Charlotte Sometimes

by Penelope Farmer

  “It’s five minutes to the bell, Elizabeth,” said Janet coldly but more patiently. “Don’t you think you’d better get a move on?”

  “Gosh, is it really? I’ll be late!” cried Elizabeth, hurling her nightdress to the floor and rushing out of the room, leaving Janet and Vanessa to make faces at each other and murmur what a slut she was. How could they bear to share a room with her for a whole term.

  “She’s supposed to be brainy; that’s her trouble. She thinks she can get away with anything because of it.” Vanessa turned off the radio. But Elizabeth switched it on again, quite casually, when she returned.

  From all the confusion Charlotte’s mind grasped one thing—that no one had missed her yesterday. But it was not until later that the obvious explanation struck home to her, that while she herself had taken Clare’s place yesterday, Clare must have taken hers here.

  In the library that morning she saw a book called Twentieth Century Library, and when the bell had rung and the rest of the class was collecting their books, she lifted it down, hastily, guiltily. She opened it at the back, leafing through till she came to the chapters on World War II. Earlier yesterday she had thought that might be the war then being fought; but now she saw it had started in 1939. At once she slammed the book firmly shut. She did not want to check further the dates of the other, World War I. She did not want to read of it at all. It seemed like cheating somehow, like looking at the end of a book before you were halfway through. It even seemed unlucky. Of course she might never go back into 1918. Yet in an odd, aching sort of way, she hoped she might. She did not want to do anything that might prevent it, even something so simple as checking on a date.

  The very next morning when she awoke beside Emily again, Charlotte, pleased, gave her a special smile of greeting before being reminded by her look of surprise that as far as Emily was concerned, she had been there all the time.

  •

  Emily was silent today. From time to time she looked most oddly at Charlotte, who wondered uncomfortably if she was beginning to guess that something strange was happening.

  “I say,” Bunty said when they went to their classroom after prayers, “I say, I wanted to ask you. If you’re thirteen, aren’t you a bit old to be in a class with me and Emily?”

  “It’s just because we’ve been to so many schools, she’s never had a chance to catch up,” cried Emily fiercely. “Clare’s very clever, really she is, so snubs to you and utterly squash.”

  “I never said she was stupid, did I, stupid? Anyway, can’t she ever answer for herself?”

  “And can’t you ever stop asking questions? Someone of thirteen can’t be bothered with all your silly questions, that’s all.”

  “Was there ever such a cheeky little new bug as you?” asked Bunty amiably.

  Their classroom was a big room with two pillars at one end above the dais, where the teacher sat surveying both their class and another one. In Charlotte’s time this was used as a dining hall, while her class met in a little cell-like place at the end of the new glass-covered way that ran along beside a stable yard. The classroom might once even have been the saddle room, with its three high windows and stone walls, with the three stone steps that led to a door kept permanently locked. It was very dark, very small, compared to this large, light, dusty room. The clicking of the rings on the green baize curtains covering the pigeonholes sounded the same in both the classrooms, though.

  Charlotte went upstairs at recess to fetch a handkerchief, up the steep back stairs that emerged by the window over-looking the yard. The window was open, and there was no one in sight. Hastily, guiltily, she thrust out her head and found that with some awkward craning she could see where the classroom should have been. No covered way ran to it now. Its door was painted blue like the other doors in the yard, but the paint was so flaked and old that she could see the wood in places underneath; also there was a large padlock on it.

  Beneath Charlotte, a door opened, and a maid came out of the kitchen. Charlotte could see the parting in her hair and smell the steaming reek of food. She brought her head in again hastily to find Nurse Gregory standing there behind her, Nurse Gregory’s eyes screwing themselves into her.

  “And what do you find so interesting then, Clare?” she inquired with interest.

  “I—I’ve just come up to fetch a handkerchief from my room.”

  “Handkerchiefs, I suppose, growing outside like Virginia Creeper?”

  Charlotte said no and then yes, meek and confusedly, since an answer seemed expected, but either way convicted her, yes, of stupidity, no, probably of crime, that is, of breaking a school rule.

  “The rule is no girl may come up to her bedroom during the day. You should have remembered your handkerchief this morning.”

  “But I thought,” said Charlotte, “honestly, I thought the rules said. . .” And then she remembered she had heard the rules read in her own time, not here, and that there weren’t necessarily the same rules now. But she could not, of course, use this for an excuse. “I didn’t know the rules,” she ended lamely, pulling down the rather short tunic they wore on weekdays in 1918 that was not unlike the modern one except for the strip of velvet across its top.

  “That is no excuse. You should have known. I read them to you myself only yesterday. It is not, of course, a rule you’ll long be in a position to break, since you will be in lodgings soon and come only as a day girl here.”

  “Lodgings?” asked Charlotte, amazed, but Nurse Gregory noticed no amazement, her voice clattering on as if it were set by clockwork and had to go running down.

  “I cannot spare my sickroom long, you know. I have two girls ill already in the other one, and if there are more, I shall soon need your room. I hope you and Emily quite realize the kindness Miss Bite did you in allowing you its use till lodgings could be found. Were it not for wartime, such sudden upsets and arrangements could never be allowed.”

  “Everything’s upside down with the war,” ventured Charlotte, remembering what Bunty had said.

  “I am not upside down, and my order mark system works perfectly. You will take one please and go straight downstairs again.”

  All the rest of that morning Charlotte had to do what she usually told her sister not to do; wipe her nose on the back of her hand. She was wondering, too, what would happen once the Mobys went into lodgings and did not sleep at school. Would she and Clare continue to change about? And suppose she should get stuck here, could not get back to her proper time, to be Charlotte instead of Clare, to have Emma for her sister instead of Emily? The thought of that frightened her, and she tried hard not to think about it.

  Chapter 4

  THERE was work to be prepared that day for future lessons. This did not create such difficulty as it might have. Charlotte’s handwriting fortunately was not unlike Clare’s, since she had been taught to form her letters in the same old-fashioned way as Clare formed hers. Also the system of work had not much changed between present and past. Charlotte, being organized and neat, followed it as meticulously as Clare had done, jotting down in the little notebooks provided not only the work to be done but also the day by which it had to be handed in. They had been given an essay called “My Holidays,” and she was thankful that it could be left till another day, for how could she write an essay about Clare’s holidays? She knew nothing about them, nor had she any means of finding out. And if she did write something and Emily read it, how suspicious she would be, if she was not suspicious already, as Charlotte had begun to think. She did arithmetic instead, long division of money that she had learned when much younger and so found easy, though she was not usually good at arithmetic. She also learned by heart the first six verses of a poem called “Horatius at the Bridge.” It began:

  “Lars Porsena of Clusium

  By the Nine Gods he swore

  That the great house of Tarquin

  Should suffer wrong no more.”

  It was stirring both to learn and to recite and kept on beating in Charlotte’s hea
d all that day and the next, in her own time.

  •

  That morning when Charlotte awoke, she found beside her bed an exercise book with a pale pink cover (the color usually used for Scripture books) on which was written Charlotte Mary Makepeace and underneath again blacked over twice, Very private. Charlotte hesitated before opening this. There was something disconcerting about a book that had her own name on it, that no one ought to have written except herself, and yet that she had not written. Nor was her name now her property alone. Suppose that Very private warned even her not to open the book and read what was inside?

  However, she opened it at last, to read, not unexpectedly but still as disconcertingly, a message from someone whom she did not know and who was more than forty years away from her.

  “Dear Charlotte,” she read. “I think we should be able to write to each other to explain anything difficult. For instance, about work and about Emily (please look after Emily; she’s only ten). We could use this book here and my diary in 1918. It is that red book on the chair. But please do not read the earlier part; it is very private. Not even Emily may read it. I did your arithmetic for you today. I am afraid it was all wrong; I am so bad at arithmetic. Please write. I think it would help if we both write, yours sincerely, Clare. P.S. I took this book from the classroom cupboard. It was very dishonest and wrong of me, but I could not think what else to do.”

  Clare’s arithmetic certainly was not good. Charlotte had the exercise book back that day, scored in red ink, with only two marks given out of ten, and decided that in future she had better try to do it for herself. She was going to suggest this to Clare that very evening in her own note, but it seemed rather unkind and so after all she left it out.

  “Dear Clare,” she wrote. “It was very clever of you to think of this book. I don’t think it was too wrong to take it from the cupboard. We have to have a book, and there’s no other way of finding one. I think grownups would say it was all right if they knew what was happening to us. I promise not to read your diary. I did open it once just to find out the date, but I promise on my honor I didn’t read any more. I promise. By the way, do you think we should tell Emily what’s happening? I’m sure she’s suspicious, so it might be better. But I think you should tell her perhaps, not me.”

  Charlotte stopped and thought a little and then added, “How are you managing here? Do you find it very difficult and strange?” For it had occurred to her suddenly how much harder it must be to move forward in time than to move back. At least in the past many things were familiar, and you knew something about it. But what did you know about the future? Nothing except guesses, and many of them frightening. She would not have liked to move forty or fifty years ahead of her own time as Clare had moved ahead of hers.

  Susannah was saying curiously, “Whatever do you find to write about? I kept a diary once, and all I could think of to say was, had breakfast, had lunch, had tea, and went to bed.”

  “Oh, I just think of things,” said Charlotte, ending her letter hastily with: “I don’t think anything important happened today. I’ll write tomorrow, yours sincerely, Charlotte. P.S. I can’t understand why this is happening. P.P.S. I didn’t look at your diary, honestly.”

  Afterwards, out of the darkness, a voice came, Vanessa’s voice.

  “Charlotte, are you awake?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Janet and I are very puzzled. Why do you take such ages to say your prayers some nights before you get into bed, and not other nights at all?”

  “Well, some nights I say them in bed,” Charlotte answered, glad of the dark. In fact, this was sometimes true. But from now on, she thought, she would have to do as Clare did and kneel beside her bed, much as she would hate to make such display of holiness; otherwise the rest of them might become suspicious. It was odd really that they were not suspicious already.

  •

  Charlotte lay awake some while that night. She could hear the sounds of traffic in the distance, blown downriver from the road bridge, and occasionally the sounds of trains, too, from the railway bridge.

  When the airplanes came, they blotted out all the other sounds. She thought how frightening they must have seemed to Clare at first. Whatever had she thought such enormous sounds could be? The school itself was not so very different from the earlier one, but in 1918 so far Charlotte had only heard one airplane and that a tiny buzzing far away like a bluebottle fly. It had quite excited Emily, who cried, “A plane, a plane. Can you see it, Bunty? Can you see it, Clare?”

  These airliners did not buzz, unless it was inside your head like something drilling there. Some roared, some screamed, some thundered, some did all three at once. Some made tight, narrow sounds, loud yet contained within a space; others laid sound flat over your head like a kind of roof; still others, and by far the worst, were heavy; they reverberated everywhere as though the air made little invisible walls against which sound echoed, through which it broke in thunderous waves and surgings, until it felt like being in a tent of sound pegged down close all round. Then sometimes Charlotte found it hard to remember who she was, Charlotte or Clare or someone quite different again.

  •

  It was odd, disconcerting, this jerky proceeding of days in worlds both so different and yet in the movements of school alike—for they continued to change about day after day. The earlier school was stricter, more drab, the food there both scarcer and nastier. They had fur in the soup on Tuesday, underboiled fish on Wednesday, and on Thursday the most unpleasant pudding Charlotte had ever eaten—North Pole pudding, it was called—a kind of jelly made of cornmeal, graylike porridge, shiny like glue, and flecked with little pieces of meal like the flaws in glass. Emily would not eat it and was made to sit in the dining room for hours. But she smuggled the plateful into her handkerchief when no one was looking and reappeared in class triumphantly.

  Between Emily and Susannah and the rest, Charlotte felt as if she were reading two stories alternately, reaching some point of tension in one, only to continue in the other. It was Friday, for instance, before she received an answer to her first note to Clare, which said, among other things, “I don’t think we should tell Emily. I don’t want to tell her because I think she might be frightened and not understand. Please, Charlotte, just go on acting as if you were me and not say anything and look after her.”

  But of course Charlotte could not look after Emily that day because it was her own time and there was no Emily. There were Janet and Vanessa instead, who seemed to be plotting something and giggled a great deal. After supper they said to Charlotte and Susannah, “Don’t come up just yet. One of us will fetch you when we’re ready.”

  Charlotte went on ahead when the time came and opened the door to find the curtains drawn, the light wrapped in a sweater. A figure leaped out at her from the gloom—Vanessa—while Janet grabbed Susannah from behind. Susannah let out a giggle, a little sharp, nervous “Oh . . .”

  “Now,” they were told by deep, croaking, cracking voices, “now, oh, novices, you have tests to undergo. Lie down and look up these.”

  These were dressing-gown sleeves and trembled because Janet and Vanessa who held them were laughing so much. Only Elizabeth took no part. She lay on her bed with her back to everyone reading by the light of a flashlight, and Charlotte heard her radio faintly, indecipherably growl. She was waiting, apprehensive, for something to happen, staring up through the tunnel of the dressing-gown sleeve. It was Janet’s dressing gown, very thick and hairy, tickling her mouth and nose, making her want to sneeze. She could see an uneven round of light at the top of it, but this was suddenly obscured, by what she could not tell, except that it made a darkness there.

  “Behold the sights of Venice,” intoned Vanessa’s voice above Charlotte and Janet’s above Susannah. Charlotte screwed up her eyes to see, but still could make nothing out at all. The round of light appeared again and was once more obscured.

  “Behold the churches of Venice,” they said. And afterwards again, “Be
hold the bridges of Venice.”

  There was a long pause. The voices began at last more loudly and impressively than ever. “Behold the canals of Venice,” but were overcome by giggles well before the end, for down the dressing-gown sleeves came a cascade of icy water onto the faces of Charlotte and Susannah, who sat up choking, startled, bewildered, rubbing the water from their eyes and mouths, while Janet and Vanessa collapsed with laughing, clutched each other, and laughed the more.

  “What did you do that for?” cried Susannah, indignantly, tearfully. “I’m all wet; you made me wet.”

  “You made me all wet,” they mimicked. “That’s the point, silly, that’s the joke. It’s a joke, you see.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s awfully funny that sort of thing, making people wet.” Susannah was in full tears by now.

  “As if you can make wet people wetter anyway,” they cried. “All new girls have this done. You’ll be able to do it on someone else next term. It’s very funny really, and we haven’t finished yet. They’re sort of initiation tests.”

  Before they could start another test, however, there was a knock on the door, and a prefect came in with a message for Susannah. Seeing the mess of water, she grew shocked and stern and made them clear it up at once. She made them pull the jersey from the light and draw the curtains back.

  The prefect happened to be Sarah. Charlotte had not spoken to her since the first day of term, and she was cold and distant now, though she did smile once in Charlotte’s direction.

  When she had gone, Susannah cried and Elizabeth started to laugh. Vanessa said how feeble they all were not to take a joke, what rotten luck it was for her and Janet to be landed with such a wet lot as this. When the same trick had been played on them, they had not minded, of course they hadn’t. They weren’t such spoilsports. Tricks like that had been played on new girls for absolutely donkey’s years, since before Sarah’s mother came, she wouldn’t wonder.