by Hilary McKay
* * *
Time passed.
* * *
Rupe wrote about the summers they had spent together and that Clarry should not worry if sometimes his letters seemed to take a long time to arrive. That the little cat was gone now, and he hoped it was somewhere warm and dry because French rain was wetter than English rain.
Then it was winter, and Rupe wrote that this time last year he had been at school playing football and sometimes when he thought about it it was hard to believe. At Christmas he wrote about how often he thought of them, and he was afraid there wasn’t very much news.
* * *
After that there was a long break, but another letter came at last. It said, I’m sorry Clarry. It’s all a bit of a mess, isn’t it? I try not to let myself think.
Once he came home on leave. Clarry didn’t see him. He went to Cornwall, stayed one night, and left the next morning. His grandparents said he had been very quiet.
“Quiet?” said Clarry.
Life was quiet for Clarry too. Peter was back at school. Her father worked. The news was terrible. There were no more letters from France.
Another year passed.
Rupe wrote suddenly, Were they real, those summers? The grass and the quiet? Is anything left how it used to be? So many things are gone. Are you still the Clarry who sent butterflies? Or have you vanished too?
* * *
Clarry went to find Peter, who even though it was supposed to be the school break, was working for exams. Peter read Rupe’s message, pushed back his glasses, rubbed his eyes irritably, and then read it again.
“He’s still alive anyway,” he said, speaking his uncomfortable thoughts out loud because it was no use any longer trying to hide the truth from Clarry. “At school there’s a list in the entrance hall of old boys that have joined up. And there’s another one, all blue and red and gold across the top. That Irish chap’s on it and the Head’s nephew that people said got let off everything . . . Don’t say anything about that to Rupe, though.”
“What shall I say? Help me Peter.”
Peter looked down at the letter again. “Tell him those summers were real,” he said at last. “Tell him how we think of him every day. Tell him you haven’t vanished. Make him believe it. He wants to believe it.”
He sounded unhappy and he was. Unhappy because Rupe had gone rushing off to France as thoughtlessly as in the past he had gone rushing onto a sports field. Unhappy because he, Peter, could think of no way to help. Unhappiest of all because he had jumped off a train and now never would have to face what Rupe was facing.
“Send him a butterfly,” he said.
“A butterfly? To France? A butterfly when things are so terrible?”
“You never sent a Swallowtail.”
“I was saving that, for in case.”
“Now it is in case,” said Peter.
* * *
It took more than a single day to make a butterfly. The bodies were always the hardest parts to do. Clarry shaped matches to the right length and then wound them with thin fine silk, black, deep brown, and deep gray, layer upon layer. Afterward the bodies could be brushed so that they looked soft and downy. The eyes were darkened and varnished and the legs and antennae were varnished too, to hold them in shape. Then the wings were drawn and cut out with a fine sharp blade. The best and easiest part was the painting with fine sable paintbrushes. Lemon yellow, lapis blue, brown and black, alizarin crimson to make a dusty ruby.
Clarry always made her butterflies in the sitting room, on a little table in the window, the lightest place in the house. Since the day she had given away the piano, she had never been left alone in that room. Her father could not seem to help hovering distrustfully in the background.
“He thinks you might do it again!” Peter had said once, and Clarry had looked at the clock, whose marble was so pink and fleshy that when she was very little she had supposed it to be meat, and agreed that she possibly might.
Now, as well as her father, Peter was hovering too.
“Tell me when you’ve finished and I’ll tell you where you’ve gone wrong,” he said on the first day.
“Dolls’ house games again,” complained her father on the second day, which was utterly unfair, since Clarry had never owned a dolls’ house, nor even a doll.
“Very clever,” said Miss Vane, when the third day arrived. “But you could use prettier shades, pink, or peach or mauve . . . Although even then, I really don’t care for the legs!”
“Real butterflies have legs,” said Clarry. “I don’t think there are pink and peach and mauve ones, though.”
“You are quite wrong,” said Miss Vane. “I have a vase, Clarry, painted with butterflies in exactly those colors! It was given to me long ago by a great friend and for that reason I keep it on my dressing table between the photo frames. Pink, peach, and mauve. I don’t think that yellow you are using looks natural at all.”
“There are yellow butterflies just like this one, Miss Vane,” said Clarry. “They’re quite common in France. Sometimes, when the winds from the south are very strong they get caught in the gale and blown right across the sea. Even as far as Cornwall.”
“Clarry, my dear!” exclaimed Miss Vane, sounding suddenly very startled indeed.
“Swallowtails! It’s quite true!”
“Clarry!” said Miss Vane, quite urgently and alarmed.
“I read it in a book.”
“Clarry, there’s a telegram boy outside!”
“A telegram boy? Oh!”
Telegrams in those days of war could be very frightening indeed.
“He’s looking toward the house! I think I had better go and speak to him.”
Where would a telegram concerning Rupe be sent? Surely not to the grandparents who had become so sad and frail. To this house? To her father?
“Stay here, my dear!” ordered Miss Vane. “I will be very quick.”
“No!” cried Clarry, jumping to her feet and overtaking Miss Vane. “NO! Let me!”
But when Clarry held the telegram in her hand she could hardly open it. She shook so hard it was as if some invisible icy force was racketing through her bones.
* * *
The most terrible words were: Missing, presumed dead.
* * *
Although Miss Vane talked too much, and understood too little, and smirked at music and smelled of cats, Clarry never forgot her kindness that day. When the telegram was read Miss Vane guided her to a chair, and wrapped her in a blanket, and gently took it from her hand and laid it on the table beside the half painted butterfly. Her voice sounded cracked and quavering and old, but it did not stop her saying, “There may be hope, there may still be hope,” while tears washed wet gray streaks down her powdery cheeks.
Later she brought Clarry a sloppy cup of tea in a clattering saucer. “Where is Peter?” she asked.
“He had to go to Oxford. He’s staying the night.”
“Your father, Clarry dear? He’ll be back quite soon.”
He was, but he was useless. He rubbed his neck and stared out of the window and later disappeared.
“Clarry, I must pop home to my cats,” said Miss Vane that evening. “I will return very soon and then we will think what to do. All hope is not lost, dear. Many wonderful and astonishing things happen when we least expect them . . .”
When Clarry was alone at last those words echoed in her mind, wonderful and astonishing, wonderful and astonishing. A steady rhythm, like a heartbeat. And despite the fact that she guessed that no part of Miss Vane’s experience of life had ever been anywhere near wonderful and astonishing, the words beat on and they kept her from despair and by the time Miss Vane returned she knew what to do.
“Clarry!” said Miss Vane, when she heard.
“You said,” Clarry reminded her, “all hope wasn’t lost, and perhaps it isn’t. And that many wonderful and astonishing things happen and I think sometimes they do, but not in this house.”
“No, not in this house,” ag
reed Miss Vane slowly.
“But somewhere else they might,” said Clarry, all her old bravery now shining from her eyes. “There are hospitals, in France and in England. There are some in Southampton. That’s where I’ll begin.”
Miss Vane’s eyes went to the telegram, still in Clarry’s hand.
“Presumed!” said Clarry. “It means they don’t know. If I was writing it, I’d put ‘Missing, presumed alive!’ ”
“You would be quite right!” said a suddenly new and bold Miss Vane.
“Peter had a train timetable in his room. I’ve been looking up trains. There’s one in an hour. You needn’t worry, Miss Vane. I’ll be quite safe.”
“I shall not worry and I know you will be safe,” said Miss Vane briskly. “Because I intend to come with you, Clarry dear. You may possibly have to go to France, and you do not speak French. Also I can take care of the luggage and deal with the porters. Please do not argue with me.”
Clarry did not argue with her. She hugged her instead.
“Many wonderful and astonishing things,” she said, smiling through tears, and Miss Vane nodded and hugged her back and said, “Yes. Many wonderful and astonishing things.”
* * *
Clarry’s father was still absent, and the house was still silent, but Clarry and Miss Vane packed unpractical bags and counted their money. Then Clarry picked up the telegram from the table and Miss Vane put down in its place her house key and a list of very detailed cat care instructions.
And so they fled.
Chapter Thirteen
In the time between Christmas and Easter, Binny’s life became very busy. There was Max, who needed two good walks a day, besides brushing and feeding. There was Gareth, who demanded daily updates on how they were getting on. There was homework, which had to be done with no excuses, or else Max would get the blame. Also there was Clare, who announced very casually to Binny and Ella one morning at school, “They will start after-school classes in Mandarin Chinese if twelve or more people sign up.”
“That’s not going to happen, then, is it?” asked Ella (who had turned out to be noisy and funny and very good at drama as well as perpetually hungry).
“Why are you telling us?” demanded Binny (who had turned out to be one of Ella’s friends).
“We need two more. It’s Wednesdays.”
“Ha!” said Ella. “No chance! Not unless you’ll come to drama on Tuesdays. Then we can all be in the summer production. Titanic. The musical. Perfect for Binny, since she never learned to swim.”
Binny said she could not possibly learn Mandarin Chinese or be in Titanic the musical because she had Max to walk and homework to endure.
Ella said she had three dogs to walk and a paper round, and Clare said the homework problem could be easily solved if they all joined Homework Club on Mondays and Fridays and got the worst of it out of the way there. Binny pointed out that this only left Thursday with nothing to do, and Ella and Clare looked at her as if she was mad and Ella said, “Don’t be silly. It’s Photography Group after school on Thursdays. You can’t miss that!”
“Every term you get a chance to go on an all-day trip in the minibus,” explained Clare.
“And you get let off PE!” added Ella.
“Forever?” asked Binny.
“Just that day,” said Ella, “but every little bit helps!”
* * *
With all these new things to do, it was amazing how quickly the days and weeks rushed by that term. There came a weekend when Binny found Clare and Mrs. Tremayne in the middle of cleaning the vacation house, ready for summer visitors.
“But it is clean,” protested Binny, looking in surprise at the assembled buckets and bleach. “It’s very clean! Mum and me and Clem cleaned it, every single bit! Inside the cupboards and under the beds and everywhere!”
“It’s stood empty since then, though,” said Mrs. Tremayne, and continued emptying shining plates from immaculate cupboards and loading them into the dishwasher to be done on Extra Hot.
“Dust settles. You two go round all the switches please, and check the lightbulbs still come on. Don’t forget the bedside lamps and I’ll have all the sofa covers off while you’re at it.”
“Phew!” said Binny rudely.
“Then there’s the winter curtains,” said Mrs. Tremayne, taking no notice. “They’re to go up in the attic, now we’ve found the key, and I’ve got the light ones here. Both sets to be washed.”
The attic caused fresh outpourings of instructions and bleach. “I’d have the whole lot thrown out,” said Mrs. Tremayne, recklessly vacuuming spiders. “But Mark says no, he’ll sell it. He’ll never find time, though, and even if he did, whoever is going to buy? Those great heavy tennis rackets with all the strings gone, nobody would ever want them! Nor those damp old books, and boxes of rubbish! Whatever have you got there, Binny?”
It was the remains of a hundred-year-old frog skeleton, yellowy wisps of bone on brown mottled card.
“That is not hygenic!” said Mrs. Tremayne, whisking it into a trash bag, “and I’ll have that case of butterflies too, what’s left of them, they’re all mildew. Whatever were people thinking of? And they talk about the good old days! What are all those stones?”
“Fossils,” said Clare. “Boring.”
“We had fossils at school,” said Mrs. Tremayne. “Would your school want them? Would that Gareth?”
Gareth had baffled the Tremaynes when Binny had brought him to visit. He had paced the old railway line, inspecting the mud, photographed the shed door, and then offered to sandpaper and paint it.
“It’s not the time of year for outdoor painting,” the polite Tremaynes had replied. “And you in your good clothes anyway.”
Binny had privately admitted that he was a bit weird, but all right when you got used to him, the same as Clem’s flute, and James. Now she said, “Gareth would love the fossils,” and took the box, with its stones and yellowy labels, all jumbled together.
Peter’s fossils, Clarry’s labels, Rupe’s tennis rackets and a yellowing photograph of him in soldier’s uniform. Binny, who loved languages, translated the inscription. “Good-bye, my friends! See you soon! But did he see them soon, she wondered, and she asked, “What happened to them? Clarry and Peter and Rupe.”
Clarry was easy. Mrs. Tremayne, returning from emptying the vacuumed up spiders into the garden (“It does them no harm. A change of scene.”), said, “Clarry. Yes.”
“Of course Clare was named for her. Those eyes. Even at ninety. Even at a hundred. She died at a hundred but not before Clare met her. ‘The next generation,’ she said. ‘I wonder what they’ll see.’ She was pleased about the naming. She never had any children of her own.”
“What about Peter? Peter, her brother? What happened to him?”
Peter was not impossible, after they thought to look at the books. Half of them he’d owned, and the other half he’d written. Or so it seemed. There was a thin damp blue one that Binny hugged to her chest:
Origins of Nomenclature in the Animal Kingdom
Clare Penrose (MA Oxon) Peter Penrose (PhD Oxon)
“Please could I borrow it?” Binny begged, and Mrs. Tremayne said, “Goodness, you can keep it.”
So the book was rescued from the trash bag as well as the fossils, and so were the painted butterflies, including the Swallowtail. But nowhere in the attic, or in Mrs. Tremayne’s memory, was there any news of Rupe.
The tennis rackets went. No use to anyone. The books were repacked to be ignored for another half century or so. The gorse bushes on the moor turned yellow with coconut scented flowers, and Binny and Clare lay amongst them, watching for their mythical beast and swapping the latest news.
“James walked off the pier.”
“Fell?”
“Just walked. About a million people jumped in to rescue him but he climbed out himself by the steps.”
“Ella’s on a diet.”
“Titanic?”
“Mmm,” said Clare. “Th
ere was a lynx, wasn’t there?”
“Definitely.”
“Do you sometimes wonder?”
“No!” said Binny, indignantly. “We saw it and we rescued it, me and you and . . . Clarry.”
Clarry and the painted butterflies, without whom Binny would never have understood Clare and the painted paw prints. Clarry and Peter and Rupe.
“What did happen to Rupe?” demanded Binny sternly.
At first Clare wouldn’t think. She said, “Does it matter, really? It was ages ago.”
“He was a soldier in the war,” persisted Binny. “Me and Clem looked it up after we found that photograph. It was terrible. All mud and dying and bombs like fireworks and poor old horses like in that book they made us read for English. Awful!”
“I quite liked it. There’s a film now.”
“The war was awful,” said Binny. “Not the book! Loads of people died. Loads. Why didn’t Clarry finish painting the Swallowtail butterfly for Rupe?”
“Because . . . because she didn’t need to. He came back, suddenly, so she didn’t need to! Or else, because he died. Don’t look like that! He might have done. Lots did. You said so yourself.”
“I don’t want him to have died. You met Clarry. You actually met her! Was she sad?”
“Bin! I was about one and she was about a hundred!”
“So you can’t remember?”
“Of course I can’t remember!”
“I only asked. In case. I can remember nearly everything that happened when I was one. Carpet burns. Flying round the room. Everything.”
Clare gave her a look.
“Think of it like a story,” said Binny, ignoring it. “We haven’t reached the end.”
“Because it isn’t a story,” said Clare. “It’s just broken bits of things that happened.”
“They’re what stories are made of,” said Binny. “They join up, and you get a new one. If James hadn’t lost his chicken Mark wouldn’t have gone out with his gun. If Gareth hadn’t noticed the paw print I wouldn’t ever have known about the lynx. If Clarry hadn’t painted butterflies I would never have understood why you painted paw prints. The lynx wouldn’t have been saved. Think! If Clarry hadn’t painted butterflies we wouldn’t be here now!”