“Jolly good, Rosie,” he said. “I like the way you’ve got those tattered curtains dangling at the back.”
“What about me?” demanded Grandma. “How am I going?”
“Jolly well, Grandma,” he assured her. “It’s going to be much better than the other one when it’s finished.”
“It’ll be the last, of course,” Grandma remarked. “Last night put years on me.”
“If you could last a few more years you’d get a better portrait,” Rosie said, opening up her paints. “Everyone seems to keep forgetting I’m only eight and expects me to be Augustus John or Leonardo da Vinci or something. I think if I get my portraits looking even a bit like people they ought to be satisfied.”
“You’re putting my eyes in, I hope,” Grandma enquired suspiciously, “and my nose?”
Jack stepped hastily in to save Rosie.
“I have a feeling,” he said, quite off the cuff, “a strange feeling, that you will live to be a hundred, Grandma.”
“Whatever is the child saying?” said Grandma. She looked keenly at him and Jack, who was getting to recognise cues when they occurred, allowed his eyes to move slowly past her right ear. There he saw roast beef and Yorkshire pudding swimming in gravy and surrounded by crisp roast potatoes.
“Why,” he heard Grandma demand, “do you not look me straight in the eye when I speak to you?”
Jack held his roast beef steady and murmured,
“I see … I see …”
“What are you looking at?” A note of alarm had crept into Grandma’s voice. “Is there someone behind me?”
It was at this point that Jack overstepped the mark. If he had kept his head, and simply passed a hand over his eyes and shaken himself and said dreamily, “Oh … oh … that was queer … where am I?” a Mysterious Impression would have been created without any unwelcome side effects. But Grandma’s suggestion that there might be somebody behind her gave Jack such scope of expansion that he could not resist it. By means of adding treacle tart and custard to his Vision he deepened his gaze and said again,
“I see … I see …”
Grandma, who was a game old lady, did not wait for him to say what he saw. She turned rapidly in her charred chair to see for herself. The chair broke and Grandma went sideways. Jack and Rosie both leapt to her aid and the paints and easel went over.
Everything was very confused from then on. Tess and Mrs Fosdyke arrived on the scene. (William did not hear the racket because he had his headphones on.) Grandma was lying on the sodden carpet refusing to be helped up.
“I shall stay here until I am able to get up by myself,” Grandma kept saying, while Rosie was sobbing over her ruined Portrait. She accused Jack of having staged the whole thing on purpose to pay her back for beating him at swimming. This he hotly denied and a first-class row developed during which he told Rosie what he had really thought of her Portrait anyway.
“First portrait I’ve ever seen without eyes … and nose,” he said. “Since yesterday, anyway.”
At this Grandma, who had half raised herself up, sank back again.
“No eyes,” she cried despairingly. “No nose, no mouth. How could you, Rosie?”
“I hadn’t finished!” Poor Rosie redoubled her sobs. “It would’ve been lovely – I was going to have done eyes and things.”
Grandma was not really listening.
“I think I know a Sign when I see one,” she was saying, to herself, mainly. “There can have been few people in history who have had their Birthday Cake go up in flames and their Birthday Portraits ruined in less than a day. Even Job had his troubles spaced out. If ever I do manage to move from here, I shall probably go to bed and stay there.”
“Oh, come along, Grandma, do. Let me help you,” pleaded Tess. “I’ve got a Judo Club meeting in half an hour, and I can’t go and leave you there. I’m the oldest while William has his headphones on.”
“Two Portraits in twenty-four hours,” Grandma went on. “Eyeless Portraits. Noseless. Mouthless. It’s horrible.”
At this Rosie flung her ruined Portrait down, stamped on it, and ran from the room. Then Mr and Mrs Bagthorpe returned, the former in an even worse mood than when he had left. He and Uncle Parker had had a few savage exchanges and parted, which was why the visit had been so brief. Finding Grandma on the floor did not improve his temper. At first he thought she was lying down there because this was how she wanted to pose.
“I suppose you think you look like Ophelia?” he enquired sarcastically. “Or a reclining Muse?”
At this point Jack slunk off to join Zero. He had a definite feeling that whatever was later remembered of this whole episode, it would not be his own Mysterious Impression.
Chapter Five
Jack was in a dilemma. Not only was he having trouble with a build-up of Mysteriousness to his final Vision of the Lavender Man Bearing Tidings, but now he was no longer certain that the Lavender Man would be coming anyway, with or without Tidings. If Jack said a Lavender Man was coming and he turned up, that was one thing, but if he did not, that would be another again.
They’d probably have me put away, he thought. They’re ashamed of me enough as it is. I’m just an embarrassment to them, not being a genius.
The way Mr Bagthorpe was currently talking it did not sound as if Uncle Parker would be crossing his threshold again for a long time to come. He actually said as much. On the other hand, Mr Bagthorpe and Uncle Parker had so many rows that one suspected that they rather enjoyed them, and Jack himself had certainly noticed some of their interchanges turning up later pretty well word for word in Mr Bagthorpe’s television scripts. Indeed, so had Uncle Parker himself (though he usually affected to be too busy to watch Mr Bagthorpe’s programmes, or any television at all, for that matter). He said loudly and often that he regarded it as a debased and debasing medium. But during one of their rows Uncle Parker had threatened that he would sue Mr Bagthorpe unless he paid him a fair percentage for the dialogue he had unwittingly supplied, as anything that he, Uncle Parker, might say was copyright.
There was no way of finding out what was happening at The Knoll because if Jack himself went there then the Bagthorpes would immediately put two and two together when the Lavender Man appeared, and the whole game would be up before it got properly started. The one chance Jack did have was to make a telephone call. Even this was fraught with danger. The two telephones in the house were sited in the hall and in Mr Bagthorpe’s study. The hall was little better than a public thoroughfare, and too close to Mrs Fosdyke’s HQ in the kitchen, and of course Mr Bagthorpe was there in the study along with his telephone, probably making notes on his recent interchange with Uncle Parker.
I’ll go down into the village and use the phone box there, Jack thought. Then, if Aunt Celia answers I can put the phone straight down and keep trying till I do get Uncle Parker. No one’ll know who it is if I don’t speak.
After lunch, which was a tense, relatively silent affair with Grandma, Grandpa and Rosie all missing, Jack set off to the village with Zero. The walk gave Jack another chance to give Zero a pep talk, because he could not hope to keep out of Mr Bagthorpe’s way for ever and needed building up as much as possible before the inevitable meeting took place.
“Don’t forget,” Jack told Zero, “that half the things he says he doesn’t mean. He only says things to try out how they sound, in case he can use them in his scripts. Remember that.”
Zero’s legs had now stopped shaking and he was obviously making progress. He had had the ordinary kind of shock rather than the delayed variety Mrs Bagthorpe had been talking about.
When he reached the village Jack took a quick look about to see if anybody who knew him was looking. Then he went into the booth and took Zero in as well, even though it did make things rather crowded about his feet. Jack stood with his back to the road and dialled Uncle Parker’s number. It rang for some time before the receiver was lifted and a voice, high and clear and unmistakably Daisy’s, said:
“
Hello, Thurton four-oh-one Daisy Parker speaking. I nearly burnded the house down today and yesterday as well. Do you want Mummy or Daddy?”
Jack hastily replaced the receiver. He waited a minute or two to let Daisy get clear of the phone, then dialled again. Again Daisy’s voice replied:
“Hello. Thurton four-oh-one. Daisy Parker speaking. Is it whoever jus’ rung? If not, I nearly burnded the house down today and yesterday as well. If so will you please hang on this time and don’t go away like you did last.”
Jack replaced the receiver. This time he left the booth and walked on, trying to think of a way round what looked like an impasse. The game with Daisy could go on all afternoon, he could see that. His money would run out.
What could I do to scare her off? he wondered. What’s she scared of?
There was not, in fact, very much that Daisy was scared of. She was not half so scared of things as four-year-olds are supposed to be. He had actually heard Uncle Parker telling Mrs Bagthorpe this. It was unnatural, he said. He had given up reading her Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk and so on because when he got to the bits about wolves and giants and such, she just laughed. It was no fun, he said, reading scary tales to four-year-olds that just laughed. It made you look a fool. The only thing she was scared of, apparently, was Daleks and deathrays and things, and he was most certainly not having any of that rubbish in his house. He would not, he declared, be caught dead reading about Daleks and deathrays.
Jack pondered a few minutes perfecting his scheme and retraced his steps to the kiosk. Sure enough, it was Daisy’s voice he heard.
“That is Daisy Parker,” said Jack, interrupting her. He used a disguised voice. His acting had improved considerably in the course of the day, and the voice came out quite well. “You will be exterminated.”
He heard a squeal at the other end of the line.
“We shall transmit a deathray through the telephone wire,” said Jack. “You are holding the telephone, and it will exterminate you!”
There was a really loud shriek then, followed by a clatter that nearly deafened Jack. The receiver had not been replaced, he realised, but let drop on to the stone floor of the hall. In the background he could hear Daisy squealing and then Aunt Celia’s voice and very faintly, Jack was certain, Uncle Parker’s own. He hung on in case it was he who came to the phone, but in the end it was Aunt Celia’s footsteps he heard approaching, and her voice that said:
“Hellooooo, Helloooo. Is anyone there?”
Jack, elated by his dramatic success with Daisy, was tempted to threaten her with extermination too, but resisted.
“In any case,” he told himself as he replaced the receiver, “she’d probably have hysterics or something and Uncle Parker’d murder me when he found out.”
Uncle Parker, for some obscure reason, loved Aunt Celia to distraction. He seemed to have a blind spot about her.
Jack took Zero for another short walk and returned yet again to the kiosk.
“Keep your fingers crossed,” he told Zero, and dialled.
“Hallooo, hallooooo … Celia Parker here …”
Jack banged the telephone down. At intervals of five or ten minutes he dialled four times more. On the last two occasions Aunt Celia was not answering very calmly. She was saying things like:
“Who are you – leave me alone, leave me alone!” and:
“I know there’s someone there – I can hear you breathing … Who are you, who? Are you human?”
“One more time,” he told Zero. His supply of money had almost run out. He waited a whole quarter of an hour before making the final call. This time, Uncle Parker’s voice answered. There were no preliminaries.
“Look,” said Uncle Parker’s voice, “I don’t know who you are, but you are a maniac and a public nuisance. You have reduced my wife and only child to hysteria.”
“It’s me!” shouted Jack, lightheaded with relief. “It’s me – Jack!”
“There is a law about this sort of thing,” went on Uncle Parker, astoundingly, “and innocent subscribers must be protected from fiends like yourself. One more call from you, and I shall call the police.”
Jack wondered whether he had gone mad.
“Look, all I want to know is, are you still coming in that lavender suit, or not?”
“And when I say I am going to do a thing,” said Uncle Parker, “I do it. Understand?”
The line went dead. Slowly Jack replaced his own receiver.
Of course, he thought, Aunt Celia was listening. He had to pretend it was … And what was it he said at the end – ‘When I say I’m going to do a thing, I do it.’ That was it – that was his way of giving me the answer.
He pushed open the door and went out.
“Come on, Zero!”
He was going to try to pull in one more Mysterious Impression before coming out with the actual Vision One at tea-time. He found himself excited and pleased by the prospect. Things had become so lively during the past twenty-four hours that he was beginning to enjoy it, and feel let down when they slackened off.
On his way across the fields he had the good fortune to pick up a couple of twigs that looked promising from the dowsing point of view. He even tried holding one out for some distance, but nothing happened.
It’s because I don’t know the proper grip, he thought. It’s how you hold it that counts.
He hid the twigs in his wardrobe when he got home and then went down to survey the field. Grandpa had surfaced, he noticed, but was still without his hearing aid. He was nodding over a copy of The Guardian. Mrs Fosdyke was banging about in the kitchen baking.
“Where’s Mother?” he asked.
“Doing her Problems,” Mrs Fosdyke replied briefly. “And don’t want disturbing, I don’t suppose. You’d think she had enough problems of her own.”
Mrs Bagthorpe had an Agony Column in a monthly journal under the name of Stella Bright. She got hundreds of letters every week, and some of them, she said, were really agonising. This was partly why she had taken up Yoga, to help restore her balance. She was also a magistrate in a juvenile court and so she saw a lot of the hard side of life. Mr Bagthorpe was always trying to pump her about her letters and her cases, to see if he could get some good material for his scripts, but she refused to be drawn.
“A veil of secrecy must be preserved,” she always said. (This was where William had got it from.) “These are sacred confidences. I am morally bound by a Confessional Oath.”
She kept all her letters locked in a cupboard because she did not altogether trust Mr Bagthorpe not to go rummaging about if he ever got really desperate for an idea. Every few weeks there was a ritual called The Agony Bonfire. The closed files of letters would be brought out and ceremonially burnt. Mrs Bagthorpe always supervised this herself, especially if there were a high wind when she would get nervous in case a particularly agonising letter got blown out of the garden and fell into the wrong hands. She would not leave the bonfire until it had died right down and even then would prod about among the ashes with a hoe to make sure there were no charred remains (particularly if Mr Bagthorpe was hovering about at the time). She was exceedingly thorough about her Problems, and took them very seriously.
Once or twice Mr Bagthorpe, during periods when he was stuck with his scripts and at a loose end, had written some bogus letters to Stella Bright with false names and using the addresses of a film producer friend in Islington and one in Fulham. They had been real stingers, he afterwards gleefully informed the rest of the family, though he would not divulge most of the details, saying that they were too young for that sort of thing. Mrs Bagthorpe had fallen straight into the trap and written back as requested in the stamped addressed envelopes provided. Sometimes when he and his wife had a row Mr Bagthorpe would sardonically refer to this and quote extracts from Stella Bright’s replies, punctuated by scornful laughs. He had even gone so far as to write a TV script about the incident but the BBC had turned it down. He was not downcast by this and would boast that his
script had been “too hot to handle”. It was easy to see why Mrs Bagthorpe did not trust him and kept all her letters locked up.
If his mother was up in her room doing her column Jack knew she would not be favourably inclined to receive a Mysterious Impression. Mrs Fosdyke was automatically disqualified and Grandpa by now had his head right down and looked dead to the world. The whole house was depressingly quiet, and nobody would at that moment have taken it as the haunt of genius.
Jack wandered out into the garden with Zero following. He came upon Mr Bagthorpe so suddenly that it was too late to dodge out of sight. What Mr Bagthorpe was doing was trying to plant a pot-grown tree some fifteen feet high, single-handed. He was trying to hold it upright and fill in the hole at the same time, without much success.
“Come and hold this,” he ordered on catching sight of Jack, who obediently went and held the tree while Mr Bagthorpe seized his spade and began to shovel his specially mixed soil in round it. Zero must have missed Mr Bagthorpe’s scent, being out of doors, and was probably still in a mild state of shock, because he wandered over and sniffed at the soil.
“Doesn’t it irritate the hell out of you having that hound trailing you round everywhere?” said Mr Bagthorpe. “It would me. It’d drive me to drink.”
“He likes me,” said Jack. “It’s a compliment. And I like him,” he added boldly, knowing that Zero was listening and would soon become undermined if no one stood up for him.
“You must be joking,” said Mr Bagthorpe.
“We’ve got a lot in common,” Jack said sturdily.
“Really? You got pudding feet and no brains and matted fur, have you?”
Jack was so annoyed by this that he refused to answer. He even had a sudden crazy idea that he might report Mr Bagthorpe to the RSPCA if he could get some tapes of him criticising Zero. It could be classed as mental cruelty.
“Is it up straight?” asked Mr Bagthorpe, deeply involved in his hole. Jack refused to answer this too. In point of fact the tree was not particularly straight, because it was too tall for Jack to handle and Mr Bagthorpe was treading it in all lopsided. But it seemed to Jack that if his father’s tree got put in at an angle, however acute, it would be no more than justice. Nobody could expect to insult people and get them to hold trees straight as well.
Ordinary Jack Page 5