black and white and looked, she thought, as Nurse Gregory’s had—and again she fumbled for the right word, but this time it swam into her head quite easily—they looked a little old-fashioned. Their skirts were rather too long for one thing, like Nurse Gregory’s. Of course, she thought, some people just did wear longish skirts and old-fashioned clothes—Miss Gozzling for example, her grandfather’s housekeeper. Old-fashioned was the word she wanted anyway; the one her mind had chased so uselessly before. Everything this morning seemed old-fashioned: in obvious ways, such as there being no washbasin, no electric bell; and in other less obvious ways. But then her home, Aviary Hall, was just as old-fashioned, if not more so, having been decorated and furnished many years ago and scarcely altered since. No doubt this school was the same, she told herself firmly. A different explanation that slid into her mind was so huge and impossible that she could not believe it, did not want to even. It frightened her. She turned her mind wildly away, thinking, “How funny, I haven’t heard any airplanes this morning. I wonder why?”

  •

  As they filed into the brown-paneled dining room, each girl had taken from a scrubbed shelf a small glass jar containing a slab of margarine, like butter in texture, but very much paler in color. Emily fortunately had fetched Charlotte’s as well as her own, for on each was stuck a little white label with a name on it, and Charlotte would not have known which name to take. E. MOBY, Emily’s label said, C. MOBY Charlotte’s. Everyone placed their jars on the table in front of them, and so did Charlotte and Emily.

  “Wake up, dreamy,” a voice prodded at Charlotte from the other side of the table; a surprisingly deep, imposing voice, for it belonged to a very small, round girl with spectacles and with black hair cut quite short instead of long in a braid like most people’s. She had also a very snub nose. Just now she was contorting herself to read the name on Charlotte’s jar.

  “Wake up, dreamy. What’s the C stand for?”

  “C?” asked Charlotte, jerked out of thought. “What do you mean C?”

  “On your marge jar, silly. C. Moby, it says. I’m asking you your name in other words. . . .”

  “Oh . . . Char . . .” began Charlotte, off guard still, but Emily took over answering before the name was fully out.

  “She’s Clare. I’m Emily. What’s the M on yours?”

  “Marjorie, if you must know, but everyone calls me Bunty, Marjorie’s an awful name. You can call me Bunty, too, if you like. Do you want sugar on your porridge or milk?”

  “Both of course,” said Emily.

  “You can’t have both, because of the war, you have to choose. What I wanted to tell you was that I’d have sugar if I were you; it’s horrid otherwise. It’s pretty horrid with
sugar, too, actually, my sister’s a land-girl now, and she says what they give pigs on her farm is better than school porridge.”

  “Ssssh, Bunty, you mustn’t talk like that. You’ll get into awful trouble if someone hears,” whispered her neighbor, a thin, droopy girl with brown eyes like butter drops and sandy-colored hair and lashes.

  “Oh, don’t be such a prig, Ruth,” Bunty said impatiently. “Did you come late yesterday?” she asked Emily, her mouth already full of porridge. “I didn’t see you even at supper.”

  “We were quite late,” said Emily. “In time for supper, though.”

  “Well, I never saw you. Are you two sisters?”

  “Clare’s my brother if you must know.”

  “There’s no need to be cheeky; you’re just a little new girl, remember. You don’t look much like sisters, that’s all.”

  “How long have you been here?” asked Emily.

  “One term. That’s nearly five months including the holidays.”

  “One term, one term? Well, that’s nothing to be so grand about.”

  There was a pause. Bunty turned her back on Emily as far as it was possible and ate her porridge. Charlotte hoped that she would not remain offended for too long. She hoped Bunty would ask a great many more questions, for being expected to know the answers, she was not in a position to ask them for herself, much as she wanted to. At last Bunty leaned across the table to her in a lordly way.

  “How old is Emily? She looks rather a baby to be at boarding school.”

  “I’m not a baby,” Emily cried indignantly. “I was ten in August.”

  “Ten, just ten. You are a baby then, just as I thought. I didn’t know anyone could come here till they were eleven.”

  “How old are you then?”

  “I’m eleven actually.”

  “Well, that’s nothing to be so grand about either. Clare’s thirteen.”

  “Thirteen, gosh, she doesn’t look as ancient as that. But what are you doing here if you’re only ten?”

  “We hadn’t anywhere else to go if you must know.”

  “Everything’s upside down with the war of course,” observed Bunty in an elderly voice.

  “But it wasn’t the war at all; it was our Aunt Dolly. She was ill, you see, and we live with her now in term time.”

  “Did you go to a day school before then?”

  “We’ve been to lots and lots of schools. As a matter of fact,” said Emily impressively, “this is my fifth school.”

  “Your fifth school? Gosh, how ripping, you lucky thing. I’ve only been to one. I had a governess before.”

  Charlotte, meanwhile, struggled through her porridge, which was as solid as bread, much solider in lumps, and slippery, too. Emily pushed hers away after one mouthful. Bunty told her she’d have to eat it, that was the rule, but the maid, who came to clean, smiled and shrugged and took pity on her, removing the plate quickly before the teacher at the end of the table had noticed anything.

  “Miss Bite says it’s doing your bit to eat things you don’t like,” Bunty said. “I don’t see how it hurts Germans myself, eating nasty porridge.”

  “I couldn’t have eaten it even if it made us win the war,” said Emily passionately.

  “Well, I’m so hungry I could eat anything. Give me your second round of bread, Emily, if you don’t want it, we’re only allowed two each, you see, and that still leaves me starving.”

  “Oh, but I will want it. I have to eat something.”

  “You can have mine, Bunty,” Charlotte said.

  “You are a sport, Clare, thanks awfully. Can I have some of your marge ration, too? Mine will never last otherwise.”

  But even having eaten three slices of bread with her own and some of Charlotte’s margarine fast enough to choke, Bunty still watched every bite Emily took like, Charlotte thought, a hungry little dog.

  •

  Except for the mysterious and, to Charlotte, incomprehensible talk about the war—what war could Bunty mean—everything seemed so ordinary that Charlotte thought there must be some quite simple explanation for what had happened to her. She could begin to believe this was just a different school, its likeness with yesterday merely the likeness of any boarding school to any other. This, at least, was what she wanted to believe.

  But then after breakfast she went upstairs, and except for the cedar tree, the view out of the window was unmistakably the same view as yesterday of garden and river and island. Nor could she mistake her bed with its wheels like little wagon wheels, and when later she set out for church in the school crocodile, it was from the same porticoed door at which the bus had arrived yesterday. Beyond though, inexplicably, all the lawns that had been green yesterday were not lawns any more but dug up and planted with cabbages.

  Charlotte and Emily wore gloves and carried prayerbooks, as did everyone. They were meant to keep silence on their way.

  “It’s so that we can think holy thoughts for church, you see,” Bunty explained. “Not that I ever seem to have any.”

  “Oh, Clare’s always thinking holy thoughts, aren’t you, Clare?” Emily replied, with a meaningful glance at Charlotte that she quite missed the meaning of since she was not Clare, nor knew her.

  Through the school gates they marched—to these were now nailed Union Jacks, very faded as if they had been there some considerable time and in all kinds of weather. The road beyond was more countrified than Charlotte had thought it yesterday. She could not remember seeing market gardens then behind high walls, their rows of greenhouses flashing in the sun like a field of huge glass furrows.

  Chapter 3

  THE NEXT MORNING when Charlotte awoke to an airplane’s booming overhead and saw Susannah asleep next to her, she at once thought Emily merely a dream. What had happened yesterday seemed something that could only have happened in a dream, for she had carried out that day so calmly and ordinarily, even writing a Sunday letter home to Emily’s Aunt Dolly, whom she did not know, and by the evening she had found herself accepting it as any other day, not one out of her own time at all. Now she assumed that she must have fallen asleep on Saturday night to dream most vividly about Sunday, and that awake at last, she was about to spend the real Sunday in her own time.

  But the rising bell went not long afterwards, the one-note electric bell—and at seven o’clock, weekday time. The others grumbled their way out of bed into weekday shirts and tunics, not Sunday coats and skirts.

  “Gosh, Monday mornings. How I hate Monday mornings!” Vanessa sighed. But if it was Monday, it meant Charlotte had missed out a whole day in her own time. It meant Emily was no dream but real.

  Yesterday she thought she must have been quite numbed by the strangeness to have behaved as she did, so normally, though in another time, and in wartime, too. Today, contrariwise, she was overcome by it, stopping, thinking, trembling every now and then.

  She did not know when exactly she had realized what had happened to her. Not knowing had slid so gradually into half guessing, half knowing, knowing for certain. She thought herself stupid now for not realizing immediately, as children did in books, but of course they usually went back so much farther into the past that it was easier to tell because people dressed, unmistakably, in wigs or crinolines.

  Then, at bedtime yesterday, she had found beneath Clare’s Bible on the chair a thin red exercise book. “Diary,” it had said on the cover, and “Clare Mary Moby”; and beneath that again in letters three times larger, PRIVATE. Charlotte had hesitated briefly, holding it in her hands. But she had been comforted in some odd way because Clare shared her middle name and even her initials, and at last she had opened it determinedly, though she was careful still to look only at the date of the last entry. The day before in her own time, the present had been Saturday, September 14. But Clare had written Saturday, September 14, 1918, the same day, only more than forty years before.

  It seemed quite unbelievable today. After breakfast, her bed half made, Charlotte picked up her nightdress and stood there, far a
way, letting it dangle from her hands. She was looking out of the window at the new brick building that stood where the cedar tree used to stand, thinking that the room must have been called Cedar after it. The tree had been beautiful as a sailing ship, its trunk stouter than a mast, its branches spread like sails, and she felt sad, indignant even, that they should have cut it down. Yet it seemed silly to feel sad for something lost so long ago, that she ought never to have seen.

  “Penny for them.”

  Charlotte came back out of her mind to find Vanessa staring at her, curiously.

  “You might have been on Mars the way you looked. Penny for your thoughts.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see. Nothing very much really.”

  “But you must think about something. All yesterday and this morning, too, it’s been hard to get a word out of you. You must think about something all that time.”

  “Oh, Charlotte’s just dreamy, aren’t you, Charlotte?” Susannah apologized for her.

  “Why should she want to talk to us anyway?” asked Elizabeth lazily, looking up from her book. “Lucky Charlotte. Perhaps she can dream herself right out of here.”

  Elizabeth was not a thin girl like Janet and Vanessa, not plump exactly either, but big. Her hair, though short, was rough even when brushed and wild when not, as now. She had a big untidy-looking mouth, big untidy-looking hands with the nails chewed down, even untidy-looking skin that was pale and peeled in places. As soon as they had returned from breakfast, she had flung herself down to read on her unmade bed. A trail of clothes lay on the floor around her, and her transistor radio blurted out “Housewives’ Choice.”

  Vanessa looked distastefully at Elizabeth.

  “Well, we all know you’re always too busy reading to hear anything we say, but we can’t dream away your mess unfortunately.”