by Hilary McKay
“Father,” she began bravely, to the back of his leather chair. “I had to come . . .”
“Clarry!”
“I need to know . . .”
“Clarry, what on earth are you wearing?”
Clarry, comfortably and practically dressed in her night things, a warmish red and blue tablecloth, and Peter’s left-behind boots, ignored this question. She hadn’t made the long journey down two flights of unlit stairs in order to discuss what she was wearing.
“Would you tell me,” she demanded all in a rush, “if Peter was dead?”
“If Peter . . . ? Would I tell you? Dead? What silliness is this?”
“You might not. To be kind. In case I was upset.”
“You’ve been reading some ridiculous book and it has given you nightmares,” diagnosed her father. “It’s my fault. I should check your reading. Tomorrow . . .”
“He isn’t, then?”
“Clarry dear!”
“He said he would if he went to school,” said Clarry, quivering a bit, partly at the coldness of the night despite the tablecloth, partly at the unexpected dear. “He never writes. I’ve written three times now and there hasn’t been a single word.”
“I imagine he is sulking,” said her father calmly. “I myself have written twice, once to send him some pocket money and a second time to ask if he had received it. I have had no reply to either message. Sulking. Uncomfortable, but seldom fatal.”
He raised an eyebrow to Clarry, perhaps hoping she might smile at this wintry joke, but she didn’t seem to hear.
“You might write to Rupert,” he suggested.
“I did but he hasn’t written back either.”
“I expect they are both very busy.” Clarry’s father paused, as if thinking. “Possibly you are not busy enough.”
“Me?”
“I have always thought it a pity that you were born a girl,” said Clarry’s father. “Many things would have been easier if you’d been a boy. You could have gone to school with Peter.”
“Girls are just as good as boys!” said Clarry indignantly. “And I do go to school!”
“Miss Vane thinks it a pity that you have so few interests—”
“I have lots of interests!” interrupted Clarry. “I read! I have the museum with Peter and Rupe!”
“Interests that other girls have,” continued her father as if she hadn’t spoken. “She suggested that you help out with Sunday School . . .”
Clarry groaned.
“Or take music lessons.”
“But you hate music!” said Clarry, astonished.
“Your mother quite enjoyed it, Miss Vane reminded me.”
“I think I must take after you, not Mother,” said Clarry. “Anyway, what sort of music?”
“Piano. Obviously. Since we have a piano.”
“Oh!”
They both looked at the silent piano, Clarry’s father with a sort of mild satisfaction at having produced such a convenient distraction from morbid thoughts of death at boarding school, Clarry with loathing.
“Miss Vane has offered to teach you. It could very easily be arranged.”
“I should like to learn Latin if I’ve got to learn something,” said Clarry.
“I don’t think Miss Vane could possibly attempt to teach you Latin. You can practice after school. Before I’m home. I’ll see about it . . .”
“No, please!” begged Clarry desperately. “Please not! And Father, about Miss Vane. I have thought of something awful about Miss Vane. Can I ask you?”
“It’s midnight. I think that’s been enough for one night.”
“Father, you wouldn’t marry Miss Vane?”
“Upstairs, please, Clarry!”
Clarry’s father got up and held open the door. He nodded toward the stairs. Clarry got halfway up and then stopped.
“If Peter dies and you marry Miss Vane I will probably run away.”
“I have no intention of marrying anyone,” said her father. “Peter is merely being his usual uncooperative self. Now hurry up please, Clarry.”
Clarry returned to bed very cold but immensely cheered. She might have to endure music lessons, but Peter was not lost.
I’ll write again tomorrow, she resolved. Interestingly. Excitingly. I’ll write about natural history and the museum. I’ll write him the sort of letters that will keep him alive.
She began the next morning.
Hello Peter. Don’t stop reading because this is going to be a very good letter so first I will tell you about . . .
About what?
Clarry bit the end of her pen as she searched through her mind for interesting and exciting news.
Nothing.
She looked out of the window for inspiration. A seagull on a chimney pot. The rag-and-bone man’s black and white horse pulling a rattling cart, empty except for the geraniums he sometimes gave to lucky customers. Two cats in the window of Miss Vane’s house on the other side of the street, almost opposite, quite convenient for music lessons.
Oh, the thought of piano lessons with the hard fingered Miss Vane!
The rag-and-bone man (who did not just collect rags and bones, but all sorts of odds and ends of junk that people no longer wanted) was right outside the front door.
Her father was at his office. The street was very quiet. Clarry left her place at the window and ran down the stairs.
* * *
. . . First I will tell you about the piano, wrote Clarry triumphantly, some time later, because Father said since we have a piano and Miss Vane is quite convenient she could give me piano lessons and I do like Miss Vane but do you remember how she breathes on people very close, and those little cakes she made me eat that had cat hairs in them, and how she pushes your shoulders with her fingers?
So I rushed to the rag-and-bone man who was luckily outside and I popped up right in front of his horse and I said, “Would you like a piano?” And he was very surprised but I could tell from his face straightaway that he would even though he said, “And what would your ma and pa have to say about that?”
So I said, “My mother is dead and my father hates music and so do I. No one ever plays it. It smells of dust and fish.”
“It’ll be damp,” said the rag-and-bone man. “That’s the glue, smells of fish. Damp piano’s not worth nothing.”
But he stayed sitting there on his cart, so I knew he still wanted it, so I said he could have it for nothing and perhaps he could dry it and get rid of the damp, and he said, “Where is this piano?”
So I pointed to our door and I told him nobody was in except me.
Then he whistled and a little skinny boy jumped up from amongst the geraniums and all three of us hurried and pushed and heaved and in no time at all the piano was jangling down the road very fast in the cart and I had a pink geranium in a purple pot and a shilling as well for luck.
I have put the geranium in the sitting room window where it looks very nice and the shilling on Father’s desk because it was his piano.
Write back NOW! With lots of love from Clarry.
Chapter Ten
Now that outdoor exploring was no longer allowed, Binny was surprised how much she missed the pause between school and home when something magical might happen. The house was all right when her mother was home, because she had the ability to make the most barren place homelike, simply by putting down her bag and switching on a kettle. However, in the empty stretch of time between school ending and her mother getting home, the house was not comfortable. Mrs. Tremayne was the opposite to Binny’s mother. She could make the most homelike place barren, and she had gone to some trouble to do this with her vacation house. Holidaymakers, she thought, were most useful when out of the house, spending money in the town, not hanging around at home, wearing out cushions and using up electricity.
“Some owners leave books and toys and I don’t know what,” she said. “I make a nice cake that can be taken on picnics.”
“You make very nice cakes,” James had ag
reed, and had been rewarded the next morning with what Mrs. Tremayne described as a chocolate brick. Anywhere was home to James if there was chocolate about, and there was a lot of chocolate to a chocolate brick—a solid chocolate covering, with fudge underneath. James was sprawled on the sitting room floor eating it when Binny got home from school. “Play with me!” he begged as soon as he saw her.
“Play what?”
“Farms and jagulars.”
“Not just now,” said Binny, and she took herself off to the kitchen, which was the only other warmish room in the house. Clem was there, with her flute.
“Flutes,” said Binny, “are loud. They don’t look loud. They look like they’ll be all silvery and moonlighty. But they’re not. They’re really loud.”
Clem passed her a piece of chocolate brick and took no notice. When it came to flute practice she was quite ruthless. She did at least two hours a day, and she did it in the kitchen because she needed warm hands.
So Binny wandered the house, and ended up in the attic with an old cardboard box.
Stones, fossils, shells, and other jumble, and yellowy handwritten labels.
Swapped for the pen Peter
had from Clarry on his birthday
The grass snake skin made Binny jump, coiled up like the ghost of a snake in a battered cookie tin.
Found by Rupert Penrose
amongst the reeds beside the river
and:
Skull and wing feathers of male Kestrel
(Falco tinnunculus)
July 1912
Found by Clarry Penrose on the tideline
(but Rupe picked it up)
But there was no skull in the box; only the card was left.
Perhaps, thought Binny, it was a drawing of the same skull that James had found when they first arrived. Perhaps Clarry had drawn it, and James had colored it in. With that thought, the hundred-year-old chasm between the two times shrank to a space that was small enough to step. Briefly Binny crossed and joined Rupe and Clarry on the tideline. Clarry pointed to something. Rupe picked it up. He didn’t seem to mind picking things up; it was he who had found the snake skin too.
However, Peter had skinned the mole.
Skin of Common Mole
(Talpa europaea)
Taken from the molecatcher’s gibbet pole
August 1912
Binny knew that Peter had skinned the mole because it said so on the back of the card.
Peter took the skin off the mole.
He did it all and said he did not mind.
Afterward the smell would not wash off his hands.
Binny wrinkled her nose, retreated swiftly back to her own world, and stirred through the box again. A bright blue feather, barred with gray. A once white tennis ball with no bounce left. Some stumps of pencil, sharpened so often that there was nearly nothing left to hold. A postcard of Plymouth Harbor.
My Dear Peter and Clarry,
I shall be engaged on Friday when you arrive back in Plymouth. However, Miss Vane has kindly agreed to meet your train.
I trust that on this occasion you will give her no trouble.
With good wishes for a safe journey, your father, A. Penrose
What a strange way for a father to write to his family, thought Binny, and who was the sometimes troubled Miss Vane? Here she was again, on another postcard. Purple roses on a dark brown background, and Birthday Thoughts in curly writing.
For Clarry,
With kind regards on her birthday,
Sincerely, Alice D. Vane
Binny was fascinated by these glimpses into a different world, where fathers sent good wishes but not love, moles were hung on a gibbet pole, pencils cherished to the last uncomfortable inch, and Birthday Thoughts were purple roses and sent with kind regards. She even forgot the murdered butterflies for a moment to think, Poor Clarry.
This moment passed when she read:
One Feather
from Clarry’s Kestrel.
Which should not have been taken
from the nest in the very high elm trees.
Binny ran down the attic stairs and straight into Clem who had come up to put her flute away.
“She took a kestrel from its nest!” said Binny.
“Mind my flute,” said Clem, “if you value your life! Who took what?”
“That Clarry! A kestrel!”
“Remind me what a kestrel is?” said Clem placidly, in her room now, polishing her flute with the old silk rag that she kept for that purpose only.
“A bird! They have nests in elm trees. Very high. They have sharp hooky beaks like the picture James colored. And that girl took one from its nest! How horrible is that?”
“Hmmm.” Clem picked up the old photograph of Clarry, Rupe, and Peter. There was Clarry in her bunchy dress. It came well past her knees. Underneath, the drooping hem of a white petticoat could clearly be seen. “Fancy,” said Clem. “She made it to the top of a very high elm tree dressed like that!”
“She must have had some other clothes,” said Binny.
“Perhaps,” said Clem doubtfully. “I bet they were pretty much the same, though. You know what Binny, I don’t believe she climbed to the top of a very high elm tree and took a bird with a sharp hooky beak from its nest! Do you, really? Or do you just want to believe it?”
“It says,” said Binny, brandishing the card, “Clarry’s kestrel from the nest in the elm trees!”
“But it doesn’t say,” said Clem, “that Clarry took it.”
* * *
It was turning into an interesting day for James. In the morning the chocolate brick. In the afternoon, the discovery of Pecker sitting on a record-breaking three eggs (one added by Binny early that morning, one warm and new laid, and one that looked like a perfect brown egg, except that it was made of rubber and bounced). A final surprise came in the evening, when he and Binny were carting Pecker off to bed for the night. Large pink paw prints all over the shed.
“They go right up to the roof!” exclaimed James, delighted, and so they did, under the windowsill, across the door and over the roof, as bright as a chain of roses.
“Don’t they look real?” said James admiringly, but Binny could not reply. Her heart was pounding with alarm, and her eyes could not stop staring at the long deep claw marks, gouged like train tracks, that ran from the height of James’s shoulders to the bottom of the door.
They looked terribly real. When Binny touched them they felt terribly real.
“Evening James!” called a voice from out of the shadows. “Need a lift with that coop? How’s your hen today?”
It was Mark. He had come down the road on his motorbike and left it by the side of the house to speak to them. One look at his confident grin explained the third miraculous egg.
“Three eggs!” James told him proudly. “One white, one still warm, and one that bounces!”
Mark looked down at Pecker in mock surprise and said, “She lays eggs that bounce?”
“Did you put it there?” demanded James.
“Me?” asked Mark, winking at him. “I’ve been working all day. Whatever has happened to that door?”
“Clare,” said James. “She does it loads. It’s because of the jagular. Can I have a go on your motorbike?”
“Because of the what? No you can’t!”
“Just for one minute,” said James, sidling over. “Only to sit on,” he added, sitting. “Not to touch the key,” he explained, reaching out and touching it.
“Get down off there! What would your mum say?”
“She’d say be careful. I am being careful.”
Mark could deal with a lot of things: guns, sheep, pub quizzes, motorbikes, bills, broken walls, and the constant repairing of ancient vehicles were all on his list of what he could manage.
But Mark had never tried to manage anything as persistent as James.
“Could I have one try-on of your leather jacket?” begged James.
“Flipping heck!” exclaimed Mark, and he look
ed at Binny for help but she avoided his eye.
“One?” asked James wistfully.
“Oh, all right, in a minute! Just let me have a proper look at this shed door.”
“I’ve found the horn,” said James, deafeningly proving this. “Is that where the gas goes? If you undo it can you see it inside? Oh, thank you!”
Mark’s jacket engulfed James so that for almost a minute he was speechless. “I don’t suppose . . . the helmet . . .,” he asked when he came up at last for air.
The helmet extinguished him at last. He squawked and slid to the ground and Binny heaved him up and untangled him, while Mark lifted Pecker inside the shed, closed the door, and ran his hand over the ridged claw marks exactly as Binny had done.
“It’s just a joke,” said James. “Magic paw prints. Clare makes them. She’s done loads, hasn’t she Binny?”
“Yes loads,” said Binny, beginning to retreat backward to the house. “Hurry up and come in now, James. Supper! Aren’t you hungry?”
James, who was always hungry, was distracted at once. He overtook Binny at the door, dodged Clem, was fended from the fridge, the cookie tin, and the cheese, but settled down with a banana to torture everyone with his reading book while Binny helped her mother fry apple slices with butter and brown sugar and lemon and fold them into pancakes.
The awfulness of James’s reading book, My Book of Farm Machinery (“Why, why, why?” moaned his family, who had already endured My Book of Road Transport, My Book of Bridges, and My Book of Weather), the success of the pancakes, and the inexplicably huge amount of spilled flour and milk and egg that needed clearing up afterward, all distracted Binny from thinking of Pecker’s shed door. However, much later she remembered and braved the dark to tiptoe outside to look at it again.
“Don’t let me startle you!” said a voice behind a sudden huge flashlight, and there was Mark coming toward her.
“I wanted to double-check it was fastened,” he said in explanation. “We don’t want any more hens going missing. It looks to me like there’s a big rogue fox around. I know Clare put those daft footprints there, but I can’t believe she did all the rest.”
“Those scratches were . . . were me!” said Binny, stammering with nervousness. “I’m sorry. It was an accident. The door was jammed and I tried to unjam it with a . . . with a . . . fork!”