Charlotte Sometimes

by Penelope Farmer

  Miss Agnes tried to hurry away with Charlotte and Emily, but the crowd had thickened so much that they found themselves wedged in front of it, beneath the station’s shabby canopy and fringe.

  Charlotte was used to all the marks of war: the shabbiness of things, bad food, shop queues, posters about the war effort, people with worried faces, people dressed in black. She was used to seeing the wounded men from the hospital with their bright blue uniforms and bright red ties, the colors, she thought, if not the clothes of Arthur’s soldiers. Such things did not disturb her, and the war seemed quite remote. But this disturbed her, the grotesque kind of circus that came now. It did not seem remote at all, nor did it fit with her vague ideas of war gained from those books of Arthur’s she had read, with their flags and glory and brave drummer boys. How could you dare to become a soldier, knowing that you might end like this? There were men like clowns with white heads, white arms, white legs, men with crutches, slings, and bloodied bandages, and all so distressingly like men you would expect to see walking down the street, two armed, two legged, in hats instead of bandages and suits of black not battered khaki. Some came on stretchers borne by whole and ordinary men, some hobbled and leaned on whole ordinary arms. Most had mud dried thick across their clothes, and all came from the dark station’s mouth with the spewings of trains behind, the clankings, thumpings, grindings, the sounds like great devils taking in breaths and blowing them out again.

  •

  The war, however, was clearly coming to an end. At school the children were elated and excited. To hear them talk, it might have been a school match won, rather than a war. But their excitement was not reflected among the staff, and at Flintlock Lodge the subject was scarcely mentioned now, mainly because it made Mr. Chisel-Brown so angry, especially at breakfast when he first read his newspaper. No one was meant to disturb him then by talk of any kind. A lazy Susan, a sort of round tray on a pedestal, stood in the center of the table with all the food on it. You had to spin the tray gently if you wanted something, milk or margarine or marmalade, till the jug or dish stood opposite your place. But one morning, Mr. Chisel-Brown’s newspaper so angered him that he set the tray spinning like a top. Toast flung out at angles; salt cellar confused with pepper pot; marmalade was thrown onto the margarine. Emily was delighted, giggling openly; so, more discreetly, though, was Charlotte.

  “Conchies, huns ought to be hanged,” muttered scarlet Mr. Chisel-Brown, whether at them or the newspaper it was hard to tell, but Mrs. Chisel-Brown continued eating toast as if she had not noticed what had happened, putting the slice that had fallen nearest her on her own plate.

  Emily these days was a friend of Ann the maid. At least she spent a lot of time talking to her, or rather bickering, if amicably. That morning she came rushing from Ann to Charlotte in a state of great excitement.

  “Ann says the Chisel-Browns are going to have a séance,” she said.

  “A what?” asked Charlotte.

  “A séance. A spiritualist séance. Don’t you know what that is? I know; Ann told me. It’s to make dead people talk to you. There’s a lady who comes called a medium, and everyone sits round her, and the dead person speaks through her and gives messages to people still alive and answers questions, too.”

  “But how can someone answer questions who’s dead?”

  “Ann says spiritualists don’t say people are dead; they say they’ve passed over to the other side. She says the mediums are sort of telephones sending messages. It’s a sort of magic they’ve got like fortune-tellers, you know, who can tell what’s going to happen in the future. Ann went to a séance once to speak to her young man, who was killed early in the war. She says she really did speak to him; he said all sorts of things no one would have known except for him. When the Chisel-Browns have their séance, she’s going to look through the keyhole and see what happens, and I want to, too.”

  “I should have thought it would be difficult for two people to look through a keyhole at once, and I think perhaps it isn’t a very nice thing to do.”

  “Of course I’m not going to look through the keyhole. That’s something only servants do. I’m going to hide in the bay window. It would be quite safe there with the curtains drawn across.”

  “I don’t see that it’s different from looking through the keyhole myself.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a prig, Clare. Don’t you want to see what happens?”

  “I don’t believe anything will happen.”

  “Well, Ann does, and the Chisel-Browns and Aggie, and they’re all grown-up people. They wouldn’t have asked the medium to come if they didn’t believe in it.”

  “Who do they want to speak to anyway?”

  “Why, Arthur of course, silly,” said Emily. “Don’t you want to hear what he says? I thought you would, the amount old Aggie talks about him. In fact, I’m a bit sick of him myself. I bet he wasn’t really so handsome and brave and clever at all. Ann says he wasn’t like that a bit.”

  “Of course he was brave,” said Charlotte. “Of course he was brave. He was a soldier, wasn’t he?”

  •

  At school, since Ruth was still in bed with flu, Emily went round with Bunty all the time. This had begun to happen even before Ruth went. She and Charlotte had been left more often than not to keep each other company. Now Charlotte was left on her own. All the same she dreaded Ruth’s return, for what would Ruth say about seeing her that night? She half expected that Ruth might have let it out to someone already—to Nurse Gregory perhaps—and half expected to be summoned for questioning by Nurse Gregory or by Miss Bite herself. But she never had been. She had not told Emily about Ruth’s seeing her that night and did not now tell any of her fears.

  One morning at the recess break someone gave Charlotte a letter for Clare and Emily from their father in France. They were all supposed to be out in the garden as they were in every kind of weather, but though Charlotte found Olive, Peggy, Margaret, Dorothy, Susan, Joan—almost everyone, in fact, she found no sign of Emily or Bunty.

  “I think they went that way.” Someone pointed toward an end of the garden Charlotte had never explored, for it was out of bounds. In her own time it had led into the Japanese gardens. She wondered if it did now, and it was a kind of strange curiosity that took her round the edges of the bushes and into the forbidden territory at a moment when she was sure no one would see her go.

  It did not look so different from when she had seen it in her own time, except that then it had been September and now it was November, and a dripping, dismal, blackish day at that.

  Charlotte pushed her way uncomfortably through the wet bushes with their whippy twigs to find the lake, the bridge, the curiously shaped trees, most still with leaves on them, but drooping now and seeming to absorb the dank and dismal light as much as they had absorbed the glow of sun before. The garden was more overgrown if anything, the black lake choked by leaves and water lily plants and bent brown reeds. Only the bridge looked newer, missing no slats or rails, its paintwork barely flaked at all. It was a dark pink, dreary paint, which had been prettier faded, Charlotte thought.

  On the bridge, staring down at the water and giggling uncontrollably, were Emily and Bunty. They did not notice Charlotte, who stood among the bushes, still thinking about the last person she had seen standing on the bridge: Sarah Reynolds.

  She had not thought about Sarah for weeks; but she could see her in her mind as clearly as if she had met her yesterday, tall and fair, with that curious walk like ropes slackening in her at each step, then tightening again; with her slow, incurious smile; Sarah Reynolds whom she’d thought might be called Moby and so be the daughter of either Clare or Emily.

  Charlotte shook herself at this and made the bushes shake, too. Bunty and Emily looked round at once and stopped giggling when they saw Charlotte.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Emily rudely.

  “What are you doing here? And what are you giggling about?”

  “We’re getting away from bos
sy older sisters, if you must know.”

  “It’s out of bounds here.”

  “Well, you’re out of bounds, too, aren’t you?”

  “We like it here. Nobody interferes with us—we mean anybody, prefects and people, not just you,” explained Bunty, less hostile than Emily.

  “Well, usually nobody interferes with us,” said Emily pointedly.

  “If you’re going to be rude,” said Charlotte, “I won’t tell you why I came.” But she was too kind to continue that. “It’s a letter actually, from Daddy,” she added, self-consciously.

  “Oh, you lucky thing, it’s time I had a letter from my father,” Bunty cried.

  Emily had already jumped from the bridge. She snatched the letter from Charlotte without saying a word. She tore it open anxiously as she always did but then laughed several times in the reading of it.

  “Aren’t you going to let Clare read it, too?” asked Bunty curiously.

  •

  They hurried back afterwards but found they’d missed the bell for the end of break, and almost everyone else had already gone indoors, except for the two prefects in charge, one of whom saw the three coming from where they never should have gone. Bunty had the worst scolding, for she had slipped beside the lake and was wet and muddy everywhere.

  They had to sit in the big classroom, doing preparation in charge of Miss Wilkin, whose fiancé had been killed at the front the week before. Though as neat as ever, she looked bedraggled somehow, a little shrunk, her clothes not quite so tight on her as before. Certainly she was not jolly any more. She had pen and paper but did not write; she twisted her ring continually but did not look at it. No one now tried to play her up, but it was hard not to take the slightest advantage of her lack of interest in what they did. Bunty and Emily were drawing in ink on the backs of their hands, comparing the results with appreciative giggles. They ignored Charlotte’s occasional frowns. On her other side sat Elsie Brand, who seemed more silent than ever these days and still took no notice of efforts to be nice to her, though Charlotte tried her hardest. It worried her that anyone could look as miserable as Elsie did.

  Bunty and Emily were still drawing on each other’s hands. Emily drew a fine, fat pig on Bunty’s, dressed in school uniform. She wrote a B for Bunty underneath, but Bunty snatched the pen and had just written Elsie Brand instead when a prefect came into the room and whispered to Miss Wilkin.

  “Bunty, Miss Bite wants to see you. Will you go at once?” Miss Wilkin called aloud, in her new, flat, unhappy voice.

  “That meanie prefect,” Bunty hissed to Emily. “I bet she told about us being out of bounds.” She was squeezing between the desks, meanwhile, watched by the prefect with a grave, unmoving face; disapproving, Charlotte thought.

  “I wonder why they didn’t make us go to see her, too,” Emily whispered to Charlotte as the door closed behind the tall prefect and shorter, rounder Bunty.

  Emily went on drawing by herself, patterns instead of figures, stars and swirls and dashes, wholly absorbed by what she did. Bunty did not return. Much later, Miss Bite came with her slow, deliberate kind of walk, bent forward, one hand behind her back, placing every foot as a chicken does as if to scratch at dust. She went first to Miss Wilkin and spoke to her quietly. Miss Wilkin nodded, but her head sank farther and farther down, and she looked at no one. Miss Bite looked straight toward the class.

  “May I have your attention, please, girls,” she asked, as if they had not all secretly been watching and listening to her since she entered the room, wondering who or what she wanted here.

  “I am afraid I have to tell you, girls,” she said, “that Marjorie’s father has been killed in France. (‘Marjorie? Marjorie?’ thought Charlotte, before realizing with a horrid jump that Bunty was Marjorie.) She will not be joining you for the rest of the day, but when she returns tomorrow, I know I need not ask you to be especially kind. Marjorie has asked if Emily Moby may spend part of the afternoon with her, and I have agreed to that request.”

  The rest of the class became subdued at this. No one looked at anyone else and talk was hushed. One or two people even sniffed and cried. Charlotte did not cry but could not get out of her mind the sight of Bunty’s giggling face as she went off to be told such news.

  Suppose next time it was Emily’s father. At least, unlike Emily, Bunty had mother, brother, and sisters left to her. It occurred to Charlotte to wonder how she herself could pretend to show grief for someone she did not know, had never seen, although he was supposed to be her father. But she was ashamed of having such a selfish thought. And, of course, she knew she would be very upset on behalf of Emily.

  Just before lunch, Miss Bite sent her to the staff room with a message, and Charlotte almost bumped into Bunty coming out of Miss Bite’s room nearby. Her eyes were red all round, and she was not looking at anyone, though she gave a sort of half-made smile at Charlotte. Charlotte half smiled back, as embarrassed as most people are at someone else’s sorrow; not wanting, by some mistake, to make Bunty still more sorrowful. Looking down, she caught sight of Bunty’s hand, which still showed a faint picture of a pig in school uniform labeled Elsie Brand.

  All the rest of that day, a name went on nibbling in Charlotte’s head; not Bunty’s, nor Elsie Brand’s; the name of Sarah Reynolds. And it came to her at last, when lying in bed, that a grown-up married Emily or a grown-up married Clare would not be called Moby. They would be Smith, Jones, anything, even Reynolds, because women when they married changed their names. Which meant, of course, that one of them, grown up, might be Sarah’s mother after all. When she had considered a little more, Charlotte scarcely doubted it, for nothing else explained the things Sarah had said to her.

  She wondered which of them: Emily or Clare. She was inclined to think it Clare. Clare sounded more motherly; indeed Charlotte could not imagine Emily as a mother at all. She had said so firmly that she was never going to have children of her own, and Charlotte knew quite well that Emily did not easily change her mind.

  But then, suppose she and Clare remained for good in each other’s times, as often seemed likely now? That would mean, thought Charlotte with a horrid lurch, that would mean she herself might grow up to be Sarah Reynolds’ mother.

  Chapter 14

  AFTER the news of Bunty’s father, Emily became increasingly quiet and withdrawn. She had always tended to be in trouble at school. No one made allowances for her being younger than anyone else, and all her work came back scrawled across with pencil, blue or red, and with words such as “poor” or “ill-done” written underneath; for which she was given detentions or sometimes even conduct marks. She had not seemed to mind too much before, had let Charlotte help her sometimes with the work—in fact, usually begged her to. Now she still did not say that she minded, but looked as if she did, and she would no longer let Charlotte help at all. Her homework done, she sat playing endless solitary games—of patience or spillikins or checkers. She spent hours arranging the checkers in towers or patterns or trying to balance them around the edges of their box. Once when Miss Agnes did not come, she spent half the evening pulling horsehairs out of the dining-room chairs and arranging them in rows along the table and the other half scraping dirt with her nails from around the little brass studs that held the leather down.

  The next day, Charlotte found a solitaire board and the marbles to fit into its rounded holes. From then on Emily played with that incessantly. She even took it up to bed with her, sat hunched over the board, moving one marble across another till it was time to put out the light.

  With Emily like this, Charlotte was quite glad sometimes to have Miss Agnes to talk to, but she, too, for some reason seemed different just now, especially awkward and uncertain. Sometimes when talking of Arthur, she would change the subject abruptly to something else. Charlotte wondered if she would mention the séance, but she did not—at least not until the Friday night.

  Miss Agnes seemed more nervous and edgy than ever then, knocking things over with her elbow, picking the
m up quickly and putting them down again, starting to say something and not finishing. Two red patches came to her cheeks, both very firm and bright.

  “Did you hear of the séance?” she whispered abruptly. “Did you hear we were having a séance? Do you know what a séance is, Clare?”

  “A little bit, I think.”

  “We have a medium coming, a very wonderful lady, I believe. We hope, through her, to get in touch with dear Arthur. At least, Mrs. Chisel-Brown . . . I’m not so sure myself. . . .” She was looking away from Charlotte, twiddling a white checker between her fingers, round and round. “But dear Mother was so keen to have it, you know. She thinks of dear Arthur all the time; she was so very fond of him. A friend told us of this medium lady, and she wished to have her here. All those photographs, you know, on her table, they are all of my brother Arthur, and she won’t let anyone touch them except herself.”

  Emily was listening. Without turning her head, Charlotte could see her look up from the solitaire board. But she said nothing at all.

  “We are having,” Miss Agnes continued, “we are having this séance tomorrow.”

  In spite of what she had said to Emily before about the séance, Charlotte found herself curious to know what would happen and ready to hide in the window bay, deceitful as that seemed. She was curious about Arthur, having heard so much about him. She wanted to hear what he might say if he did say anything. She went to bed thinking of all she knew of him.

  So she dreamed about Arthur, not for the first time. She dreamed she stood below the picture, the “Mark of the German Beast,” and there were soldiers all round her in red uniforms, stiff as toys but tall as men. There were dolls, too, like Miss Agnes’s doll, tall as the soldiers; and when she looked down, she was wearing the same kind of clothes as they wore, with boots and a hat and a sash behind.