Tanglewreck

by Jeanette Winterson

  As she swept up the last of the coal to throw on the furnace, she noticed something sparkling in the coal dust. She picked it up carefully, so that Bigamist couldn’t see what she was doing. It was long and thin, like a man’s tiepin, with a sharp pointed end, and it seemed to be made of diamonds. Hurriedly, she dropped it in the pocket of her overalls.

  Overhead, she heard the library door open and the floorboards creak as Mrs Rokabye and Abel Darkwater went towards the front door. She sneaked up the cellar steps, past Bigamist, and darted into the library. Quick as a whistle, she stuffed the leftover ham sandwiches and Victoria sponge down her overalls, and filled her pockets with chocolate biscuits. From the window, she could see Abel Darkwater slowly lowering himself into his car. Mrs Rokabye was turning back towards the house, counting the wad of money in her hands.

  Silver grabbed the jug of milk from the table, and slipped out past the enraged rabbit and upstairs to her little bedroom that she loved. It was where she felt safe.

  The room was high up in the attics of the house. It had a big wooden bed carved in the shape of a swan, and a fireplace, where she always kept a fire burning, fetching sticks from the orchard, so that the room smelled of apples and pears even in the worst of winter.

  Silver began to heat the milk on the little fire, and lay out the sandwiches and cake. She would save the biscuits for later.

  She looked at the photograph of her mother and father and sister on the mantelpiece, but she didn’t cry. Instead she said, half to herself, and half to the photo – Help me to find the Timekeeper.

  The room breathed in. The fire paused in its burning. The milk that had boiled to the rim of the pan bubbled and stopped. It was only the smallest hesitation in time, but Silver knew what she had to do. Something in her and something outside her leapt together and waited in the leaping. She said, Yes, yes.

  Then the moment landed, and the milk boiled over, and everything was as it usually was, but Silver knew that she had made a promise – to something inside herself and to something outside herself. She would have to find the Timekeeper now, because the Timekeeper had to be found.

  Toad in the Hole

  Three days later, Silver was in her vegetable garden weeding the cabbages, when she heard Mrs Rokabye calling to her from the house.

  It sounded as though Mrs Rokabye was shouting something like ‘Toad in the Hole’, but Silver knew it couldn’t be that, because Toad in the Hole is something to eat and Silver never got anything to eat from Mrs Rokabye.

  She’s probably found a frog stuck down the sink, thought Silver. I’d better go and rescue it.

  Silver shut the gate on to her little garden so that the hens couldn’t get out, and walked towards the kitchen. She could smell food – hot food, which was very strange.

  Mrs Rokabye was standing at the low kitchen door, smiling. It was a horrible sight; the corners of her mouth were drawn up towards her eyebrows, and her eyebrows were pulled up towards the hairnet she always wore in the house. She had been practising smiling all morning, but it was not nearly for long enough.

  ‘Welcome, dear child!’ she said. ‘Come and eat your lunch while I tell you something very exciting.’

  Silver came slowly into the kitchen. It was not a modern kitchen at all. It was enormous, like a bus depot, and it had a stone floor, and a huge iron oven, and a long wooden table with long wooden benches placed on either side. There were hooks from the ceiling for hanging hams and herbs. There were two stone sinks side by side with plate racks nailed on the wall above them. There was no fridge, no washing machine, no dishwasher, no lino, no TV, no nothing at all, except what had been put there four hundred years ago. Oh, and there was Mrs Rokabye’s microwave, sitting on its own at one end of the twenty-foot long oak table, where twenty servants had eaten every day, when the house had been a great house.

  The microwave looked very out of place in the old kitchen, as though a Martian had left it there and gone back to Mars.

  Today, though, Mrs Rokabye was not heating up Ready-Meals for One in the blue microwave. She was bending over the great oven and lifting out a huge tin dish of sausages cooked in egg batter.

  ‘Toad in the Hole!’ she said, placing it on the table in front of the hungry and amazed Silver.

  Quickly, she washed her hands and sat down, as Mrs Rokabye cut two portions with a gleaming knife.

  ‘You never said you could cook,’ said Silver.

  ‘I have been very busy,’ said Mrs Rokabye.

  ‘You’ve been here for four years.’

  ‘Is it really four years? All that dusting I’ve had to do – the place was a shambles, as you know. Well, well, four years, how time flies – tempus fugit, as Abel Darkwater would say.’

  ‘What?’ said Silver, her mouth full of delicious sausage.

  ‘Tempus fugit,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘It means “Time flies”.’

  ‘What language is that?’ asked Silver.

  ‘Latin, I think,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘You must ask Mr Darkwater yourself. Ask him tomorrow – for that is my wonderful news!’

  While Silver ate seconds and thirds of Toad in the Hole, Mrs Rokabye told her of their trip to London the very next day.

  ‘We will have a picnic on the train. We will stay in Mr Darkwater’s magnificent house – nothing like this – all modern inside, and we will be taken to a musical in the evening. Mr Darkwater loves children and all he asks in return for his kindness is that you talk to him as though he were your own father. If he asks you a question – any question, do you hear me – if he asks you a question you must answer it.’

  ‘What if I don’t know the answer?’ said Silver.

  ‘I am sure you do know the answer,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘All questions have an answer.’

  Silver wondered if that was true, but there was no point asking Mrs Rokabye. Privately, Silver thought that the answer to some questions was another question.

  ‘Be ready to answer,’ said Mrs Rokabye, ‘it will be better for everyone that way. Then we shall all have a lovely time.’

  She said it still smiling, though by now the strain was beginning to show, like somebody desperately trying to hold on to the edge of a cliff by her fingertips.

  She turned away to get Silver some chocolate, but really to give her face a chance to relax into its customary scowl.

  As she stood with her back to Silver, relaxing and scowling, she didn’t realise that she was reflected in the polished metal door of the Chocolate Cabinet. Silver could see the real look on her face, and she knew that nothing had changed.

  The Chocolate Cabinet was where Mrs Rokabye kept her supplies of caramels and cake bars. The cupboard was made of steel and fastened with a metal padlock of the ferocious kind. Silver was never allowed in there.

  Carefully, and with something like pain, Mrs Rokabye took out two tubes of Smarties, then put one back, then took it out again. She reminded herself that she was a nice kind lady, at least for the next twenty-four hours, and she guessed that a nice kind lady would not be mean with her sweets.

  ‘London!’ she said brightly, forcing pleasure and happiness into her voice, like the ugly sisters forcing their feet into Cinderella’s slipper. ‘London! We are going by train at eight o’clock in the morning and we will have a lovely time.’

  ‘When are we coming back?’ asked Silver. She loved the house and she hated the thought of leaving it. The house was her friend. The house felt alive. Since her parents had disappeared, it was the house that had looked after her, not Mrs Rokabye.

  ‘Such an ungrateful girl!’ said Mrs Rokabye, keeping her voice light, her fists clenched with fury under the table. ‘Here I am, doing my best to win influence with important people like Mr Darkwater, just so that you can have a holiday like other children, and do you say thank you? Not you! You ask when you are coming home.’

  ‘Well, I need to know so that I can pack my suitcase,’ said Silver evenly. She knew better than to fight Mrs Rokabye.

  ‘Ah, well, indeed,’ said
Mrs Rokabye, mollified. ‘Then take whatever you like, but only a small bag.’

  ‘How many pairs of knickers?’

  ‘Two,’ said Mrs Rokabye.

  By now, Mrs Rokabye had been pleasant for a whole hour, and she had smiled through most of that hour, and she had spent the morning cooking instead of lying in bed reading Murder Mysteries, and she had given away some of her chocolate, and the whole business had exhausted her. She decided to go and lie down and take a pill. She told Silver to wash the dishes, and then she disappeared up the stairs.

  As soon as she had left the room, Silver ran over to the Chocolate Cabinet because Mrs Rokabye had left the padlock off.

  ‘1603,’ said Silver, reading the lined-up numbers. ‘Now I can get in here whenever I like.’

  She grabbed a couple of extra chocolate bars, and hid them in her jeans. Then, hearing Mrs Rokabye returning, she turned away and ran to the sink.

  Mrs Rokabye swept into the kitchen like a hailstorm and went straight to the Chocolate Cabinet and locked it.

  ‘Do your packing in good time tonight,’ she said. ‘I will leave you ham sandwiches and milk for supper, and I want you in the hall, washed and dressed by seven o’clock tomorrow morning. A taxi will take us to the station. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Rokabye,’ said Silver, without turning round.

  That afternoon Silver went to talk to the house.

  The house was very quiet but she knew it was listening to her. She often talked to the house, but she preferred to do it in her special place. It was a room where nobody had ever been but her.

  It was triangular room with triangular windows on three sides, and a strange old window in the sloping roof. Silver called it the Sky Window, because all you could see through it were the clouds floating by.

  When Silver sat in the special room, she felt like a bee in a hive.

  She sat in it today, cross-legged, making a triangle of her body, and closing her eyes so that she could listen to the house. It was here that she knew the house was alive, and it was here that the house spoke to her – not with words, but she understood what it was saying.

  ‘What will happen to me in London?’ she said.

  For a minute the house was silent, then she saw a red light flooding the window in front of her, and colouring the thick wide floorboards red, and her legs and hands red, and the front of her sweatshirt, right up to her neck, but not her face.

  ‘Danger,’ the house was saying. ‘Danger.’

  ‘Then I won’t go,’ said Silver. ‘I’ll hide in you and she’ll never find us again.’

  The house said nothing.

  ‘Do I have to go?’ said Silver, who knew the answer in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Yes,’ said the house.

  And for the first time in her life Silver realised that sometimes you have to do something difficult and dangerous, something you don’t want to do at all, and that you have to do it because something more important depends on you.

  ‘Will I find the Timekeeper?’ she said, but the house didn’t answer.

  ‘Will I come back here one day?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the house, ‘one day.’

  Silver sat on the floor as the long shadows of the afternoon filled the room.

  What did she know? She knew that something had happened to her parents. She knew that Mrs Rokabye and Abel Darkwater were in league against her, and against Tanglewreck too, and there was the thing called the Timekeeper, but she didn’t know exactly what it was, or why a watch could be so important.

  She knew that in the world beyond the house very strange things were happening to Time. She took all her knows and her don’t knows and asked the house what she should do.

  And then, without waiting for an answer, she suddenly stood up, because the house had already given her its answer.

  And that is how Silver and Mrs Rokabye caught the 8:05 from Manchester Piccadilly to London King’s Cross, leaving the great house watching behind its hedges of beech and yew.

  The Journey

  Mrs Rokabye was in high spirits on the train, even though she had left Bigamist behind.

  At the station she ignored all the newspapers with their headlines about Time Traps and Time Tornadoes and the future of the world. Instead, she bought all the glossy magazines about the lives of film stars and celebrities. Like most people she longed to be a film star herself, though it was difficult to imagine what parts she could play, except for nasty aunts with odious pets.

  She sat with a bucket of sweets on her bony knees, and she gave Silver four caramels, then she remembered she was a nice kind lady that day, and fished out another eight of the hard centres she didn’t like.

  ‘What a blessing to be away from that awful house!’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘I sometimes think it is listening to me, ha ha ha.’

  ‘It is listening to you,’ said Silver. ‘Tanglewreck is alive.’

  ‘Children are the most ridiculous things ever invented,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘Houses do not have ears.’

  ‘My father said that Tanglewreck has listened to everything for four hundred years, and that the house never forgets. Even if you talk to yourself the house can hear you,’ said Silver.

  Mrs Rokabye did not like the sound of this at all. Suppose the house had overheard her conversation with Abel Darkwater? Suppose the house knew that she was intending to cheat Silver out of her inheritance and sell Tanglewreck to a developer who wanted to build Executive Homes on the site?

  No! No! No! A house is a house is a house. The sooner a bulldozer came and flattened it the better. Mrs Rokabye’s eyes darted about as she thought these thoughts and her big teeth crunched her chocolate peanuts. Calm down, she said to herself, first things first. First the Timekeeper and all the money she would get from Abel Darkwater, and after that the horrible house. She had a Plan; all clever people had a Plan. She would follow her Plan step by step and not let this unsettling child distract her. Tanglewreck was an old ugly house, and anything else was a silly superstition.

  ‘I don’t know why you like that house as much as you do,’ said Mrs Rokabye, sighing, ‘but however much you like it, it is not alive.’

  The ticket collector came and clipped their tickets. ‘Delays at Macclesfield,’ he said, and went on down the train.

  Mrs Rokabye buried herself in her star-studded magazine. She had decided to ignore Silver until they reached King’s Cross.

  ‘I’ll tell you about Tanglewreck,’ said Silver, ignoring Mrs Rokabye ignoring her. ‘Then you’ll know why it’s special.’

  Silver had told this story to herself many times before, when she was on her own, which, since her parents had died, was always.

  ‘There was a field,’ said Silver, ‘and the field was empty, but some said they saw a house there long before it was built; a shimmering house, made of fog, and standing in birch trees.’

  ‘What nonsense you talk!’ said Mrs Rokabye, glancing up from her magazine, but Silver was repeating word for word just what her father had told her.

  ‘In 1588 the first stones of the house were laid, but although it was a fine house, it was a wild place and no one wanted to live there, and so the house waited.

  ‘In those days, in the days of Queen Elizabeth the First, our family, the Rivers, were called Rovers, and because they were wanted for crimes in England, they stole a ship and put out to sea –’

  ‘That’s right!’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘What a disgrace to be descended from pirates!’

  But Silver wasn’t listening to Mrs Rokabye; it was her father’s voice she could hear now, reassuring and low, in the days when she had sat on his knee in his study, with the fire blazing, listening to stories about Tanglewreck …

  ‘It is true, Silver, that the Rovers were pirates, but they were successful pirates, and in those days, England and Spain were enemies, and so when the Rovers finally limped back into Deptford with a broken ship and a hull groaning with stolen Spanish treasure, they begged the Queen for an Official Pardon and
a Quiet Life.

  ‘Queen Elizabeth liked treasure, and she didn’t like Spaniards, and so she graciously agreed to take three-quarters of the pearls, each the size of a baby’s head, and half the bars of silver, each one the length of a man’s leg.

  ‘Roger Rover was knighted Sir Roger, for his services to the Treasury, and, for the sake of his new status and his new wife, he changed the family name to River, and River it has been ever since.’

  ‘And now there is no heir to Tanglewreck, is there?’ said Mrs Rokabye, her eyes gleaming. When her eyes gleamed she looked just like Bigamist, and Silver half expected her to chew on a carrot.

  ‘My father made me the heir,’ said Silver, looking straight at Mrs Rokabye. ‘He said it was time that the old house had a girl to look after it. That’s why he called me Silver, as a reminder of the treasure that began it all. Oh, and because he said I was like his favourite pirate.’

  ‘What pirate?’ said Mrs Rokabye suspiciously.

  ‘The one in Treasure Island. Long John Silver.’

  ‘Never read it,’ said Mrs Rokabye, who never read anything except celebrity magazines and Murder Mysteries.

  ‘I brought it with me,’ said Silver. ‘Here it is, and there’s a picture of Long John Silver on the cover. It’s really good. You can read it to me if you like.’

  ‘No thank you,’ said Mrs Rokabye, who would rather have lain face down under the floorboards than done anything to please Silver.

  ‘I’ll read it by myself, then,’ said Silver, who was used to doing most things by herself.

  She wrapped herself deep into her old duffle coat and opened the book, but before she could begin, a strange thing happened. The ticket collector came back and said, ‘Delays at Macclesfield.’

  ‘You told us that already,’ said Silver, ‘and we have gone past Macclesfield.’

  But they hadn’t, because the train had got jammed in Time.

  ‘What do you mean, we are jammed in Time?’ demanded Mrs Rokabye. ‘I have paid for my ticket, two tickets, as it happens.’

  The guard shrugged. ‘Nothing I can do about it. Happens here a lot lately. The train can’t go forward until Time goes forward. Simple as that.’