Ordinary Jack

by Helen Cresswell

  Mr Bagthorpe threw down his spade and stepped back. He surveyed Jack and the tree.

  “I suppose I should’ve had more sense than ask you,” he said finally.

  At this point, Jack scented the cue for a Third Mysterious Impression. He fixed his eyes, quite deliberately, just past his father’s left ear.

  “What’re you looking at?” demanded Mr Bagthorpe and whirled about, scanning the garden. Jack was looking at a plateful of the jam tarts and scones Mrs Fosdyke was baking.

  “Look at me,” commanded Mr Bagthorpe. Jack pretended not to hear and held his gaze steady. This, surprisingly, unnerved Mr Bagthorpe quite quickly.

  “What’s going on?” he said uneasily, and had another thorough scan round. Then, “I don’t get it. Here, give me that tree.”

  Jack released his grip on the tree and it swooped down on to Mr Bagthorpe.

  “Get out of here!” Mr Bagthorpe’s face glowered through a latticework of branches and leaves. “And take that hound of hell with you.”

  Jack turned silently and walked off.

  “It’s that mutton-brained hound that’s at the bottom of this!” he heard Mr Bagthorpe yelling after him. Jack broke into a run and did not stop till he was out of earshot, mainly for Zero’s sake.

  “Good boy!” He stopped and patted him hard. “Don’t you take any notice. He’s just jealous.”

  Zero wagged his tail feebly.

  Jack had not intended to count this as a successful Mysterious Impression till half an hour later he heard his mother and father talking in the burnt-out dining-room. They were in there deciding on a new colour scheme.

  “… suffering from delayed shock, this morning,” he heard Mrs Bagthorpe say.

  “If that was delayed shock, I’m the Emperor of Siam,” came Mr Bagthorpe’s terse reply. “I tell you he was looking past my left ear like he was Joan of Arc seeing visions, or something.”

  Jack, listening, glowed and expanded and awarded himself an Oscar.

  “Perhaps he was hallucinating.” Mrs Bagthorpe sounded genuinely concerned and Jack felt half guilty. “That can be a symptom of delayed shock.”

  “Oh, do be quiet about delayed shock,” Mr Bagthorpe told her. “You’ve got it on the brain. It’s clear as crystal what’s happening. That boy’s mooning round from morning till night with no one for company but that half-witted mongrel of his, and he’s beginning to get like him. It’s a perfectly well-recognised and authenticated phenomenon. You’ve heard about people growing like their dogs, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Don’t be silly,” returned his wife. “It’s quite ridiculous the way you go on about that dog. As a matter of fact, I rather like him.”

  Jack did not wait to hear what followed. Mr Bagthorpe was still spluttering and Jack could not wait to get back to his room and tell Zero, in all honesty, that Mrs Bagthorpe liked him as well.

  “D’you hear? She likes you. Good old Zero.”

  Zero thumped his tail once or twice and Jack was delighted, and thought:

  So now, there’s only the actual Vision to go.

  To put things on a businesslike footing he took out his loose-leaf notebook and wrote “Mission Accomplished” after “Create Mysterious Impressions”. He then listed them as:

  By accident at breakfast but thought to be delayed shock.

  On Grandma while Rosie was doing her portrait which unfortunately got spoiled.

  On Father I’m glad to say while he was planting his rotten lopsided tree.

  He put the book back among the pile of comics and spent the rest of the time till tea rereading some back numbers.

  Everyone had gathered in the kitchen for tea in a state of what seemed uneasy truce. Jack guessed that what had brought them all together was not so much the desire for a brisk and lively interchange of ideas as the delicious scent of Mrs Fosdyke’s cooking, which had been invading the house and garden all afternoon. (Even Mr Bagthorpe conceded that Mrs Fosdyke did not cook like a hedgehog.) Three people present had also missed lunch, of course. Rosie was evidently still blaming Jack for the ruination of her second Birthday Portrait and pulled truly horrible faces whenever he looked at her. These he did not return, partly because he felt he was too old to be caught doing this, and partly because he recognised that he had, albeit in a roundabout and quite unintentional way, brought about the catastrophe. He resolved that on some future occasion he would make it up to her, either by buying her an ice lolly or letting her borrow his microscope, which as a rule he would lend to no one, even when bribed.

  Conversation to begin with was sporadic and Jack decided to wait until it warmed up before coming out with his Lavender Man Bearing Tidings. Had he known, of course, that things were to warm up to the point where nobody would be able to hear a word anybody else was saying, his strategy might have been different.

  It started innocently enough with Tess announcing as she reached for her third buttered scone that she might give up Judo and take up Yoga instead.

  “Bit tactless, isn’t it?” enquired Mr Bagthorpe tactlessly.

  “Why is it?”

  “I should hardly have thought,” he replied, “that it needed to be spelled out. I should have thought you might have left the monopoly of Yoga to your mother.”

  “I don’t see why,” Tess said. “I don’t see why we can’t both do it.”

  “All right, I’ll spell it out,” said Mr Bagthorpe, “if that’s the way you want it. The way your mother does her Yoga, she looks like someone doing an impression of a dinosaur emerging from the primeval mud.”

  There was a silence.

  “Someone will have to come with me to have it fitted,” said Grandpa suddenly, obviously finishing a train of thought he had started in his head.

  “If you took any form of physical exercise yourself,” said Mrs Bagthorpe distantly, “you would be in a position to make that kind of criticism. Though even then there are those who would think it not only uncalled-for, but unkind.”

  “I’ve never seen you doing your Plough Posture and things,” said William, “but you certainly don’t look like a dinosaur most of the time.”

  “Thank you, William,” said his mother, accepting this dubiously worded testimony.

  “I bet you can’t stand on your head anyway, Father,” piped up Rosie.

  “No use at all,” said Grandpa loudly. “Worse than useless.”

  “Rubbish,” snapped Mr Bagthorpe. “Just wait while I swallow this mouthful.”

  He got up from the table.

  “What are you going to do?” cried Mrs Bagthorpe. “You’re not going to stand on your head now, in the middle of a meal?”

  “And make sure he sees me do it,” Mr Bagthorpe indicated Grandpa.

  “But he was talking about hearing aids,” began his wife, but too late. Mr Bagthorpe was already crouched in preparation.

  “Stop him, Mother,” she implored.

  “Henry has always gone his own way,” said Grandma imperturbably. She was, after all, Mr Bagthorpe’s mother, and should know. “And he has always been a show-off.”

  Mr Bagthorpe was halfway up when he heard his own mother so slander him. Everyone watched fascinated as he swayed up there, uncertain whether to carry on and complete the headstand, or to surface and answer back. Gravity decided the matter. Mr Bagthorpe could not, unless he had been doing it secretly in his study, have stood on his head since he was a schoolboy, and it showed. His descent was not graceful. He crashed down and as his legs skewered round one of his shoes caught a Dresden piece on the dresser. A chair also went over. Everyone present, except Grandpa and William, shrieked. (Grandpa was still making loud observations about hearing aids and William was helpless with laughter.) Mrs Fosdyke shrieked louder than anyone and darted vainly forward to try to field the Dresden piece before it hit the tiles. The crash took place under her very nose.

  “Oh no! No! Not me Dresden,” she lamented. It was this kind of scene that made her persistently refuse to live in at the Bagthorpes’. The reas
on she always gave for this was that she had her unmarried son to cook for. The real reason, as she told her friends, was that certainly Mr Bagthorpe and Grandma, and possibly more of the family, were mad, and that the continual goings-on would be more than flesh and blood could stand. She felt it would shorten her life.

  She later gave a graphic picture of Mr Bagthorpe’s Yogic exhibition to her cronies in The Fiddler’s Arms.

  “With a brain like his,” she opined, “you can’t afford to have the blood rushing to your head. It unhinged him, of course, and down he comes, crash on my Dresden Floral, and that’s that. Broke his arm as well, and I wish no harm to anyone, I’m sure, but it served him right.”

  The confusion that followed Mr Bagthorpe’s collapse was certainly exceeding. Jack actually bawled above the din:

  “I see a Lavender Man Bearing Tidings,” but he might as well have been reciting the two times table. Everybody else was bawling too.

  Grandma was wailing, “Son, son, speak, speak!” like someone out of the Old Testament.

  Rosie jumped up and down yelling, “I knew he couldn’t do it, I knew he couldn’t do it!” until Tess administered a sharp slap and set her off bawling instead.

  Mrs Bagthorpe, with creditable concern, all things considered, rushed forward and pushed Grandma aside.

  “Henry, are you hurt?”

  “My arm, my arm!” bellowed Mr Bagthorpe above the din. “Ow – OUGH!” as his wife tried to raise him, and then, in tones of epic despair:

  “My writing arm! My God, it’s my writing arm!”

  William was sent to telephone the doctor. Mr Bagthorpe, supporting his right arm with his left, was led into the sitting-room and made comfortable with cushions (or as comfortable as he would admit to being).

  Even then the tumult did not abate because in true Bagthorpe tradition a post-mortem inquiry into the incident was instantly set up and everybody started arguing about whose fault it had all been. Jack blamed Mr Bagthorpe himself for starting the whole thing off with his rude remarks about dinosaurs. Tess blamed Rosie for daring him, and William for laughing at him just when he was at his most precarious. Grandma blamed Grandpa for making one of his loud remarks off cue, and it seemed as if it was going to be one of those rare occasions when it was not all finally pinned on to Zero. (Zero had been left upstairs. Jack had given him the job of guarding the pile of comics in which the Plan of Campaign was concealed, in the hope that this would give him a sense of responsibility and increase his self-respect.)

  Jack looked at his watch. It was already after five and time was short. The furore showed no sign of dying down and would doubtless redouble when the doctor arrived and each Bagthorpe made his or her own diagnosis. The only person in the room who could actually be pinned down, Jack decided, was the patient himself, who was at least sitting. He had gone quiet now, except for the occasional groan, because for the time being he had an inattentive audience on which any serious performance would be wasted.

  It was hard on him, Jack realised, to have to receive two Mysterious Impressions so close together, particularly on top of injuring his writing arm, but there seemed no choice. He advanced and stood in front of Mr Bagthorpe’s chair waiting to be noticed. At last his father’s eyes travelled up and met his.

  “What’re you hanging about there for?” demanded Mr Bagthorpe. “Where’s that doctor got to? This could be the end of the road for me. I’m sunk without my right arm.”

  Jack really had to harden himself to carry through the manoeuvre. Slowly he moved his gaze to just behind Mr Bagthorpe’s right ear, and visualised turkey with all the trimmings, which he obviously would not get in the foreseeable future, but there was no harm in imagining. The effect was gratifyingly dramatic.

  “Quick! Help! He’s doing it again!” yelled Mr Bagthorpe. He yelled so loud he even got heard and everyone looked round.

  “Quick! Laura – look! It’s horrible! I told you – look – he’s doing it again!”

  Mrs Bagthorpe rushed over and the others, interested, crowded round.

  “Get behind me, Laura, quick!” commanded Mr Bagthorpe, “and just look where he’s got his eyes fixed.”

  Jack did not feel he could sustain his performance much longer. He had only begun his acting career that morning, and the size of the present audience was daunting. Just as Mrs Bagthorpe crouched behind her husband’s chair to take a bearing on the line of Jack’s gaze, he said, quite distinctly and slowly, “I see a Lavender Man Bearing Tidings.”

  The hush that now fell was total.

  “He sees what?” hissed Grandma at last, poking Tess. “What’s that about lavender bags?”

  “He says he sees a Lavender Man Bearing Tidings, Grandma,” Tess whispered back.

  “Oh.”

  Jack repeated the words. He then stepped back and passed a hand over his eyes and murmured, “Where am I?” once or twice, just to round the whole thing off.

  It was Mr Bagthorpe who broke the silence.

  “When that doctor does come,” he said, “get him seen to first. My own can wait. Poor old chap. Completely bananas. He’ll end up in a straitjacket.”

  “Someone’ll have to come with me to get it fitted,” said Grandpa loudly in the ensuing silence.

  Chapter Six

  When the doctor eventually arrived Mr Bagthorpe insisted that he examine Jack immediately.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said faintly, leaning back on his cushions, “I shall survive. I think my writing arm may be a write-off – ha, that’s good!” (He perked up momentarily but sank back again.) “But that boy must be examined.”

  “What for?” asked Dr Winters. He looked keenly at Jack, who had been trying so hard to appear normal during the last half-hour that the strain was beginning to tell. When the family cross-examined him about the Lavender Man Bearing Tidings while waiting for the doctor, he stoutly denied all knowledge of saying any such thing, and said they must all have been dreaming.

  “I just felt a bit giddy, that’s all,” he told them. “Like I did earlier. Everyone gets it sometimes.”

  “I don’t,” William said.

  The rest of them promptly chimed in, saying they never got giddy either, with the exception of Grandma who said that she got giddy so often nowadays that she could hardly tell the difference.

  “Who gets giddy and who doesn’t has nothing to do with it,” Mr Bagthorpe said. “I take it none of us has seen Lavender Men Bearing Tidings?”

  They all shook their heads and William said he wouldn’t know one if he saw one and was told to shut up.

  “This is not a laughing matter,” said Mr Bagthorpe sternly. “That boy may not be a genius, but he has always passed as normal – till now.”

  Jack was so infuriated by this that he very nearly told them he was a lot cleverer than they thought, as witness the fact that the whole tribe of them had been taken in by the first bit of serious acting he had ever done. He managed to refrain from this by promising himself an even greater victory if he stayed his hand.

  “I keep telling you,” he said, “I’m right as rain. Anyone want to test me on my tables or irregular French verbs?”

  Mrs Bagthorpe, who was trying to treat the whole matter impartially, as she would one of her Problems, thought this a good idea.

  “It will at least show whether it’s only one part of his brain that has been affected, or all of it,” she said sensibly.

  So Rosie ran Jack through some mental arithmetic and Tess took him through his French irregular verbs, and he emerged with practically full marks. If anything, he did rather better than could be normally expected. Mr Bagthorpe refused to be comforted by this.

  “I don’t see that proves anything,” he said. “There are plenty of lunatics walking around reeling off kings and queens of England or the Cup Final results for the last twenty years. I know some of them.”

  “What do I have to do to prove I’m normal, then?” Jack asked. He got a dig of his own in. “Stand on my head?”

&nbs
p; “Very funny,” said Mr Bagthorpe through his teeth.

  “As a matter of fact,” Tess said, “that was an exceedingly good sign, Jack saying that. A sense of humour is usually regarded as a sign of mental health – apart from excessive punning, which is another matter entirely. That –” she shot a look at her father, who was always doing it – “is often an early indication of impending schizophrenia.”

  “Thank you very much, Professor Bagthorpe,” said William jealously. He had as many Strings to his Bow as Tess had, but knew far fewer long words.

  There was every indication that more trouble was brewing when Dr Winters arrived and Mr Bagthorpe put in his urgent request that Jack be immediately examined. Dr Winters did not seem to understand.

  “Now what exactly are the symptoms?” he asked.

  “He looks all loopy and blank,” said Rosie. “I saw him at breakfast.”

  “I think he has delayed shock, Doctor,” put in Mrs Bagthorpe firmly, and Jack gave her a grateful look.

  “I’ll explain, if you don’t mind,” Mr Bagthorpe said. “After all, I’ve seen it twice and nobody else round here has.”

  “Seen –?” prompted Dr Winters.

  “I’ll demonstrate.” Mr Bagthorpe cleared his throat and stared rivetingly past Dr Winters’ head. The latter, bewildered, turned to look behind him.

  “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  “Of course you don’t!” Mr Bagthorpe told him sharply, annoyed by the failure of his experiment. “There is nothing there—” He stopped just short of saying “you idiot” as he would have done had it been a member of the family.

  “Ah.” The doctor sounded relieved.

  “What he does,” Mr Bagthorpe told him, “is stare as if he can see Frankenstein or a swarm of angels or something over your shoulder.”

  Dr Winters addressed himself to Jack directly now.