by Jane Gardam
Harry went round the back and opened the kitchen door and called hello, as he always did now. He met complete silence. He looked in the rooms and they were empty. The kitchen fire was laid but not lit and there was an extra neatness about the table and the sink and draining-board that meant nobody had been there for some time. Harry remembered all at once the Show at Brough, where Bell and everyone had gone and where Mr. Teesdale had been hurrying to on the tractor. The kennel was empty because of the sheep-dog trials. They’d be hours getting back—sheep-dog trials being as long as it takes. And then all the judging of the plants and cakes and rum-butters.
Never mind, he’d just go home. He didn’t like the feel of Blue Barns without the Egg-witch in it, and that was odd when he remembered how frightened of her he used to be. The house had a different quiet about it without her. Even a quiet house has some little noises in it if you listen—ticks and creaks, a hum from a fridge or a flap from a curtain or a squeak from a board. Today Blue Barns was so quiet it was like somebody holding his breath and listening for himself.
Harry thought of the old lady all alone upstairs and prickles walked across the back of his neck. I’m off, he thought.
And there was a tremendous and horrendous crash from just behind his head!
He was halfway down the yard, beyond the pump before he stopped running.
Then he listened. “I can’t,” he said—and very slowly set off back.
The kitchen had become completely still again but from under the dairy door there trickled a stream of what looked like blood.
This time he ran out of the door, over the yard past the kennel, past the silos and a good way down the bramble lane.
Then he stopped again.
He’d have to go back.
If there had been anyone about he need not have gone back. If there’d been anybody at home in any of the farms along by the village he could have run into one and told them and left it at that. But everyone would be at the show.
Maybe he could telephone the police? He could telephone his father and mother packing up at Light Trees. He could reverse the charges since he had no money—or just dial 999.
Except there wasn’t a telephone box.
But there was a telephone—back in the kitchen of Blue Barns. The kitchen with blood pouring out under the dairy door.
Harry walked slowly back, up the lane past the silos, past the kennel, past the pump and into the kitchen where a very old lady in a long frilly white dress was standing eating a slice of bread and drinking blackberry juice out of a jam jar.
She was very, very small, with a sharp face, the chin turning up to meet the nose that turned down. Her jaw was going round and round in a circle and her eyes were in two round shadowy caves but you could still see they were bright, bright blue. Her hair was white and puffy and thin and all over the place.
Behind her through the now open dairy door Harry could see a great ocean of blackberry juice flowing all over the dairy floor. Small purple dabs walked out of it up to where the old lady stood. She didn’t look frightening at all. Rather frightened if anything.
She said in a tiny voice, like a flute down inside her, “It might have been the cat.”
“There is no cat,” said Harry. “Leastways it’s not about. It’ll be off somewhere. You can’t say it was the cat—and the door left shut no doubt.”
“Maybe,” she said, “it was the gypsies. The gypsies got in.”
“Gypsies don’t come spilling juice.”
“Gypsies does anything,” said the flute.
Harry looked in the dairy. The juice flowed from a big broken bowl. Above the bowl, from a hook in the ceiling, was a muslin bag of dry brambles that had been dripping all night. It was a large bag that must have dripped out juice in pints, the pints now flowing free. “I’m not clearing that up,” said Harry. “I’m always clearing things up here.”
The old woman looked very sad. “She’ll go at me.”
“I don’t wonder.” Harry looked about for a cloth, then he said, “No—I’m not cleaning it all up.”
Granny Crack took a bite of the bread and a drink from the jar, daintily like a swallow. “You’re Harry,” she said, “Harry Bateman. I’ve seen you before.”
“I’ve not seen you.”
“I’ve seen you through upstairs windows. I’m light-footed.” She looked down at her pale little marbly feet with a purple rim to them and said, “I’ll to my bed.”
“You’ll leave a trail.”
“I’ll wash my feet.”
“Where will you wash your feet?”
The old woman looked perplexed.
“I’m not washing your feet here,” said Harry, “not in that sink. You can’t climb on that draining-board. You’ll have to wash them in the trough in the yard.”
“I’ll not go outside. I don’t go outside.”
“Or there’s a tap for her dahlias in the front garden.”
“It’s outside.”
“I’ll not clear up for you if you don’t wash your feet.”
“Oh!” came out of the flute, long and wailing and thin.
“I’m glad my gran’s not like you,” said Harry. He found a cloth and mopped up juice with a very bad grace. “The flags’ll need scrubbing,” he said, “and the lino’s stained for ever. And the bowl’s done for.”
“Throw it,” said Granny Crack.
“Throw?”
“Throw it int’ midden and cover it.”
“I’ll throw it,” said Harry, “if you’ll come out in the garden and have your feet washed at that tap.”
“Kill me,” she said. “You want to kill me.”
But when Harry had thrown the broken bowl away on the midden she trotted after him into the front garden and stood quite interestedly with her feet under the tap. He turned it on and the flute laughed. “Like Castle Beck,” she said. “Gives you the jumps.” Then she skipped off and wiped her feet all over the grass right down to the garden gate.
“I’m off now,” said Harry. “You’ll be all right.” He opened the gate.
Granny Crack trotted after him in her white nightie.
“Hey—you can’t come with me! Go back,” he said, feeling he’d got landed with some sort of crazy, disobedient dog.
Granny Crack grinned and sat down by the gate with her back to the wall where Mr. Bateman had sat to read his book. The September sun shone down on her and she turned her smooth face up to it and munched with her small mouth at nothing for a time. She twiddled her lilac-coloured feet and let the sun warm them on the warm bank.
“You’re a boy,” she said. “I had boys. They went off. There wasn’t enough for them. You’re not from these parts.”
“Some of the time I am,” said Harry. “Off and on I’ve been here for ages. We live in London mostly though.”
“London,” said Granny Crack. “I never saw London Town.”
“It’s all right,” said Harry. “Up here’s better. More seems to go on up here.”
She turned her head to him. Every bone in it could be seen through the wispy white hair and her mouth fell open in a little O. Her blue eyes stared in great surprise.
“More goes on,” the distant flute said. It was difficult, Harry thought, to know what feelings started the words off, for the voice had no expression in it. It was a voice just taken out for use after being long put away.
“I’d like once to have seen London Town.”
Harry found that he was trying to tell her. He was not much of a talker and never had been, but once he got going he found it easy—she looked at him with such wide eyes he might have been telling her adventures. Yet it was only the zoo and the Tower and Buckingham Palace and Nelson’s Column and all the old boring things you take visitors to. He told her biking on the Common was best—but nothing like biking here. And you never noticed weather h
ardly, or trees and so on. There were drunks, of course, to look at on Waterloo station and painters hanging their pictures on Hyde Park railings on Sunday mornings, and the lights over the bridges coming back late after the pantomime at Christmas. No excitements much though . . .
He droned on and on. After a time Granny Crack turned her queer old face from him and seemed to be smiling. She turned her face up to the white crescent of the daytime moon. And Harry droned.
The Egg-witch found the pair of them sitting there, contented in the sunshine.
THE ICICLE RIDE
Can Harry come out?” asked Bell bobbing up at Light Trees’ kitchen window and making Harry’s mother drop a pan. She had been standing at the sink dreaming out over the snow-covered view to see if she could sight Helvellyn and the Saddleback sparkling against the sky.
“Heavens, Bell, wherever did you spring from? Only sheep look in on me at this sink.”
“I come over the stile. You could have seen me all across the field. I were watchin’ you.”
“You might have waved, Bell.”
“I waved and I called but you were busy over me head looking at the snow.”
“I can see your footmarks now. Come round quick. I can’t stand shouting here and it’s too cold to open the window.
“Harry,” she called.
Bell came round into the house and stamped his feet in the stone porch and then took his boots off and came into the living-room and stamped a bit more in his socks and got in near the fire with the long green furry branches sticking out two feet into the room. He came right into the house now without knocking. He was long past knocking, for the holiday folks had been here now for years.
Bell was much bigger than at the first angry hay-time, though he still wore the same hat he’d worn then, with a piece of his hair coming out of the top. His face hadn’t altered. Neither had Harry altered much. He was stretched out upstairs making a railway train out of playing cards that ran across the little bedrooms and over the landing and up the step to the bathroom in rather the style of the Trans-Siberian Express. He encouraged this train by singing to it.
Sometimes when the song grew louder and the train had a long incline to go up there would be a roar from the little room at the back of the house where his father was writing for the newspapers about important things which had little to do with playing-card trains.
“Hush as you go up,” said Harry’s mother to Bell, “Mr. Bateman’s got a deadline.”
Harry had a dead line too. All the carriages had spilled about all over the place and Harry was lying on the floor on his back among them looking up through the landing window at the high line of fell with no cow or sheep standing out along the sharp line of it like black cutouts, which he liked to see.
“There’s no cows and no sheep out,” he said to Bell.
“And no rabbits and no nothing else,” said Bell. “My, but it’s freezing. D’you want to come on an icicle ride?”
“Yes,” said Harry getting up and putting on a jersey. “What is it?”
“You’ll see. Are you ready? You’ll need some good fistcovers. And a hat.”
“There’s plenty downstairs with my zip jacket.”
“Int’ porch?” said Bell, throwing a second jersey at him. “’Ere, get this on an’ all.”
“Yes, int’ porch,” said Harry.
“In the porch,” said his mother appearing from the kitchen. “Now whatever’s happening? Dinner’s ready in five minutes and it’s a good stew.”
“Bell wants me to go on a nice icle ride.”
“A nice little ride! A day like this! What are you thinking of then, Bell—a central-heated Bentley?”
“No, an icicle ride, Mrs. Bateman.”
“But will Harry’s track-bike keep the road?”
“Oh I’d think so. It’s not a real rough track-bike. It’s got brakes. I’ve only got Mam’s sit-up-and-beg and the roads down the bottom are gritted.”
“It seems a funny day for bike rides.”
“It’s just up here on the fell it’s so fierce,” said Bell. “Down the bottom they’re all out doing their shopping.”
“Well, stay for your dinner with us first,” said Mrs. Bateman, “and I’ll ring your mother. Then Mr. Bateman will take you both and the bike down when he goes to catch his deadline at the post-office. Will the post-office be a good starting place?”
“Grand. We’re going down Castledale.”
“Oh well, that’s a nice level road for a mile or so if you’re wrapped up, and there’ll be nothing about to skid into you today. There’s a phone box at Hell Gill. You can ring from there if you want lifting back. You’re sure now it won’t be iced over?”
“I’d think not,” said Bell. “We can always get off and walk if it is.”
“And you’ve asked at home?”
“WHAH, YARRAH, WHAH!” came from the top of the stairs they were talking on. “However am I going to get this done in time for the post?”—so that Bell was saved the difficulty of replying.
They picked up Bell’s bike from the back shed of the Teesdales’ farm as they passed, seeing no one. Snow was very thick on Bell’s father’s fields and the roofs of his buildings and up against the front door that was never used in winter. Bell’s family was round the back, his father doing his tax, his mother baking, his grandad making mole traps and his sister Eileen in bed with a magazine, and nobody heard them call. At the post-office they were just in time to see the post-van driving away towards the Oxenholm road to the train, and had quite an exciting time chasing it with Harry’s father’s piece of writing which—when they had flashed and tooted long enough—the postman said he would see arrived at London for the deadline. Then they returned to the post-office and Mr. Bateman helped them out with the bikes and watched them off under a sky grown very low and dark towards Nateby; but you could see from his face that he was still mostly inside the envelope he had just handed into the van. The two boys were just shadows passing away from him.
“You did say an icicle ride?” said Harry, pedalling fast to keep up with the large wheels of the sit-up-and-beg. “I’d not really want a bicycle ride today. Whoops!”
The track-bike did a glorious swan-lake across the thick-packed snow of the road and Harry slid off and landed underneath it. The grit was over the snow, but it was beginning to get a glaze over it.
“It’s a bicycle ride int’ first place but the main event’s an icicle ride all right,” said Bell, “or we’ll hope it is. It may not come to anything. Often it doesn’t, but once it did.”
“Did what?”
“Come to something. To icicles. If you know what you’re on about looking.”
“Like blackberrying?”
“That’s it. Wow!” This time it was Bell’s bike’s turn to do a graceful ice-dance and Bell tried to catch up with it before it hit the cattle grid. They both paused for breath and looked down at Wateryat Bottom and the frozen-over river there. The flat plain, like a green, sheep-nibbled psalm of a place in summer, looked today like somewhere that had come grinding down from Alaska. Two dismal gypsy caravans stood on it and one sorrowful-looking gypsy pony. Had it not been for the pony you’d have said no living creature had anything to do with the caravans. They were shuttered in, tight curtained, and the rubbish around them had been made to look quite ancient and respectable, like ruins, under its fat layer of snow.
“How far is an icicle ride?” said Harry. The sunshine of the morning had now completely gone and it was very grey light.
“A mile or two as far as I remember. Not much more anyway. We’ll ride on a bit. Then if it gets rough we’ll push. It’s fine and frosty all right. Help!” A Land-Rover suddenly appeared round a corner and fainted across the road nearly into the stone wall when it caught sight of them. A head looked out. It was a farmer Bell knew who lived at the far end of Castledale. His Land-Rov
er was solid with sheep he’d found straying and was taking to Nateby pound. A wall of yellow-eyed wool looked out over his shoulders. The sheep’s eyes rolled about and the farmer’s eyes rolled about, too.
“Whatever’s this then? Goin’ off youth ’ostelling?”
“Just a bit ride,” said Bell.
“Yer father know?”
“Yes,” said Harry.
“Then he’s dafter than I thought,” said the farmer revving and shuddering at the gears, and, all the sheep a-tremble, he passed them by. It seemed very cold and silent in the dale when the noise of the engine had gone.
“Come on,” said Bell. Totteringly up they got and pedalled safely for quite a long way in the more sheltered bends beyond Pendragon Castle, bumpity bump by the holiday cottages, bolted and barred like the gypsy caravans.
“You’re the only incomers comes in winter,” said Bell. “Folks say London must be a pretty terrible place if you prefer up here this weather.”
“London’s not bad,” said Harry, and the bike took a header for a small ravine, “but it’s not exciting.”
When they’d gathered up the bike this time and looked it over, Bell thought it might be an idea for Harry to finish the icicle ride on foot. It wasn’t that the track-bike was finished altogether, but the brakes when you squeezed them seemed to swing about rather. In fact, as Bell squeezed one of them, it came off in his hand.
“Put the thing int’ roadside,” said Bell, “it likely won’t get stolen this weather.” They propped it up against the wall, where it leaned looking rather relieved—like the dying Indian in the poem, said Bell.
“What poem?”
“Poem at school. About a dying Indian. When they get ill, American Indians, and they’re crossing the prairie, they just has to be left. Somebody else takes over their kids and that and they just watch as the tribe goes walking off into the distance. And then they die. It’s like The Guns of Navarone.”