“See him?”
“The gardener?” said David. He turned back to Luke, wondering what was so alarming about a fat old gardener, and meaning to make a joke about it. Luke’s face was narrow and hunted-looking and his eyes had gone very wide and golden. David saw he really was frightened. “Who is he?” he asked.
“Chew,” said Luke. “I can’t think how—but I couldn’t get out of the window with him there. I’ll have to get out by the front door, if you could keep him talking while I do. He’s very stupid. If you just chatter, he won’t suspect a thing.”
“All right,” said David, though it seemed a mystery that Luke should be afraid of someone so fat and stupid.
They came downstairs and met Astrid in the hall.
“Hallo, Luke!” Astrid said. “Nice to see you again. That fire’s in the paper this morning. Did you see?”
Luke turned to Astrid with his most charming smile, but he gave David a nudge as he turned, to tell him to get out and distract that gardener. David went through the dining room, toward the French window. Halfway to it, he stopped short and nearly went back again. He heard Aunt Dot say, in her haughtiest voice:
“Just who is this person, Astrid?”
“Er—this is Luke,” Astrid said, sounding rather guilty about it.
David thought that if Luke could charm both Astrid and Mrs. Thirsk, he could probably handle even Aunt Dot. He sped on toward the French window and collided with Cousin Ronald coming in.
“Look where you’re going, boy!” snapped Cousin Ronald.
“Sorry,” said David. “Cousin Ronald, what’s the new gardener’s name?”
“Mr. Chew,” said Cousin Ronald. “Must be Chinese or something. Don’t you go interrupting him.”
David ignored that instruction. He scudded in long strides up the lawn and came to a rather sudden halt beside Mr. Chew’s great right shoulder. Mr. Chew was not fat. He was wide because he was built on the lines of a gorilla, and the width was pure muscle. David no longer wondered why Luke was frightened when he saw Mr. Chew’s massive right arm, swathed in muscles and spread with rough black hairs, moving out toward a weed. Mr. Chew’s big horny hand hovered and then made a vicious jabbing plunge. The weed came up between fingers that looked capable of tearing up a tree. Mr. Chew—or did you spell it Chou?, David wondered—grunted, tossed the weed on a heap of others, and moved on to another.
“Good morning, Mr. Chew,” David said nervously. Mr. Chew made no reply except another apeman grunt, which may have been directed at the weeds, not at David. “Fine weather for the Test, isn’t it?” said David. He got another grunt. “Are you interested in cricket, Mr. Chew?” he asked, rather desperate by now.
Mr. Chew actually spoke. He said “No,” heavily, like a lump of earth falling.
“Then I’ll explain it to you,” David said. “You play with eleven men a side on a pitch twenty-two yards—” Mr. Chew turned his head and looked at David. David jumped. Mr. Chew was not Chinese. He had huge wiry eyebrows and high cheekbones at the top of great brown slabs of cheek. His mouth was like a cut in the slab and his chin jutted. His nose was a fierce beak. His eyes were very small, very dark, very piercing, and somehow quite savage. David would not have been surprised if Mr. Chew had got to his feet and torn him limb from limb. He was sure Mr. Chew could have done it very easily too. “The wicket, you know,” he said, trying to keep to the subject.
“You,” said Mr. Chew, fixing his savage eyes on David’s. “What’s your name?”
“David, sir,” said David. The “sir” came quite unintentionally.
Mr. Chew thought for a while and inspected David while he thought. “I’ll need to speak to you,” he said at length.
“Yes,” said David. “I was wanting to talk to you too. About cricket,” he went on bravely. “I’d like to tell you how I took five wickets against Radley House last—”
Mr. Chew cut short this babbling ruthlessly. “Wait,” he said.
“All right.” David stood and watched Mr. Chew snatch and tear at a weed, and then at another. There is not much you can do if the other person refuses to talk or to listen. Thinking that at least the weeding was keeping Mr. Chew away from Luke, David slid his arm down along his leg and took a glance at his watch. As far as he could see, he was lucky if he had been standing beside Mr. Chew for two minutes. Even Luke could not deal with Aunt Dot in two minutes.
Mr. Chew moved on to another weed, and David noticed an alarming thing. Every time Mr. Chew snatched and tore at a weed, it took him down the flowerbed, nearer to the house. Luke had said Mr. Chew was stupid, but David began to think that this was because Luke did not go by the usual rules. He suspected that Mr. Chew’s stupidity might be what most people would call deep cunning. He did his best to halt Mr. Chew’s progress.
“Er—Mr. Chew,” he said.
“Wait,” said Mr. Chew.
David waited, because he could not see what else to do. Together, they moved remorselessly toward the house. And surprisingly quickly. By the time they reached it and David took another look at his watch, only four more minutes had gone by. David saw that the only thing to hope for was that Aunt Dot had thrown Luke out of the house on the spot.
When they were by the wall of the house, Mr. Chew stood up. David backed away a step without being able to help it. Mr. Chew was not tall, but he loomed. He would have made six of David. He stood looking up and down the wall of the house in a way David did not like at all, and at length he pointed.
“That window,” he said. “Whose is that?”
David looked up along Mr. Chew’s great pointing arm. It was like looking along an oak tree. He could see perfectly well which window Mr. Chew meant, but he now had an opportunity to waste time and he took it.
“Which window do you mean? The one at the top is an attic. The next one along is—”
“Third window up,” said Mr. Chew.
“Oh, that one,” said David. “You mean that one. That one—” Mr. Chew turned and looked at him, savagely. “Mine,” said David.
“Underneath it,” said Mr. Chew, pointing a little lower. “What’s that?”
“You mean the creeper?” David said.
“Yes,” said Mr. Chew. “And there’s something wrong with it, isn’t there?”
“I see what you mean,” said David. “Yes.” The creeper was probably dead. Its leaves were brown and curled and singed-looking. Any gardener would have noticed it. But David was fairly sure Mr. Chew was not remarking on it because he was a gardener—though what else he was David could not have said.
“That plant,” said Mr. Chew, “has been burned. Hasn’t it? You tell me how.”
“I don’t know,” David said. After all, he thought, he did not know why it should be burned just because Luke had climbed up it.
“You don’t know?” said Mr. Chew.
“No,” said David.
“I’ll talk to you again later,” said Mr. Chew, “and maybe you’ll remember why by then.”
“I don’t think so,” said David. “I don’t know.”
“You’ll remember,” Mr. Chew said. He said it slowly, and each word fell out like a heavy, menacing clod of earth. “You’d better remember.”
David backed gently away. He was rather frightened of Mr. Chew; but on the other hand, he was quite used to people threatening him and trying to make him say and do things he did not want to. He found threats even easier to ignore than guilt. “I’ll see you later then,” he said.
“You will,” Mr. Chew promised.
David wandered away round the house. Eight minutes had passed. If Luke were not out of the house by now, there was nothing to be done. Mr. Chew had clearly decided that the interview was over and to go on hanging round him was just asking for trouble. David went out of the gate and down the road, wondering how he could find out where Luke was by now, and looked hopefully over gates into gardens as he went, in case Luke was hiding in one of them. He looked over the gate that used to be the Clarksons’ and found hims
elf staring into the face of an old gentleman who was spraying roses there.
“Good morning to you,” said the old gentleman. “And who might you be? Do you live near here?”
David explained who he was and where he lived.
“Ah,” said the old gentleman. “And I am Mr. Fry. How do you do?” He proved to be the most courteous and chatty of old gentlemen—the kind of person Luke could have dealt with beautifully. David stood on one leg, then on the other, and picked loose paint off the gatepost, while Mr. Fry told him that he had almost completed his collection of the people who lived in the road, and that David and his relations were the last people he had not met. He wanted to know all about Aunt Dot and Uncle Bernard, and what work Cousin Ronald did. David had never seen Cousin Ronald work, so he could not tell Mr. Fry. Then Mr. Fry made him promise to tell Uncle Bernard that he and Mrs. Fry would call in one day that week. And at last he let David go.
David shot round the corner into the main road. Luke, no doubt as a disguise, was standing among a line of people at the bus stop. He fell into step beside David as David passed.
“What happened?” they both said at the same time. Then of course they both laughed.
“I got away fairly quickly,” Luke said. “I told your Aunt Dot I had to go home for breakfast. But I thought you were never coming. What happened?”
David told him. “And I don’t think Mr. Chew is stupid,” he said.
“Yes he is,” said Luke. “Anyone else would have seen it was no good trying to frighten you.”
David was highly gratified. “I was frightened,” he admitted.
“What if you were?” said Luke. “It wouldn’t make you say anything important. The way to get you talking is to be friendly—and I just hope none of them realize that.” He frowned down at the pavement in a worried way. “David,” he said, “I shouldn’t keep asking you to do things—it ought to be the other way round—but could you promise not to tell anyone, anyone about me? Really about me, I mean.”
“Of course,” David said. He hoped Luke would go on and explain why, but Luke simply looked at the pavement with his forehead all wrinkled and said nothing. David tried to encourage him by making a joke. “Funny,” he said, “that Mr. Chew turned up on Chewsday.”
“Funnier still if he’d turned up on Monday,” Luke said. He seemed to have missed the point, which was unlike him. But he was obviously thinking of something else. “I have been a fool!” he said. “I was too glad to be out to think—if you knew what it was like down there, you’d have been glad too. I should have realized they’d track me down—but they knew when the lock was broken, if I’d only thought—and I ought to have guessed I wouldn’t have quite the old control at first. But, no, I have to go and burn that creeper. Then I get really stupid and make that fire yesterday. They knew that was me all right. And to crown it all, I have to go to sleep on the end of your bed and let Chew catch up with me. I must be getting old, or something.”
“You don’t seem old to me,” David said.
“I never seem old to anyone,” said Luke. “But I must be, or I wouldn’t have been so tired. I expect it’s being shut up for so long.”
“How long were you shut up?” David asked curiously.
Luke took a sudden fierce turn to cheerfulness. “Oh, I’ve lost count.”
David tried another question. “And who is Mr. Chew?”
“Distant relative,” Luke said merrily. “About the same as your Cousin Ronald is to you.”
David saw that Luke had somehow talked himself into a more carefree state of mind. In a way he was glad, but he was also a little sorry, because he knew Luke was not going to tell him any more. “So what are you going to do?” he asked.
Sure enough, Luke smiled in the way that meant he was not telling. “I’ll manage. As long as you keep your mouth shut and don’t meet me in the house again. Now, what shall we do?”
“Play cricket,” said David.
7
FLOWERS
David and Luke spent an excellent morning playing cricket in the recreation ground. There, they met a plump and placid boy called Alan, who was only too glad to let them play in his team. This team was losing when David and Luke joined it. A very few overs from David put a stop to that.
“I say! You’re a good bowler, aren’t you!” Alan said admiringly, as the fourth wicket fell.
David grinned, and was much inclined to like Alan. He hoped Luke liked him too. But, to his surprise, Luke hardly seemed aware that Alan existed. When Luke spoke, it was to David, and, for all the notice he took of Alan or any of the other boys, they might not have been playing at all. David was rather irritated.
“I like Alan,” he said, when the game finished. “Don’t you?”
“Who’s Alan?” Luke said vaguely. Then he seemed to remember. “Oh—I suppose he’s all right,” he said.
David, as he walked home through Ashbury, wondered if this was another example of Luke’s strangeness. But it could equally well have been because Luke was so worried about Mr. Chew. Beside Mr. Chew, Alan or anyone else did seem rather unimportant.
Trouble began again when David, clean, changed and tidy, came in to lunch.
“Ah, David,” said Aunt Dot. “Why did you not tell me you had met that charming and nicely spoken child who was here this morning? What is his name?”
“Luke,” said Astrid, raising her eyebrows at David.
“Yes, Luke,” said Aunt Dot. “He tells me he lives with Mr. and Mrs. Fry at the end of the road. At least,” she corrected herself, because she was always very strict about facts, “I asked if he did and he said Yes.”
David wondered how Luke was ever going to keep up this piece of dishonesty. Would it be possible to persuade courteous old Mr. Fry to join in? David rather thought not. “I met Mr. Fry this morning,” he said, hoping Aunt Dot would see it as supporting evidence. “He said they were going to call on you, him and Mrs. Fry.”
Uncle Bernard at once went frail. “My dear Dot, I can’t meet these people. Not at my time of life.”
“Nonsense, Bernard,” said Aunt Dot. “David, I think it very impolite of you not to have introduced Luke to us before this.”
David sighed. Aunt Dot always contrived to blame him about something, even when she was pleased. “I only met him on Sunday,” he explained.
“Then you should have introduced him at once,” said Aunt Dot. “As he is exactly the companion I would have chosen for you, I want you to bring him here this afternoon.”
David knew this was out of the question, because of Mr. Chew. So he was forced into a piece of dishonesty of his own. “Luke can’t come out this afternoon. His cousin’s come—on a visit, you know.”
“Then bring him tomorrow,” said Aunt Dot.
David was heartily relieved when lunch was over. He had arranged to meet Luke in the recreation ground, so, as soon as he had changed, he left the house and scudded down the front drive to the gate. He got a very nasty shock when Mr. Chew stood up from behind a wheelbarrow and took hold of his arm.
Mr. Chew was quite as strong as he looked. David tugged mightily to get his arm away, but Mr. Chew’s great arm did not even tremble. The horny fingers simply closed a trifle.
“And where were you going?” said Mr. Chew.
“Nowhere,” said David. “Let go.”
“Going to meet someone,” said Mr. Chew. “Perhaps I’ll come too.”
“I’m not going to meet anyone. Let go. I’m only—I’ve only come out because my Aunt wanted me to pick some flowers,” David lied. After all, Mr. Chew was not to know he was forbidden to touch flowers.
Mr. Chew let go of David’s arm and, putting his great hands on his hips, backed round until he was between David and the gate. “Go on,” he said. “Let’s see you.”
David rubbed his arm and saw that he was not going to get past Mr. Chew in a hurry. He would have to wait. He turned to go back into the house.
“Oh no,” said Mr. Chew. “Come back. Pick flowers. Let�
�s see you.”
David turned round, and was suddenly filled with black rage against Mr. Chew. “All right,” he said. “I’ll pick flowers. So there!”
And under Mr. Chew’s sarcastic eye, he picked flowers, right and left, all down each side of the path. He was too angry to care. When he had a big bunch of Cousin Ronald’s geraniums, he thrust them toward Mr. Chew’s beaked nose.
“There,” he said. “Flowers. Smell.”
“Beautiful,” said Mr. Chew, without turning a hair.
David swung round and stalked back into the house with the bunch of geraniums, knowing that, in his relations’ eyes, he could not have been more of a criminal if each flower had been a dead body. Like a murderer trying to cover his crime, he crept upstairs with them and into the best spare bedroom, where he remembered there was a very ugly jug. He filled it with water, stuffed the flowers in it, and spread them out a bit. They did not look very nice. Then, deciding that the place where they were least likely to be noticed was somewhere where there often were flowers, he tiptoed past Aunt Dot’s room and arranged them on the landing windowsill. Then he fled guiltily to his own room.
And there he was forced to stay. Every time he tried to get out of the house, Mr. Chew was there, whether he tried at the front, the side or the back. David gave up in the end and crossly read a book.
The flowers were discovered during supper. Cousin Ronald was busy boring everyone about what an excellent gardener Mr. Chew was, with slightly more interesting digressions on why England drew with Australia in the Test, when Mrs. Thirsk came in, carrying the ugly jug.
“I think you ought to see this,” she said.
David drew a deep angry breath and thought he might have known it would be Mrs. Thirsk who found out.
“My Worcester!” said Aunt Dot.
“My geraniums!” said Cousin Ronald.
“David!” said Uncle Bernard vigorously.
Eight Days of Luke Page 6