“Golly,” came Rosie’s awed voice. “He was right about the Lavender Man. And now a Giant Bubble’s going to Bear Tidings. Oh, Mummy, I’m scared.”
Rosie was already rattled following her summons to Grandma’s room. Grandma had absolutely forbidden her to put incense in the Portrait.
“Put Thomas in,” she said, “lying in my lap, the way he used to. Those days will never come again.”
Rosie had objected that she could not even remember Thomas because she had been only three when he was run over. All she could remember was once having some long, painful scratches on her arm which she had later been told Thomas had done when she had accidentally interrupted him washing his ears.
Grandma had insisted. The only thing left that could comfort her now, she said, was to have Thomas lying in her lap. And if she could not have it in real life, then at least she could have it in her Portrait. She had then started pulling down all the photographs of Thomas and thrust them into Rosie’s arms.
“Take these,” she said. “And remember, he was the most beautiful golden shining animal that ever lived. And his eyes! Never mind about my eyes and nose, but get his right.”
With this poor Rosie had been bundled out of the room fruitlessly protesting that she couldn’t draw cats anyway. She had gone back to her Portrait and had just been trying to paint out the incense sticks she had just painted in, when the Parkers arrived. This had given her an excuse to leave the Portrait, which she was beginning to hate the sight of. She was even beginning to feel that it had been her first Birthday Portrait that had triggered off all the terrible events of the last day or two.
Given all this, it was not, then, good news to Rosie to hear that a Giant Bubble Bearing Tidings was about to float on to the Bagthorpe horizon.
“I really am scared,” she repeated.
“It may not come,” comforted Mrs Bagthorpe, though without conviction. The Lavender Man had come.
“If it does, I’m not putting it in Grandma’s Portrait!” Rosie was staring at the crystal ball.
“I’m not, I’m not! She’s making me put Thomas in now, and I never even saw him!”
“There there!” said her mother weakly and led her out of the shrubbery. Only Daisy lingered.
“Is it still there?” she asked.
“What? Oh, no. It’s gone.”
Jack rose, his knees stiff, and stowed the ball back amongst its shavings in the box.
“CRYSTAL BALL FIRST QUALITY” she read out. It really was ridiculous the way she could read for a four-year-old. “What does that mean, Zack?” (One consolation was that half she read, she could not understand.)
“You’re too young to understand. Come on, Zero.”
As he passed the sitting-room on the way up to his room he could hear raised voices (raised, that is, even by Bagthorpian standards).
“–undermining this whole household,” he heard his father shout. “And there’s that dog at the bottom of it, and the fire-crazy daughter of yours! Where is she now? Where is she?”
“Out there,” came Uncle Parker’s voice.
“Well, get her out of out there! Get her in view, and don’t let her out of it!”
Jack moved quietly off. He had heard what sounded very like matches rattling in a box when Daisy had moved out there in the shrubbery. If there was going to be another fire, at least he could make sure that Zero had an alibi.
As he passed Tess’s room he could hear Atlanta’s voice pronouncing English words slowly and carefully one after another. He gave a sharp rap on the door and shouted:
“Night! Just off to my room!” – to make sure his alibi could be properly authenticated.
The first thing he saw on entering his room was an envelope lying on his bed. It said JACK. PRIVATE on it in what was obviously disguised writing but was definitely Uncle Parker’s disguised writing. He opened it.
“Why can’t you keep that hound of yours in hand?” he read. “Don’t let me catch him chewing anything of mine. I hear you got the Giant Bubble in. Good work. See you tomorrow 6.30 at same place, for further instructions.”
It’s all right for him, Jack thought. It’s not him that has to do it all. And I wish he wouldn’t call Zero a hound.
He took out his Plan of Campaign and began to make notes on the two latest MIs while they were clear in his mind. His mind was not staying clear for very long intervals these days. He was beginning to get confused about things.
After reporting the incense incident in Grandma’s room Jack added with satisfaction:
“Got William rattled about Anon from Grimsby.” (He did not know about Rosie’s being rattled, or he would have put that in as well.)
He toned down the description of what happened in the shrubbery, avoiding any mention of how silly he had felt, and doubtless looked, when discovered. He simply recorded the effect he had made on other people, which had been gratifying. He then put the book back in the middle of the pile of comics.
“Guard, Zero,” he said. “Good boy.”
Zero’s tail twitched ever so slightly.
“Don’t you worry, old chap,” Jack told him. “We haven’t finished yet. You’re going to be the chosen dog of a Prophet.”
Zero looked soulfully up at him from under his sprouting eyebrows. Jack gave him a thorough patting and praising, then got into bed. It wasn’t really bedtime, but it had seemed a long-enough day.
Just before falling asleep he remembered something. He climbed out of bed, got a chair, and removed the box containing the crystal ball from the top of the wardrobe where he had put it for safekeeping. He did not know whether crystal balls invited Manifestations, but if they did, he preferred them to occur inside the wardrobe, out of his sight.
As he scrambled back into bed he remembered the early morning rendezvous. He set the alarm for six o’clock, and called it a day.
Chapter Twelve
Jack was woken by the ringing of his alarm. He reached out to stop the bell and noticed that it had not affected Zero.
He’s sinking into himself, he thought. All he wants to do is sleep, to blot out the miseries of his existence.
Once dressed he took out the Plan of Campaign so that he would not have to rely on his memory for the new instructions he was to receive. His memory had never been good, but he felt it was getting worse. He then roused Zero and quietly they padded out of the house.
He was right at the bottom of the garden when he saw to his astonishment a solitary figure sitting on the rustic seat overlooking the meadow. It was Grandpa. He was so still, and it was so amazing that he should be there at all, that Jack wondered if he had dropped off to sleep there the previous evening and had sat there all night, gathering dew. Jack edged carefully round to see him frontways on. His eyes were open all right – in fact they turned and rested on Jack himself.
“Hello, Grandpa!” he shouted.
“No need to shout,” said Grandpa mildly. He turned his gaze away again over the meadow. “Just listening to the birds.”
Listening to the birds? Jack thought. So he is SD!
If Grandpa could hear the dawn chorus but not Grandma, then that was the only possible explanation. It was as if his thoughts were being read.
“I can hear better first thing, before anybody’s about,” Grandpa said. “My hearing seems to get worse as the day goes on.”
Jack nodded slowly. He could see what he meant. Bagthorpe days were long, trying affairs. His own faculties often felt bruised by the end of some of them.
“New aid’s better, of course.” Grandpa tapped it. “So far, so good. Have to see how the weather affects it.”
“Yes,” agreed Jack. “Anyway, I’m jolly glad, Grandpa. And the birds do sound smashing. I came out to listen to them myself partly. Going for a walk across to the wood.”
He was still speaking loudly, from long habit, and pointed at the wood as he spoke, as if explaining to a young child, or Atlanta.
“Wish I’d got the legs to go with you,” Grandpa told him
. “Could’ve walked the legs off any of you when I was a boy.”
“I bet you could,” said Jack, though the notion of Grandpa ever having been a boy took him by surprise. “Bye, then. See you at breakfast.”
“Get that dog of yours to catch a rabbit!” Grandpa shouted after him. Jack turned and waved.
“Hear that, Zero?” he said. “You’re to catch a rabbit.”
Once clear of the garden he broke into a jog to get himself into some kind of training for when he had to keep up with Uncle Parker. He was already fitter than he had been on the first rendezvous, because of all the hours of stick-fetching he had put in.
As he jogged along he thought again about Grandpa and how amazing it was that he should ever have been a boy, and gone rabbiting before breakfast. And following on this thought came the one that he, himself, might one day be somebody’s grandpa and wear a hearing aid and get up early to listen to the dawn chorus. He then tried to imagine the others old – William, Tess and Rosie – and wondered where they would all be and what they would be doing. And what with these thoughts and the golden brilliance of the morning and the satisfying rhythm he had now achieved, the whole business of not being a genius seemed to fall into place and become suddenly quite unimportant. He thought of his Campaign to become a Prophet and a Phenomenon, and actually laughed out loud.
“Me a Prophet!” he said to Zero. “And you the chosen dog of a Prophet!” – and laughed again.
This was not at all to say that he was going to abandon the whole scheme. On the contrary, it seemed more exciting than ever. He was enjoying it. All it really meant was that in that moment he abandoned any idea he might have had of ever becoming a Phenomenon or a genius. Playing the part of one for a time, and shaking up the others, was quite a different thing.
I’ve shaken them all up, he thought with satisfaction. Even Mrs Fosdyke.
He mentally went through the family and found that he had, indeed, shaken them all with the possible exception of Grandpa. Indirectly, he and Zero had done Grandpa a good turn. If his hearing aid had not been lost in Grandma’s Birthday Fire he would not have been out sitting in the early sun and listening to the birds.
By now Jack was two fields away from home and out of sight. His timing had been perfect. There was Uncle Parker now, rounding the copse and kicking up spray.
“Back to The Knoll!” he called, without stopping, and Jack fell in beside him.
“Did you know,” asked Uncle Parker after a while, “that your father’s shrubbery nearly went up last night?”
“Went up – you mean fire?”
“I mean Daisy,” said Uncle Parker grimly. “Not content with losing a fistful of cracker mottoes and having a fire in her dolls’ house. Broadening her activities.”
“She really is what Father said she was, then. A pyro – whatever it was.”
“Pyromaniac. Begins to look like it. Wasn’t born one, I’m sure of it. It was that Birthday Party job that set her off. Keeps trying to recapture the excitement, I suppose. Natural enough.”
“I suppose so,” Jack agreed.
“Started a fire with some books at her playschool yesterday,” went on Uncle Parker. “Luckily she was in the sandpit at the time. For heaven’s sake don’t tell your father.”
“I won’t,” Jack promised.
“There is something you can do for me though. If ever Daisy comes round to your place with Celia and I’m not there – just give her a quick frisk for matches, will you?”
“Of course,” Jack told him.
“Hasn’t found out how to do it rubbing two sticks together yet,” said Uncle Parker. “Though I suppose it’s only a matter of time.”
“She might grow out of it,” Jack suggested. “It might be just a passing phase.”
“Might be.” He sounded dubious. “Let’s hope we all live to find out. I’ve bought five fire extinguishers, anyway.”
At The Knoll Uncle Parker went off to shower and change as before, and Jack sat and listened to the birds and gave Zero a pep talk.
“Never forget,” he told him, “that it’s your own opinion of yourself that matters, not other people’s.” Mrs Bagthorpe often told people this in her letters about their Problems.
Uncle Parker was carrying his own Plan of Campaign when he reappeared.
“Now!” he said briskly. “Big developments.”
“Good,” Jack said.
“We carry on with Prong One of the attack as usual. You know – the odd Mysterious Impression slipped in here and there as and when you see an opening.”
“Right.” Jack noted it down.
“Prong Two I’ll come back to in a minute,” Uncle Parker told him. “Start a fresh page, and head it Prong Three, and at the side of it write ‘Dowsing’.”
“Oh. We’re starting that, are we?”
“You must diversify,” Uncle Parker told him, “if you’re going to keep that lot on their toes.”
“Have several Strings to my Bow, you mean?” Jack had not thought he would live to see the day. He really was getting to be equal.
“You have already sown the seeds of doubt in their minds. You have seen things behind their ears, you have made a prophecy that was fulfilled, and you have also made a prophecy about a Giant Bubble.”
“I wish I knew what all this about a Giant Bubble is,” Jack said.
“You will, in time. Let’s come back to Prong Three. You have to be seen to be a full-time Phenomenon. It is no use spending the odd few minutes a day having visions and then carrying on as normal the rest of the time. It doesn’t convince. You have reached the stage of becoming a full-timer. When you are not seeing things past people’s ears or looking into your crystal ball, you must be seen to be doing other, equally baffling things. Do you take my point?”
Jack said that he did.
“So this is it.”
Uncle Parker reached under the stone bench and fetched out a forked hazel branch.
“Now watch me.”
He took a fork in each hand and began to walk steadily forward with his palms turned upward and his gaze fixed steadily on the tip of the twig.
“This is how you must hold it. You’ll find it all in the Manual, but it’s easier to understand if you actually see it done. Here, you have a go.”
Jack took the hazel and tried to position it as Uncle Parker had done, in his palms.
“That’s the ticket. Keep it light. Don’t grip it. There’s a good chance, you know, you might really get to do it. Says in this book children up to the age of fourteen or so are often natural dowsers.”
“Does it really?” Jack liked the feel of the hazel in his hands. It really did feel taut and sprung, as if ready to leap.
“And there’s another thing. No harm my telling you. I’ve looked up one or two old maps and you’ve got a couple of underground watercourses right on your doorstep.”
“In the garden?”
“Don’t know about in the garden. But that big meadow at the bottom. Somewhere in there. So you’re in luck. You’ll make sure somebody actually sees you dowsing, and you’re in with a chance of actually striking gold – water.”
“Crikey.” Jack was impressed. He could hardly wait to begin. He thought he could feel his palms tingling already.
“You can keep that stick,” Uncle Parker told him. “Might even be better than the one you’ve got – you never know. Temperamental, these dowsing rods. And if you don’t do anything with one, you can change to the other. It’ll look to everyone as if it’s the rod that’s wrong, not you.”
Jack could see that it would.
“Right. So that’s Prong One and Prong Three dealt with. We’re back to Prong Two.”
“And the Giant Bubble.”
“I’m still not going to tell all,” Uncle Parker said. “It isn’t politic. Not yet. But I want some more foundations laying. The first I shall do for myself. It’s Rosie’s birthday next week, right?”
“She’ll be nine. Catching me up.”
&nb
sp; “Don’t be an idiot,” Uncle Parker told him. “How can she? What I shall do, is trot along to your place later on today, and say that I am going to provide a Birthday Party.”
“Smashing.”
“I shall go on to say, in light-hearted vein, that as Daisy is coming and we don’t want to risk a conflagration, the party will take the form of a picnic, and will be held in the meadow.”
“What if it rains?” Jack asked.
“If it rains, we’ll have to make the best of a bad job and have it in the house. And at least if there’s a fire the rain’ll be useful. And I’ll bring a couple of extinguishers,” he added.
“What’s the foundation I’ve got to lay?” Jack wanted to know.
“That’s the question. Now look, if you were a man and didn’t want to be recognised, what would you disguise yourself as? I mean, what disguise would you have that would be absolutely foolproof? No good just tacking on beards and moustaches. Too risky.”
“Are you going to disguise yourself?”
“No, I’m not. It’s a friend of mine.”
Jack thought for a while.
“What about a bear?” he suggested at length.
“First class!” Uncle Parker clapped him on the shoulder. “Just the ticket – oh, what a – oh, I can hardly wait!”
“But how do I come into it?”
“How you come into it, Jack, old son, is that you now start trimming up your Vision a bit. Did you get the red and white in?”
“No,” admitted Jack. “I tried, but there were too many people shouting and screaming.”
“Well, get it in. Quick. Today. And once that’s sunk in, then go on to the Great Brown Bear bit. Yes, that sounds good – I see … I see … it is the Age of the Bear, the Great Brown Bear …”
Jack was rapidly making notes.
“Don’t overdo it with your father,” Uncle Parker told him. “The strain’s beginning to tell. You can let him see you dowsing, but steer clear of him with the Bear.”
“Right. That all?”
“For now. And for goodness’ sake don’t lose that book. It’s red hot now, with all that stuff in. Pity we didn’t think of using a code.”
Ordinary Jack Page 13