It was a little gray room with one little gray window looking out onto the foggy woods. What woke me was the sound of the excavators starting up to finish leveling the mound. That told me at once where I was. Even if I hadn’t heard them, the smell would have told me—like a school really, only thicker and chillier. I jumped up. The first thing I saw was my old mildewy exercise book lying on the gray locker by the bed and a pen beside it. “The Story of the Twin Princesses.” I grabbed it up and opened it, and found Aunt Maria’s note written under the title on the first page. She has teddy-bearish writing. I knew the note was meant to make me feel humble and contrite. But it didn’t. There were no spells on me now. I suppose if I was going to be her new Naomi, I had to have my own free will. I went and tried the door.
It wasn’t locked. I stormed out into the gray corridor and came face to face with Phyllis Forbes. Her pink schoolgirl face was rather irritable.
“Didn’t you hear the bell?” she said. “Get up at once, you lazy girl. Breakfast is half finished.”
“Why should I?” I said. “I don’t belong here.”
“You do now,” she said. “Get dressed or starve.”
I was hungry. My clothes were on a chair. I went back in the room and dressed and Phyllis Forbes stood over me. I hated her. But I hated her much more by the end of breakfast.
The orphans were all downstairs in a long gray room quietly eating Muesli and drinking watery milk from plastic glasses. Phyllis Forbes shoved me down at a bench by the nearest long table and went stamping off. The orphans all looked at me with identical solemn clone expressions. They were all younger than me. That made me rather dejected.
“Don’t just sit there. Do something!” I called out at them. “You all got filled with stuff from the green box. It must have made some difference!”
They just stared, and their eyes all shifted in unison to Zenobia Bailey. She was dressed like a nurse, in the same way as Phyllis Forbes. She hustled up, clacking her shoes, and clapped a bowl of Muesli down in front of me. “Milk’s in the jug,” she said. “Spoons in the box there.”
“Do you work here?” I said.
“I give my time three mornings a week,” she said. She sounded very righteous.
I wondered if she recognized me. “How generous,” I said. “Do you give people anything but Muesli? I hate Muesli. It’s like mouse doo.”
“You’ll eat it,” she said. “It’s nourishing.”
“No, I won’t. I’ll throw up,” I said. “How about a crust of dry bread, instead?”
Zenobia Bailey sighed. “Phyllis!” she called out in a weary voice. “There’s one being ornery here.”
Phyllis Forbes came zooming along the gray room and glared at me. “Oh, yes,” she said. “This one will be. She has much too good an opinion of herself. Are you going to eat up like a good girl?” she said to me.
“No,” I said. “I hate Muesli.”
“Then you’ll eat it all up,” she said with a little sort of smile.
And I somehow had to. I spooned the spiky gray mush up, and choked, and spooned again, and the raisins seemed even more like dead flies than usual, but I still had to eat them. Phyllis Forbes hadn’t done anything to my feelings. She had just put a sort of transparent bag around them, so that they bulged and struggled inside where I couldn’t get at them. I had to sit dutifully there eating Muesli.
When I’d finished, she clapped her hands. “Come along now, children,” she called. “Activity time.” All the orphans got up obediently and filed out of the gray room, while she stood against the wall with her arms folded, watching. Elaine isn’t Aunt Maria’s only policewoman, I thought. I got up and went over to her.
“What is activity time?” I said. Then I burped Muesli and thought I was going to be sick.
She gave me a malicious smile. “The boys go for gymnastics,” she said. “The girls have dancing. It trains the muscles.”
“I want to do gymnastics,” I said.
“But you’ll do dancing,” she said. “That’s what young ladies do. This way.”
I knew she could make me, so I went where she pushed me, looking as rebellious as I dared.
“In there. Take that look off your face. It won’t do any good,” she said.
It was a bare room with girl orphans standing around in it. The Mrs. Ur called Ann Haversham was sitting at a piano in one corner. “Is everyone here?” she called out.
I went over to her. “Do you give your time three times a week, too?” I said.
“Every day, dear,” she said. “Stand with the others.”
“Then you should ask to be paid,” I said. “This is a slave farm.”
She took no notice and called out, “Now, I want you all to be fairies!” She played little skittish fairy notes on the piano. I went and stood against the wall to watch the girl orphans running with little steps and fluttering their arms. Then I realized that Phyllis Forbes was standing against the wall, too, on the other side of the room.
Phyllis Forbes gave me another of her nasty smiles.
I found I had to dance, too. The plastic bag was over my feelings again. I felt huge and silly as I ran and flittered and then skipped in time to the fairy music. I was enormous compared with the other girls. I got angrier and angrier, but the plastic bag held my feelings in, and all I could do was bulge about inside. I knew how Chris had felt when he said awful things to Aunt Maria. As we all started waving our arms with sickening grace, the Muesli felt like a big gray clod in my stomach, and I felt worse still. Yet Antony Green danced, I thought. That was to express his feelings. Then I thought, I was filled with stuff from the green box—more than any of the orphans were—and I took on the power Aunt Maria had vested in Naomi, even if I didn’t know I had. So I must be strong enough to do something. I made a great effort. And the plastic bag split, and I began to dance like Antony Green, leaping and whirling, kicking up my legs, and holding my arms high. It was a lovely feeling. The orphans stopped dancing and stared at me.
The music stopped. Phyllis Forbes came diving across the room and snatched hold of my arm. It hurt. “You wicked, graceless, indecent girl!” she said. “Now you shall be punished!”
I tried to look at her in a way that showed I was as strong as she was. But she was hurting my arm and I couldn’t. So I said, “It’s not punishment, whatever you do, because you enjoy watching people’s feelings bulge, don’t you?”
She dragged me out of the room, hurting my arm even more. “I shall break your spirit!” she said.
“You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?” I gasped. But when someone is stronger than you in their muscles it is very hard to do anything. She dragged me all the way upstairs and threw me back into the gray room.
“You’ll stay there without food until you’re ready to behave!” she said. And she slammed the door and locked it. I suppose it was lucky she made me eat the Muesli.
Actually, I didn’t write very much between the lines of “The Twin Princesses.” I didn’t dare. I wrote the first bit so as to defy everyone, and then my arm hurt too much where Phyllis Forbes had wrenched it. I sat on the bed, staring at the woods through the window, rubbing my arm and holding my eyes very wide to make the tears in them go away. I began to think my spirit probably was broken.
Then there was a soft little grating noise at the door of the room. My eyes went that way. I saw a cracker coming through the crack under the door. A second cracker was being pushed under a bit further along. It was the orphans. I thought I would stay sitting on the bed, but I didn’t. I went over to the door.
“Thank you,” I said. “Why are you doing that?”
“We always do that when one of us is being punished,” one of them whispered from the other side of the door. “Bye for now.” Feet softly scuffled away.
I still felt far too full of Muesli and rage to eat, but I picked up the crackers and hid them in the mattress in order not to get the orphans punished, too. More crackers kept arriving all morning. The bed crunched when I sat o
n it. I was just dismally thinking I had better sit on the floor and eat the crackers later on for supper, when I saw something moving in the wood out of the window. I looked, and whoever it was slid out of sight behind some bushes.
Funny, I thought. That looked like Larry Mr. Elaine.
I went to the window, and I was in time to catch sight of one of the boatmen scampering sideways to another bush. Not Chris again! I thought. Then I looked up at the woods and saw people coming down among the trees, three of them. One was Mum, sturdily marching with her hands in the pockets of her anorak. It was cold and still a bit foggy out there. Antony Green was with her, and he was wearing his green highwayman coat. The third person was Chris. He was a boy again and his clothes must have come from Larry, because they were just a bit big all over. They all came down the field until they vanished behind the high wall of the orphanage, but Mum had started to run by then.
I waited and I listened, and I never knew quite what happened. I heard a huge bang, as if a heavy door had been slammed open and hit the wall beside it hard. The floor trembled a bit. Then I heard Mum. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could hear her. When Mum really gets going, it’s quite hard to hear anything else. And she was really going. I stood in the middle of the room and listened to doors slamming, things going flying, other voices trying to interrupt Mum, and Mum’s voice coming closer and closer and louder and louder. There was shouting, too, from the orphans. I could somehow hear they were cheering Mum on. Then there were a host of footsteps and Mum’s voice, nearer and nearer, “I tell you she’s my daughter and you have no business to shut her up here!”
Then the key scraped and my door crashed open, and there was Mum in a crowd of excited orphans, hauling Phyllis Forbes by the collar of her nurse’s uniform.
“She’s not harmed—,” Phyllis Forbes started to say.
“Not harmed!” said Mum. “Just look at her!” I was so glad to see Mum that I had somehow started crying without knowing I had. Chris says he did, too, when Antony Green turned him back to a boy. “Not harmed!” Mum bellowed. “Why, you wicked, cruel woman!” And to my utter joy she banged Phyllis Forbes’s head on the doorjamb. From the look of Phyllis Forbes, Mum had done that several times before, but when I asked Mum she said, “I don’t know what I did, cherub. It was all a red mist. I was only thinking of getting you out of there.”
I rushed up to Mum. Mum slung Phyllis Forbes aside and hugged me. The orphans shouted, “Lock Mrs. Forbes up now!”
Mum was obviously tempted, but she said, “No, we’re getting out of here. Come on, all of you. Thank you for showing me where Mig was.”
We left Phyllis Forbes sitting in the corridor and hurried downstairs in a crowd of yelling orphans to the front hall. The big front door was off its hinges, making a sort of frame for a knot of men, Larry among them, and Chris standing with Antony Green. I wondered why they hadn’t come in. But both of them, for different reasons, were finding it hard to go indoors just then. When Chris saw me, he did actually come about three steps into the hall. I didn’t realize then what a sacrifice that was. He dragged me back outside, both of us saying excitedly, “Tell me, tell me, tell me!”
There Antony Green smiled his long, sly, friendly smile at me. Beyond Larry and the men was another knot of men, the ones who had been working the excavators. Someone told me later they came from Minehurst way and didn’t have a clue. But they knew something was going on. They stared like anything at me, all tear stained, and again at Mum. Mum came sailing out, surrounded by orphans. “You did mean to bring these, too?” she called.
“Oh, yes,” said Antony Green. “Let’s go.” And he led the way out through orphanage grounds and everyone else followed, like the Pied Piper’s procession. Antony Green looks a bit like I always imagine the Pied Piper, anyway, and he was more like him than ever with Chris and me and all the orphans crowding after him.
“Where did Larry and the others come from?” I whispered to Chris.
“They were waiting in the woods when we came down this morning,” Chris said. “They had clothes for me and that green coat for him, and they seemed to know all about everything. Larry went up to Antony Green and—do you know!—he bowed. ‘You may not remember me,’ he said. ‘I was only ten when you were put down, but I’ve tried to keep things going the way you would have wanted.’ Then he handed over the green coat.”
“He wants to be the next Mr. Phelps,” I said. “I bet. Tell me how they found you.”
Chris wasn’t sure. He thought maybe he found them. He said he was miles inland, as far as he could get, because roaming by night was one of the things he got to like about being a wolf. But he could never get enough of it. He always got more and more scared and uncertain the farther he ran from Cranbury. I think there was an injunction on him. Anyway, near dawn, he suddenly got a feeling that he had to go to Loup Woods at once. So he set off trotting. Quite a lot of people saw him. A man in a tractor tried to run him down in a field, and Chris was very scared and tired at being out by daylight. He was glad when he ran into sea mist and found the barn where he had taken to sheltering at the edge of Loup Woods. He crawled in through a gap in the back, and there was Mum, lying asleep on the straw where Chris usually slept.
“I couldn’t believe it. I nosed at her,” Chris said.
Mum was walking with an arm round both of us. She laughed. “I yelled,” she said. “Poor Chris! He jumped back looking so scared. And I said, ‘Chris! It’s all right. I do know you. It’s just your nose is so cold!’ Then Antony came in.”
“He said, ‘Hello, Chris. I’m sorry this has happened to you,’ and turned me straight back,” Chris said.
“What? Just like that?” I said.
“Well, no mumbo jumbo or anything,” Mum said. “He put a hand on Chris’s head. Things were shadowy for a moment, and then he was standing with his hand on Chris’s real head, and Chris was shivering all over. Poor Antony. He was sweating by then. He can’t bear even being under a roof. And Chris is as bad.”
“Now you tell us about the orphanage,” Chris said.
“But you haven’t told me about the hunt,” I said. Our procession was going along the promenade by then, with the sea swelling all soft and gray and foggy to one side.
“That’ll have to wait,” Mum said.
Aunt Maria was coming along the concrete toward us in her dead fox and her tall hat in her wheelchair pushed by Elaine. All the other Mrs. Urs—or nine of them, anyway—were behind her, and there were quite a lot of other women, too.
“I think this is it,” said Chris.
Fifteen
The two lots of us stopped, facing one another. Antony Green took the green box out of his pocket and drummed his fingers on it. Everyone’s eyes went to it. It seemed twice as bright as anything in the gray seaside air. Most of the Mrs. Urs looked away rather quickly. Aunt Maria covered her face with one glove.
“Elaine,” she said in her low, grieving voice, “they’ve got my little Naomi. How tragic!”
Elaine was staring past Aunt Maria’s hat at Antony Green. When she thought she had caught his eye, she smiled. She really gave him the works. It was beyond all her other smiles, not two-line, but three-line at least. I thought she was going to split her ears. You couldn’t say Antony Green took no notice, exactly. He smiled back, and of course he had a smile at least to equal Elaine’s. But I saw why Aunt Maria had tried to get rid of him. His smile was perfectly friendly, but it showed he wasn’t going to budge an inch.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’ve come back to right a wrong. There have been two deaths caused by it, and a lot of unhappiness.”
“What does he mean, Elaine?” Aunt Maria asked. This time it was her hurt voice. “Everyone’s quite happy, aren’t we, dear? And I’ve never killed so much as a fly in my life!”
“No, you use other people, like pincers, to kill them for you!” Chris shouted.
“Hush, dear,” Aunt Maria called. “Grown-ups are talking.” If she was surprised to s
ee Chris as himself, she never showed it. She really had a nerve. Mum thought so, too. I could hear her muttering things like, “What nerve! I hope he grinds her to pulp!” until Antony Green said, “Is that all you want to say? Really?” He said it quite quietly, but it overrode all the mutterings from everyone.
“Only that I’m surprised,” Aunt Maria said, “at someone of your education getting led into something like this. I thought you too old to make an exhibition of yourself on the seafront.”
Ow! I thought. It must have been a signal. I think all the Mrs. Urs set to work then. Pitying disapproval rolled out from them in waves. Mum went bright red instantly. They followed this up with such remorse, guilt, shame, embarrassment—the feeling you have when it’s your voice that rings out saying a dirty word—that everyone was writhing in seconds. One of the orphans near me quietly burst into tears.
Elaine said, “Larry, what are you doing?” and Larry looked as if he wanted to crawl into the sea.
Aunt Maria called gently, “Naomi, come over here, dear, away from all those people.”
“No!” I said. I was still feeling the way I did at the orphanage. I knew the guilt was just another plastic bag. “You’re wicked,” I said.
There was a shocked gasp, and it came from Mum and some of the orphans as well as from the Mrs. Urs.
Antony Green sighed and opened the green box. “If that’s the way you want it,” he said. I think everybody looked at him. He stood out so, with his odd face and his strange green coat. I remember looking up at his sideface as the stuff from the box swirled around him, and I thought the one bright eye I could see looked more like a hawk’s than a parrot’s. The guilt still surged out from the Mrs. Urs, and I think we were all ashamed to look at that strong, invisible stuff winding up and round, into the sky, wrapping itself into the fog, collecting more strength from the smooth, dark sea. But we did look. And we saw it all pile back at Aunt Maria and the Mrs. Urs.
Aunt Maria Page 18