by Hilary McKay
He shouldn’t have gone. He needn’t have. What use would Simon be with a gun? He used to walk round ants, he was so kind. It isn’t fair. Mrs Morgan says if anything happens to him, it’s for the best. She says life isn’t easy for boys like him. I’m never speaking to her again.
THIRTY-FIVE
Grandfather and Grandmother
In Cornwall, Clarry’s grandfather’s chest had almost got the better of him at last. He had pneumonia; he was drifting in and out, awake and asleep, slowly drowning.
‘Had enough,’ he said. ‘Still, could wish for one more summer. Skylark time, I used to think. Hear them singing over the moor. Know I’d soon be off to the station.’
‘Always late!’ said his wife.
‘Hardly ever! There they’d be . . . our own skylarks. Little Clarry and the boys.’
‘Grown-up now,’ said Clarry’s grandmother. ‘How we used to complain about them coming, and now we wish them back.’
‘Never complained about them!’
‘Oh, you did! The upheaval! The house full. The dramas! Clarry nearly drowning! Peter’s leg.’
‘They were no trouble.’
‘You didn’t say that when Rupert ran away to Ireland!’
‘Well.’
‘Or when Clarry kidnapped Lucy!’
‘She was right,’ he said, sighing. ‘Don’t know what I was thinking of. Silly.’
‘Silly,’ she agreed, and bent and kissed his forehead.
‘Had this chest a long time.’
‘You have.’
‘Got over it before. Many times.’
‘Many,’ she agreed.
‘My love to our skylarks. All three.’
‘Of course.’
THIRTY-SIX
Behind the Front Line
Simon the Bony One’s letter to Rupert arrived when he was a few miles behind the front line on the last evening of a three-day break. He hardly read letters from home any more, but this one wasn’t from England. It was from just a few miles away, battered from being carried around in a pocket, slightly damp and thumb-marked with mud.
Rupert stared at it incredulously, recognizing the handwriting of the all-too-familiar Simon Bonnington, Bonners, the Bony One, that borderline pest from the past.
The past. School. That lost world. Peter, Simon. Mad Irish, whom he had carefully forgotten. Once, long ago, in a different life, he had saved the Bony One by means of his mad Irish friend. Don’t start going back, don’t start going back, Rupert begged his weeping memory. Don’t start, don’t start, let’s find a drink, let’s find a bottle. Anything.
But, still, it started.
Long before, when the red-headed Irish boy, Michael, had been dispatched to school in England in order to toughen up for the army, he had had to suffer a certain amount of agony, as all the new ones did. Each of them had something that made them stand out, and with Michael it was his Irishness and his way of comparing his present dismal circumstances to his previous carefree life. There was one particular pack of boys who were especially talented at making life unhappy for people different to themselves. One day one of them was inspired to stand behind Michael and begin an Irish song.
It was a shot straight to Michael’s homesick heart. They all saw him flinch. And so they began to torment him with Irish ballads.
They sang them behind him as he stood in front of the noticeboards, reading every word over and over, as if, in his misery, he cared. They roared them in unison when he entered the common room. They howled them even as he flew at them, at first with blubbering nose and badly aimed kicks, later with head-butts, and in time with hard, freckled, lightning-fast fists. They were more wary when he moved on to fists. They began to say, ‘He’s a lot stronger than he looks.’
Even so, he was an irresistible target.
‘In Dublin’s fair city . . .’ began the smirking inventor of this glorious game, incautiously, at the top of a staircase, and a minute later there he was, swiped down, heaved up and dangling from Michael’s grip, held only by one wrist, on the wrong side of the banister.
The crowd around immediately switched allegiance and began a chant of ‘Drop! Drop! Drop!’ The hanging boy didn’t help either.
‘Let go! Let go!’ he foolishly wailed, but luckily the Irish boy did not let go, although his face was now dead white, with orange freckles. It was Rupert who raced to grab the hanging boy’s arms, and held on tight.
Even so, it was a job to get him back to safety.
‘What do you say?’ demanded Rupert, when the inventor was back on his quivering legs at last. ‘Thank you thank you sorry sorry thank you sorry thanks I’m sorry I’m sorry,’ he gibbered, and reeled away.
Then Rupert and Michael looked at each other, and they were friends. They grew into the two most popular boys in the school. The Irish boy’s accent remained unchanged and so did his reckless temper. They were legendary sportsmen and practical jokers. Rupert climbed the chapel roof one St Patrick’s Day and dressed the weathervane in shamrock green.
There were no more Irish ballads.
Not for years, not until Simon the Bony One arrived on the scene.
Simon’s wistful grin and perilous tendency to walk into walls when Rupert was about got worse and worse. One day it happened to attract the passing attention of Rupert’s friend, Michael, who remarked, ‘Watch out, Rosy! I spy a blushing swain!’
All in a moment Rupert understood what would happen next. What Michael saw today, the rest of the school would see tomorrow. The destruction of the Bony One would be as inevitable as time, if he didn’t think fast.
Rupert did think fast. ‘It’s your lovely little maid from school,’ his friend continued, and Rupert caught him in a swift and wicked headlock, and crooned as he gripped him, ‘Don’t be jealous, you mad Irish! He’s nothing compared to you.’
After this Rupert took to singing Irish ballads now and then. ‘When Irish eyes are smiling,’ he carolled to his raging friend, and, ‘A little bit of heaven fell from out the sky one day.’
It took the attention from the Bony One completely.
‘Oh, do you love, oh, say you love, you love the shamrock green!’ he loudly serenaded his friend under his study window, with the first form in stitches, rolling around in the quad. And Michael leaped fifteen feet from the window and half killed him.
In these ways, he, Rupert, had saved Simon the Bony One from the ridicule of the rabble. And now apparently the silly kid was here in Flanders. How had that happened? Why had that happened?
Rupert didn’t want to think about that so he spent the evening drinking red wine that tasted as if it had had something extra added, like hair oil. It was raining, as it had rained all August, September and October, the world was half liquid, the front-line trenches were knee-deep in mud; if it weren’t for the submerged duckboards, you’d just keep going down. You moved with the same speed that you ran in a nightmare. It was very bloody hot and then very bloody cold; the temperature regulation was a complete foreign mess. His head had the strangest floating feel, as if it might detach from his neck and sail away. In two hours’ time his unit would be marching back up to the front again. The next morning they would go over the top.
‘Oh, Danny boy,’ sang Rupert, ‘the pipes, the pipes are calling from glen to glen . . .’ This song had been the best of all to rouse Michael. He turned scarlet with rage at the first syllable of ‘Danny’; you might as well have set fire to his bed to see him move. It had been a guaranteed crowd-pleaser; people used to come running to witness the red-headed Irish temper at its uncontrolled worst.
‘And down the mountainside,’ sang Rupert, quavering deliberately on the long notes, and was ordered from all around to ‘Shut it, just shut it’.
‘Shut it, you fool.’
‘Rosy, you’re drunk. Just shut it, now, all right?’
So he did. Michael hadn’t come running anyway. First time it hadn’t worked. Very odd.
‘This all a dream?’ he asked a stranger he found s
tanding by his shoulder as they set off towards the front, and was reassured to hear that it was.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Wild Run
Rupert woke up to bright-blue sky, a feeling of warmth and comfort, and such a fuzzy head that for several minutes he could not imagine where he was.
And then, like a light flashing into his delighted consciousness, he remembered.
Cornwall!
For a few minutes he lay quite still, dazzled by the wonder of it. He was free. No more idiots bossing him about. No more snivelling youngsters tagging after him with frightened eyes, needing a hero to look out for them. No more mud, no more itchy uniform, no more of never a moment alone.
He was back in Cornwall at last.
The first day of the holidays, there’d be a train to meet in the afternoon, Clarry with her face all shining, jumping into his arms. There’d be Peter and Lucy and hugs and jokes and laughter, there’d be days and days and days of utter perfection.
He’d forgotten that skies could be so blue.
Not a cloud.
He’d go swimming.
The glorious race across the moor, the brambles that caught at your ankles, the gorse bushes you dodged, and the boggy patches you leaped – had he ever run it so fast before? Already he could hear the rush of waves against the cliff, and the screaming of the white gulls, and off went his jacket and shirt, and was that the key to the cricket pavilion dangling round his neck? Didn’t need that, didn’t need boots either, didn’t need any of this stuff any more, and even the sound of Clarry’s bullocks, got loose again and lumbering up behind him, didn’t frighten him in the least because here was the cliff dipping down to the sea.
Time to leap.
Over.
When you enlisted you had to give your next of kin’s name and address. These were the people who would be given news of your death. Rupert had hesitated for a moment over this. His useless parents were in India, which left either his grandparents, or Clarry and Peter and their father. His grandparents, at the time he enlisted, had thought him a fool and told him so.
Penrose, Rupert had written, and then the address of the narrow stone house where his cousins lived. He had no intention of dying, so he didn’t think it would matter much anyway.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The Telegram
Miss Vane was the only person with Clarry when the telegram arrived. It was Miss Vane who took it from her hand, wrapped her in a blanket, brought her a cup of tea, clattering in its saucer because her hands were trembling and stayed with her when her father, arriving home to the news, rubbed his neck, said not a word of either comfort or regret, stared out of the window, and disappeared.
Missing, said the telegram, and also: Presumed dead.
Snow-cold shock held Clarry motionless, silenced every sound, faded the colours to shades of grey and diminished her to a fragment of nothingness, a small lost point, rocking in an endless darkness of space.
And then a sound penetrated, as if from another world, and it was Miss Vane’s cracked, exhausted, quavering voice. ‘There may be hope, there may still be hope.’
Clarry found that she could turn her head, and there was poor Miss Vane, looking utterly tear-washed, her powder all streaked into mauve and grey, her hair a fallen heap, her eyes pink and alarmed as sugar mice, and yet she was saying again, ‘All hope is not lost, dear,’ and Clarry realized that all the time she had sat in her frozen immobility, Miss Vane had been talking, and she, it seemed, had been answering, because they appeared to be halfway through a conversation.
‘. . . home to my cats . . . Then we will think . . . Many wonderful and astonishing things happen when we least expect them . . .’
If shock had been cold, hope was warm. Hope brought Clarry back to life, her blood running again, her courage returning. By the time Miss Vane returned from feeding her cats, Clarry was back to herself again and a rhythm like a heartbeat was bumping through her mind: Wonderful and astonishing, wonderful and astonishing, wonderful and astonishing.
‘Missing,’ said Clarry to Miss Vane when she returned. ‘That’s all we know is true. Presumed dead doesn’t mean anything. Not if you don’t presume it.’
‘Of course it doesn’t,’ agreed Miss Vane. ‘We must be patient and believe that one day the dear boy may—’
‘No, we mustn’t!’ interrupted Clarry. ‘You said all hope wasn’t lost, and perhaps it isn’t. And that many wonderful and astonishing things happen and I think they sometimes do, but not in this house.’
‘No,’ agreed Miss Vane, startled, but understanding. ‘Not in this house.’
‘But somewhere else they might,’ said Clarry. ‘There are hospitals in France and in England. There are some in Southampton. That’s where I’ll begin. Presumed!’ continued Clarry, looking fearlessly at the telegram. ‘It means they don’t know. If I was writing it, I’d put Missing, presumed alive!’
‘You would be quite right!’ agreed Miss Vane, finding such bravery contagious.
‘Peter had a train timetable in his room. I’ve been looking up trains. There’s one in an hour. You needn’t worry, Miss Vane. I’ll be quite safe.’
But Miss Vane lifted her head at this, and her eyes were no longer either pink or alarmed. They were as bright as Clarry’s and she said that she wouldn’t worry, and would be quite sure Clarry was safe, and the reason she gave was that she was coming as well, to deal with porters, or take care of luggage, even to speak French, if necessary, and she finished this declaration with a hug and ‘Please do not argue’, and so Clarry hugged her back, and didn’t.
There were bags to pack and money to find. Also messages to be written by Miss Vane to Mrs Morgan, to Clarry’s father, and to Violet, now a trusted member of the Red Cross group. These messages consisted of triplicate instructions for the care of Miss Vane’s cats. Each included descriptions of how to deal with the beast heart in the icebox, the individual names of the cats, and a discreet but urgent reference to the ‘earth box’ in the scullery. Mrs Morgan and Violet were instructed to ‘obtain the door key entrusted to Mr Penrose at number forty-six’. The door key was carefully labelled. Mrs Morgan’s and Violet’s letters were stamped and posted, along with Clarry’s far briefer message to Peter:
R missing, am sure not dead. Take care of Father. Much love, C
All these things Clarry and Miss Vane managed with miraculous speed. In less than an hour they were out in the street with their bags, and suddenly good luck was with them. Mr King and his black-and-white horse, Jester, appeared round the corner.
One glance at their faces told him that this was no time for trading insults with Miss Vane. With the utmost gentleness and discretion he offered his assistance in any way they cared to name.
So their journey began as honoured passengers in a rag-and-bone cart, Clarry in the back, and Miss Vane on the seat beside Mr King, where she had a cheering view of Jester’s black-and-white rump and intelligently swivelling ears.
‘I fear I have misjudged you far too long, Mr King,’ said Miss Vane earnestly. ‘I can only apologize and try to assure you that I only ever had Clarry’s interests at heart.’
‘Say not a word,’ replied Mr King, pulling off his hat and holding it to his chest. ‘I should have shown more respect. Now I can see that you are one in a million. I’m glad to do my bit to help and I wish it was more.’
Then silently, and with great furtiveness and glances over his shoulder, he replaced his hat, drew an old black wallet from its snug pocket over his heart, took from it three warm and well-folded notes, all the paper it contained, pushed them into Miss Vane’s hands, and murmured once more, ‘Say not a word!’
Miss Vane could not speak at all, such were her sudden tears, but when they were over, her old distrust of Mr King was completely gone. With no encouragement, she recklessly confided her great concern for her cats, which despite the three sets of instructions, she found already gnawed at her soul.
‘The whole arrangement depends,’ explained Miss Va
ne earnestly, ‘on whether or not Mr Penrose will be available to supply my key. Owing to his work, he is seldom at home. And, even if he is, I cannot imagine either he or Violet coping with the beast heart properly, and none of them managing the . . . the . . . arrangement in the scullery on which my oldest cat depends.’
Mr King said that he well understood, that his old mother had never been without a cat in all her long years, and that he and Jester always had one, knocking about the stable.
‘Company, like,’ said Mr King.
‘Indeed, yes,’ agreed Miss Vane, and by the end of the journey her spare back-door key was in his pocket and he was helping her down, unloading the bags and swinging Clarry over the back.
‘Now, then, ladies, good luck and God bless!’ he told them, and a moment later was up on the cart again.
‘Lively, Jester!’ they heard, and saw his hat wave as he turned the corner.
‘Clarry, that is a very dear man,’ said Miss Vane, gazing after him.
‘Yes,’ agreed Clarry. ‘It is.’
THIRTY-NINE
Odysseus
Simon and Vanessa’s father, whom Clarry had named Odysseus, had not been a good prisoner. He found prison-camp life uncomfortable and boring and he didn’t enjoy eating rats. So he and some friends dug a tunnel beside the latrines, and one happy morning they allowed it to be discovered, and while it was being thoroughly and indignantly explored they rolled, one by one, under a section of loosened wire, whispered ‘Good luck!’ to each other, and set off to see what would happen next.