Ordinary Jack

by Helen Cresswell

  And then, all at once, the Bagthorpes were in a tumult of delight and congratulation. They patted and praised Zero – they almost patted and praised Jack. They were, to a man, hugely and genuinely delighted.

  Jack, still a little dazed and shaken, stood and let it all ebb and flow about him, and thought:

  They mean it. They’re really glad. I can’t believe it. Oh, good old Zero, good old boy!

  Chapter Ten

  By the following day things had calmed down a little. Mrs Bagthorpe had discovered what was the matter with Atlanta. It had been a combination of Uncle Parker’s driving, and homesickness. Mrs Bagthorpe had made these discoveries in two parts. She had given an imitation of someone driving a car, at the same time making a brum-brumming noise, at which Atlanta had nodded her head vigorously and redoubled her sobs. Then, while helping her unpack Mrs Bagthorpe had come upon a photograph album which Atlanta had instantly seized upon, turning the pages while tears splashed on to the smiling faces of her family.

  Mrs Bagthorpe was relieved by these findings, which were, after all, only healthy and natural. At least there would be no need to call the doctor. She did not really want to call him again for as long as possible. She knew, of course, that members of the medical profession were not supposed to bear grudges against patients, but could see how Dr Winters was being sorely tempted in this particular instance.

  Mrs Bagthorpe had comforted Atlanta, and Tess came in and bashfully spoke a few Danish words, and thus she had finally been settled. Next morning she emerged transformed. She swung into the kitchen where various members of the family were at different stages of breakfasting.

  “Ello,” she said.

  “Hello,” they chorused, all turning.

  “Oh. Hello.” It was William’s voice putting in an extra greeting. Jack looked at him in surprise. For an instant he wondered whether William had decided to go into the Mysterious Impressions business, so strange and staring did he look. Jack sincerely hoped not. He did not want the competition, and in any case, if anyone stared past this girl’s ear it might set her off crying for hours on end again. Jack had already made a mental note to give her a miss, along with Grandma and Mr Bagthorpe.

  “Do sit down, dear,” said Mrs Bagthorpe, indicating her place. William leapt up and pulled the chair out and the rest of the family gaped. The Bagthorpes were quite polite in a way, but never excessively so.

  She smiled at William.

  “Sank you,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s a pleasure,” he assured her fervently. He was still looking at her, even now it was sideways on. Luckily Mr Bagthorpe did not notice this because he was too busy trying to butter his toast left-handed. Mr Bagthorpe would not have been able to stand it if another member of his family had started giving Mysterious Impressions.

  Jack noticed that Mrs Fosdyke was leaning up against the sink having a good stare at the new arrival too. He himself took another quick look just to see if he could make out why they were looking at her like this. The only thing he could think of was that she did look a little bit like Aunt Celia, but not all that much. Not enough to knock anybody sideways.

  “Now, what about some breakfast?” asked Mrs Bagthorpe. She had already told the others that they must speak to Atlanta exactly as if she could understand every word.

  “You may perhaps speak a little more slowly,” she said, “and of course, if necessary, you must point at things and name them to her, as you would with a young child.”

  None of the Bagthorpes other than Tess had been much pleased by this prospect, but had agreed to do so when Mrs Bagthorpe had pointed out that the sooner Atlanta picked up some English, the easier it would be for all of them.

  “The other alternative,” she had said, “is for us all to learn Danish –” which had clinched it.

  “I’ll make some more toast,” said Mrs Fosdyke, managing to make this apparently simple offer sound like an insult. “I hope she won’t be coming down late every morning.”

  Mrs Bagthorpe pointed to the toast rack and said clearly:

  “Some toast, Atlanta?”

  “Oh, ja, ja.” She stretched and took a piece.

  “Butter?” It was William, pointing to that commodity.

  She smiled sideways at him past her swinging hair, and took it.

  “Toast,” repeated Mrs Bagthorpe firmly, “and butter.”

  She pointed again. Atlanta got the message.

  “Toast,” she repeated, “and butter.”

  It was very good except that she missed the ‘t’ off the end of toast and pronounced the ‘u’ of butter as in ‘good’.

  “She said it!” cried William admiringly.

  Jack took another look at him. If he were not going in for Mysterious Impressions, then clearly what was happening was that Atlanta was making a very mysterious impression on him.

  “She don’t pronounce very well,” observed Mrs Fosdyke.

  This was just one of the drawbacks of having the dining room burnt out – Mrs Fosdyke chipped into conversations a lot more often. William turned and gave her a quelling look.

  “Perhaps you’d like to say toast and butter in Danish for us?” he enquired scathingly.

  “William!” reproved his mother.

  Mrs Fosdyke drew herself up, looked for a moment as if she might be going to say something (though almost certainly not toast and butter in Danish) then turned her back and began rattling things in the sink. She had a special way she could rattle if she wanted to, and was doing it now. Mr Bagthorpe gave up trying to turn the pages of his newspaper one-handed and glowered at her back. He muttered something that Jack did not catch but that definitely contained the word “hedgehog”.

  At this point Zero, who had not met Atlanta the previous day, got up, walked to her, and wagged his tail. She turned delightedly and patted his head and said something that was evidently the Danish for “Good boy” because he wagged his tail all the more. Zero, thought Jack with satisfaction, evidently understood Danish better than any of them.

  “Dog,” said Jack boldly, and pointed at Zero. “Dog. Name Zero.”

  “Dorg. Name Sero,” she said.

  “It’s incredible,” William said. “She picks up everything you say.”

  Mr Bagthorpe opened his mouth and then closed it again in much the same way as Mrs Fosdyke just had. He had, Jack guessed, been about to say something about keeping that mutton-headed hound out of his way, and then changed his mind. He had, after all, in front of witnesses, been proved totally mistaken in his assessment of Zero’s intellectual capabilities. Jack himself had always known Zero was not stupid, and this morning had deliberately brought him down instead of leaving him up in his room as usual. He felt it was now time he took his rightful place in the household.

  Jack realised that today he was on his own. There had been no early morning conference with Uncle Parker in the dew, and there would be no rendezvous in a fast-moving car. He did not particularly care whether he progressed much today. He felt that he and Zero could rest on their laurels for a while after yesterday’s performance. The Bagthorpes had already been treated to one display of the Phenomenal.

  This was where he made his mistake. He naturally assumed that Zero would, from now on, be a name synonymous with hero. He was wrong. The whole point of being a member of the Bagthorpe ménage was that you never, but never, rested on any laurels.

  He began to discover this after he had been throwing Zero sticks to fetch for nearly an hour on the lawn at the front of the house. He had not taken into account that the house at present contained some very jumpy people, and that jumpy people have nerves which are very easily grated upon.

  The first of them was Mrs Fosdyke, who happened to be cleaning the inside of the front windows, probably to let off her feelings. She thumped on a window several times with a duster to indicate that she was not enjoying the performance, but Jack mistook this as a sign of appreciation, a kind of improvised applause of the stamping of feet variety. In the end she flung open
the window.

  “I can’t be doing with this rumpus all morning!” she shouted above Zero’s excited barking.

  “I thought you’d like to see him do it,” Jack called back. “You’ve never actually seen him, have you?”

  “Heard enough about it,” she said. “And now I’ve seen him. Very nice. I’ll go and do the windows round the back.”

  And so, presumably she did. She certainly disappeared.

  Grandma was the next objector. She too threw open a window – that of her own bedroom. Jack looked up.

  “Do you realise,” she called, “that I am trying to Breathe?”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.”

  “I can’t Breathe with that noise going on,” she said. “You have to concentrate. And if I am to survive much longer in this household then it is vital I go on breathing.”

  “Yes,” agreed Jack. “I’m sorry, Grandma. I’ll go and do it round the back. Come on, Zero.”

  The first thing he encountered round the back was Mrs Fosdyke’s face grimacing at him through a window behind a large duster.

  “Come on, Zero,” he said.

  They went right to the very edge of the garden, where it met the meadow. There the two of them started up again, but the game was not to last for long.

  “For pity’s sake!” shouted a familiar voice. “Is there no peace to be had?”

  Jack turned about, uncertain where the voice had come from.

  “I may as well give up,” came Mr Bagthorpe’s gloomy voice.

  Jack spotted him. He was only head and shoulders visible in the long grass of the meadow, through which could be seen glimpses of the thick, snow-white arm amongst the green.

  “I didn’t know you were there,” he shouted. “Sorry!”

  Mr Bagthorpe sank slowly out of sight like a submarine submerging. Jack wondered what he was doing. His father never lay around in meadows. He felt that simply to go through the wicket gate and peer would look merely inquisitive. He needed an excuse to go in there, and a solution immediately struck him. He raised the stick, threw it as hard as he could in the approximate position Mr Bagthorpe had last been seen, and shouted:

  “Fetch!”

  With this he flung open the wicket and Zero thundered past with Jack in hot pursuit. He was pulled up by a bloodcurdling yell of rage and despair. Jack, who was used to ordinary kinds of yell, stopped dead in his tracks. Mr Bagthorpe surfaced again right by Zero, and seemed to be lunging after him.

  Zero, probably temporarily unhinged by the terrible cry, instead of returning to Jack as usual, veered right off track across the meadow in the opposite direction. It looked to Jack as if he had something else in his mouth besides the stick. He raced right to the far side of the meadow and then must have lain down because all at once he disappeared. He was probably chewing the stick, Jack thought, because he was nervous. Jack knew just how he felt. Sometimes his own nails were down to the quick.

  Mr Bagthorpe, astonishingly, was lurching over the meadow in the direction Zero had taken. He was yelling loudly. Jack could not hear all of it, but all the old catch-phrases were there among it – “mutton-brained” and “useless” and “godawful beast”.

  Jack followed at a fast rate. He and his father were just about level when Zero became visible, lying on the trodden-down footpath by the hedge. He was chewing and snorting as he had done the day he caught a rat. (He only once ever caught a rat, and Mr Bagthorpe had said that it must obviously have been dead already, and Zero just happened to find it.)

  What Zero was chewing now looked like a kind of long black worm with a large head, though Jack had certainly never observed a creature of this nature in the meadow before.

  “Ruination!” cried Mr Bagthorpe in anguish. “My last link with sanity snapped!”

  He actually clutched at his head, Jack heard the bump of plaster cast against his skullbone. He was going to have to learn to make fewer such gestures. Jack raced to get to Zero ahead of him. Zero was still growling and worrying whatever it was in his mouth. Jack’s heart dropped like a stone. He could not see exactly what it was in Zero’s jaws, but trailing from it was a long black length of flex with a two-pronged plug at the end of it.

  Mr Bagthorpe was for once lost for words. He just stood there for a while and groaned and beat his forehead with his good hand. When he did finally speak, it was only to repeat himself:

  “My last link with sanity – snapped!”

  Jack knelt by Zero and held out his hand.

  “Give, Zero,” he commanded. “Give. Good boy!”

  “Good boy!” yelled Mr Bagthorpe. “What d’you mean good boy? Hound of hell!”

  Zero dropped what he had in his mouth into Jack’s hand and slouched off alongside the hedge with his tail down. Jack looked down at what he held. It felt rough and damp – it had once been smooth and dry. It was the microphone of a tape recorder – chewed out of existence.

  “If I should go mad,” said Mr Bagthorpe dully, “think only this of me. I was a man hounded out of my mind.”

  He turned and began to drag away back over the meadow, his white arm hanging loosely by his side. If his ears had been the drooping kind, they would have been drooping. Jack was torn between feeling sorry for him and sorry for Zero. He felt sorry for them both. He decided to leave the former alone, for the time being, and set off after the latter, to have a few reproachful words with him.

  He felt that Zero could not be held wholly responsible for the tragedy because he could not, in all fairness, have expected to find an exciting-looking snake tangled up with his stick and was naturally excited when he did so. Jack felt that if his father had wished to dictate his scripts into a cassette recorder he should have done it in the obvious place, his study, or else given everyone fair warning that he would be concealed in the long grass doing it.

  Even so, he wondered whether he ought to offer to buy a new microphone. The trouble with this idea was that he already owed all his spare cash to Uncle Parker for the MYSTERIES.

  “And a lot of good they’ve done me,” he reflected.

  Once Jack had given the matter some thought, however, he could see how it had all come about. What had really been at the bottom of it all, was false pride – Mr Bagthorpe’s. One of his favourite topics was the inefficiency, hatefulness and general destructiveness of machines in any form. (He conveniently ignored the fact that his own livelihood depended on one of these obnoxious devices – namely, the television.) The only machine he would have any truck with was his typewriter, and even that was so old that it could hardly be called a machine. It was more of a makeshift. It was over thirty years old and the BBC were always ringing up to check words it had mistyped. Mr Bagthorpe saw this as a virtue. It showed, he said, that the typewriter had a mind of its own, and was something to be reckoned with.

  “Machines,” he was fond of saying, “are the opium of the masses. If all the machines in England were thrown into the North Sea tomorrow, we should be back in the Garden of Eden. And the weather would probably improve.”

  Nobody ever argued with him, except Grandma, sometimes, when she felt like it. The rest of them went cheerfully on using their electronic devices, electric guitars and dishwashers, and so on, without a moral misgiving in the world.

  Mrs Bagthorpe had given her husband a portable cassette recorder for Christmas some years ago. She recognised that she was playing with fire, but decided to risk it, especially as it was the season of goodwill and Mr Bagthorpe really did try to keep calm and kind over Christmas.

  He had thanked her for it in a formal kind of way and put it in a cupboard where it had been ever since. Once or twice over the years Mrs Bagthorpe had timidly suggested that he might use it occasionally, to capture his dialogue.

  “The day I speak my thoughts into any machine,” he had said (almost prophetically, as it turned out), “will be the day my right arm is cut off.”

  Or, alternatively:

  “Can you imagine William Shakespeare dictating Othello in
to one of those things? Did Keats use one? Or Dickens? Or Tolstoy?”

  To which there was no answer, except the obvious one that these particular writers did not even have the option. Nobody made this point. If you were up against one of Mr Bagthorpe’s prejudices you were up against a stone wall. He got it from Grandma.

  Now Mr Bagthorpe was faced with the alternative of using the recorder or else doing nothing at all for the next few weeks. He had obviously come round to the idea that he must use the machine, however infernal. He did not, however, wish the family to know this, because he was not good at climbing down. His stock, he must have felt, was already low. He had been wrong about being able to do a headstand, and he had been proved wrong in front of witnesses about Zero being able to fetch sticks. A third public humiliation might loosen his grip on the household altogether. Mr Bagthorpe simply could not afford to be seen to be fallible three times in a row.

  Accordingly, he had sneaked out with the recorder under his good arm and concealed himself in the long grass of the meadow to unburden his thoughts. (Jack later got a sight of the cassette in question. It had written on it, with true Bagthorpian modesty: GREAT THOUGHTS: DO NOT ERASE.) Mr Bagthorpe had, he said, been getting nicely into his stride at the point where Jack and Zero had intervened.

  Jack and Zero stayed in the fields all morning and so Mr Bagthorpe got his side of the story in first. He had obviously elaborated it a little, and that, combined with his crippled state, had enlisted the sympathy of the rest of the Bagthorpes, who were in any case feeling threatened by Jack’s claims to Prophetic status. Grandma was the only one on Jack’s side, and it was obvious even to him that this was because she was being cross-grained – a clear indication that her breathing had not done much for her so far.

  “How could you, Jack?” Mrs Bagthorpe exclaimed reproachfully as he slunk into lunch, having safely ensconced Zero in his bedroom again, to guard the pile of comics.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. I really am. It was a terrible thing to happen.”

  “A terrible thing to happen, he says,” said Mr Bagthorpe, staring dully at his stew. (Mrs Bagthorpe was trying to organise meals that could be eaten with a fork only.) “It’s the end of me.”