by Sylvia Waugh
Ted unzipped the neck of the hooded jacket. Then he and Michael pulled it up over his head. Wimpey held back a nervous giggle as she saw Soobie’s blue arms and neck emerging from a pale blue ‘vest’ that was stitched to his body. It looked, because it was, very old and thin.
They then pulled Soobie forward in the chair, put their hands to his waist and tugged at the tracksuit bottoms. It was almost as if the doll were resisting their efforts, it felt so heavy and stiff. But they managed to pull the trousers over his trainers, leaving his blue legs projecting bulbously from a frayed pair of pale blue shorts.
Daisy took the suit in her hands and was mystified to feel the wetness of it – and even more mystified when she looked at the doll’s feet. Its trainers were soaken too, and splashed with mud.
“Where can it have been?” she said. “It looks as if it’s been out in the rain.”
Her eyes searched the room as if trying to find a solution to the problem from the other dolls. Then . . . the cupboard. Her gaze fell on the cupboard where she had seen blue cloth protruding. Yesterday, only yesterday, a wad of blue cloth wedged between door and jamb . . .
There was no cloth there now!
Daisy walked uneasily across the room, still holding the tracksuit, and opened the cupboard door. It was empty.
At that moment came a terrifying suspicion.
Daisy looked down at the clothes she was holding, then round the room again, taking in all of the other dolls, one by one. Blue clothes, blue cloth, a wet night and an inexplicably wet doll . . .
The two men stood silently looking at her, waiting for instructions. Ted coughed.
“Well,” he said, “is there anything else you want done up here, Daisy?”
“No,” said Daisy with an effort. “I’ll see to everything else myself. We’ll check the other things later. You can go now. I’ll see you at the usual time for the shutters. And thank you both. Prompt and thorough as usual . . .”
Left alone with the dolls, Daisy immediately turned her full attention on Soobie. She looked straight at him and his eyes held hers. In them she saw utter misery. The silver buttons glistened with moisture that bore a startling resemblance to tears. Daisy laid her hand on his arm.
“You are not so wet,” she said. “The tracksuit gave you good protection, wherever you were. You’ll soon dry out in here.”
Then, with a sensitivity that grew as she looked at him, she turned the rocking-chair towards the window. Now the other dolls could not see him, and somehow Daisy knew that this was what he wanted. Vinetta, watching, understood and felt warm towards their ‘landlady’ for being so perceptive.
Daisy looked down at Soobie’s feet.
“I’ll take your shoes too. They badly need cleaning.”
She lowered herself down to the floor in front of the rocking-chair, painstakingly undid the laces of the trainers, then eased them off, heel first. Underneath, Soobie was wearing a pair of knitted blue socks. Daisy felt them.
“Your socks will do,” she said. “They’re a tiny bit damp at the toes, but they’ll soon dry.”
Using the window sill for support, she got up again, turned her back on all of the dolls and looked out at the street, as she had done once before.
“I will bring the shoes and the tracksuit back first thing tomorrow morning,” she said, “before the shop opens. Please don’t frighten me. If, if . . . Oh, if you really are alive, I think I don’t want to know. I need time to take it all in. I need time to sort out my ideas.”
It was surprising how little was said and done that Friday after Daisy left carrying Soobie’s suit and shoes.
For a start, it was clear that Daisy had been right with regard to Soobie. The chair in which he sat had its back to the room and he remained stiff and mute even after the door downstairs closed. The broad back gave out its own signals. No one must look at me. Till my dignity is intact again, you must all pretend that I am not here.
When Vinetta went to the window and raised the sash a few inches to allow the air in to assist with her son’s drying, she never so much as glanced his way. It was clear to all of them that Soobie found his present state of undress absolutely mortifying. It was like the worst of all nightmares.
The waves of sympathy that went out to him were strangely various. Vinetta and Joshua felt sorry for his discomfort. Pilbeam pitied his embarrassment. Wimpey felt almost as embarrassed as he did. But Appleby, for once in her life, felt at one with her brother. If that happened to me, she thought, I would die. Then a flash of memory told her that something of the sort had happened to her once, but how long ago that seemed!
Sometime later, after a silence that settled upon all of them, Wimpey said softly, “Can I go up and see Poopie?”
“Yes,” said her mother, “but go quietly.”
No one went up to see Granny and Granpa. It was as if all normal commerce had ceased. At three o’clock, Tulip came downstairs of her own accord.
“Not one of you has bothered to come upstairs and let us know what is happening,” she said crossly, “but I take it that Soobie is back?”
Her voice sounded out of place in the silence of the room.
Vinetta nodded but said nothing . . .
Tulip took just one fleeting glance at the rocking-chair by the window. Then she understood. With unusual tact, she did not show any further awareness of Soobie’s presence. She took a seat at the dining table and remained there saying nothing, hands folded in her lap, for more than an hour. And the other dolls too remained still and silent. That was their dollness, their difference from restless humanity.
“When the shop closes,” said Vinetta, breaking the long silence, “I think we should all go straight to bed. Then Soobie can have this room to himself till morning comes.”
It was the only reference she made to her son.
When they heard the shutters clattering against the shop windows down below, they were all relieved.
“The taxi’s there,” said Joshua, glancing out of the window furthest away from the rocking-chair. He saw Daisy leave the shop. Not for an instant did she raise her head to look at the flat above.
“Bed now,” said Vinetta, and, although it was barely five-thirty, not one of them demurred.
Vinetta was the last to leave. She closed the window, was about to say a comforting word to Soobie, but then changed her mind. Sometimes even words of comfort are best left unsaid.
CHAPTER 22
Saturday
VERY EARLY NEXT morning, the dolls made their way to their proper places – five in the living room, ignoring Soobie who had not moved from his chair, two in the big front bedroom, one in the smallest bedroom and two in the nursery. The beds were made and everything was tidied away. For two hours everyone sat limply waiting for Daisy to arrive. At nine-thirty, the taxi drew up and the ‘landlady’ came to the door and rang the bell three times.
“I’m on my way up,” she called loudly. “I have brought the tracksuit and trainers for the blue doll.”
No panic this time, only relief that the waiting was over.
Daisy came in and, without looking directly at any of them, she went to the blue doll in the rocking chair, and began deftly and gently to dress him, like a nurse dressing a patient. She slipped the tracksuit top over his head, raising first one arm, then the other, to put them into the sleeves. The tracksuit bottoms were not so easy. Daisy manoeuvred them over Soobie’s feet, but then she had to raise him from the chair to finish pulling them up around his waist. Finally, she sat down on the floor and fitted the blue-socked feet into the well-cleaned trainers.
“There,” she said. “That’s better.”
She got up and went to the window. With her back to everyone, she began to speak.
“I feel love in this room,” she said, “and love is not afraid. How can I fear you when I love you all? I have spent a sleepless night just thinking of it all.”
She stopped and sighed. The Mennyms looked at her and began to grasp how difficult it was for
her. She was a loving, lonely human being, and she was clearly out of her depth. They thought of the fun they’d had playing cards with her and watching television. Even her lugging them from chair to chair had had its comic side. They wished they had not given her reason to be nervous.
“I don’t want to know more than I know already,” she said. “I think I can cope with believing, but I don’t know how I would deal with certainty. If you are truly alive and need to live here, it will be better if we all pretend that I don’t know. And, whatever the truth may be, you are my very, very special friends.”
She paused to let them consider what she was saying, though she still did not know whether what she had come to believe in the silent hours of the night was really true. All the evidence of the past and of the present gave her the conviction that, whatever it might mean, these dolls were living beings.
“I will go on loving all of you,” she said in a careful voice, as if speaking words already rehearsed, “but it will be different. And I know that loving you will mean keeping your secret.”
She paused once more to allow them to consider what she had said, but she did not turn to look at them. She listened and hoped they would not speak.
“We can take things slowly, live from one day to the next,” she went on. “I will visit you once a week, on Wednesday afternoons, as if I were coming to tea. No one will pry on you. Mrs Cooper, who does my cleaning, will come in on Friday afternoons between two o’clock and three o’clock to sweep and dust. You will not need to concern yourselves with her. She is a practical woman, totally without imagination and interested only in doing her job properly.”
In the street below, Ted and Michael were stowing away the shutters. Michael looked up at the window and waved. Daisy returned the greeting.
“If you are people,” she went on after the clatter of the shutters stopped, “whatever sort of people, I cannot go on treating you as if you were inanimate. It cannot be a game any more. If I am wrong, and this is all delusion, then so be it. But I don’t need to know everything. Just let me keep a little bit of doubt. That is safer for all of us.”
She then went upstairs to see the other dolls.
“I won’t be disturbing you after all,” she said to Sir Magnus, avoiding eye contact but daring to rest one hand gently on his arm, “There will be no chair-lift and I will not submit you to any troublesome movement. This is your home now. It is not a museum or a show-place.”
The purple foot, she noticed, was once more protruding from the counterpane. She did nothing about it.
To Miss Quigley she said, “This nursery is yours. You may do whatever you want with it. My visits will be brief. I would not dream of being an intruder.”
Hortensia was baffled. The woman who had a little house in Hartside Gardens sounded so like herself in bygone days, but the meaning was unclear.
“I am just going,” said Daisy when she returned once more to the living room. “I’ll come again on Wednesday, and not before. This flat is yours now, not mine. I ask only that you move at my pace.”
Love there still was, and pity too, but the laughter had gone out of their relationship. She had once likened playing with the dolls to playing with a giant chess set. But what if the chessmen had lives of their own?
Before leaving, Daisy went to the sideboard, took something from her pocket, and left it there.
The dolls did not stir.
“She knows,” said Vinetta, as soon as the door downstairs had closed. “She really knows. And she is going to do nothing about it.”
“Do we speak to her?” said Pilbeam. “Do we make friends as we did with Albert Pond?”
“I think not,” said Joshua. “That is a woman who knows how to stay within bounds. No games, she said, but we will play by her rules all the same.”
“She left something on the sideboard,” said Appleby. “Did you see?”
Pilbeam went to the sideboard and picked up the ‘something’. It was a pair of keys on a key ring. One was a small shiny one, for a Yale lock, the other was large and rather rusty,
“What can they be for?” she said, holding them up.
“A set of keys for this flat!” said Appleby. “She wants us to be able to come and go as we please. The big one must be for the back door. We will be able to use the back entrance. That is brilliant.”
The others looked at her, wondering exactly. what she meant.
“So?” said Pilbeam.
“It’ll be so much easier. The backstairs lead to an enclosed yard with a high gate leading out into the lane. It’s not overlooked at all. From our bedroom window all we can see is a derelict warehouse on top of the hill. We will be able to go in and out whenever we want to.”
“We’ll see,” said Vinetta cautiously. “We’ll just wait and see.”
It was now that Soobie turned his chair to face the room.
Joshua looked at him. He wanted to bring his son into the conversation, to help him over the awkward bit. He put a hand on Soobie’s shoulder.
“Well, that’s over,” he said, without being too specific. “If anyone does decide to go out, they will have to be wary of the weather.”
Soobie forced a smile, but said nothing. However long his life should last, the memory of the past twenty-four hours would never leave him.
CHAPTER 23
Wednesdays and Fridays
EVERY FRIDAY IN the months that followed was exactly the same. The first time Mrs Cooper came in to clean the flat she looked briefly at the dolls, but for her they were just like exhibits in a museum. She hoovered carefully round them. Then she sprayed the furniture with polish and conscientiously dusted everything in sight, whether it needed it or not. After that first Friday, the dolls did not merit a second glance. If anything puzzled Mrs Cooper at all, and very little ever did, it was the fact that her job was so easy.
“Once a fortnight would do,” she said to Daisy. “That flat’s never dirty, but then it’s not lived in. I might as well be doing some washing and ironing for you down at Hartside.”
“No,” said Daisy. “If the work is easy, just be glad.”
Of course, the reason why there was so little work to be done must be quite obvious. Vinetta had been well used to keeping the house in Brocklehurst Grove spick and span. Dusting was a daily ritual, and daily rituals are sacred.
On Fridays, all the Mennyms had to do was switch themselves off entirely for the duration of Mrs Cooper’s visit. It became a fairly easy operation, even for Googles. Hush, little baby, don’t say a word . . .
The Wednesday visits were more hazardous but much more interesting.
On the very first Wednesday of the new dispensation, Daisy came into the flat, giving fair warning and feeling nervous, but determined to keep her fears under control.
“Well,” she said after she had sat down at the dining table, “I don’t know what the future holds, but this is the present and I mean to hang on to it.”
The Mennyms in the living room remained absolutely still, but they listened to every word. They sat in their customary places in front of the television set. Soobie’s rocking-chair had been turned to face the room. It was a cosy, friendly grouping.
After a thoughtful silence, Daisy went on with her monologue.
“I think I had my suspicions from the start. Deep down. Very deep down. It was just too fortunate that all of the clothes in the wardrobes at Brocklehurst Grove were such a good fit for each of you. And the fact that the clothes were there at all was, well, odd, to say the least.”
Ten minutes ticked by on the clock before the visitor spoke again. In that time, Daisy looked cautiously round the room and felt more and more at home. This was the home of her childhood, and these dolls, people, dolls, whatever . . . were hers by choice.
“Then there was that story Billy told me about the dolls he had seen at a house in the country,”, she said at length, giving Soobie a curious sideways look. “Billy was sure that the blue doll was alive. And that was before I even knew that th
ere was a blue one.”
Soobie felt a shiver down his back when he heard Billy’s name and this very clear reference to his adventure at Comus House. Vinetta’s fingers involuntarily gripped the arm of her chair, but Daisy appeared not to notice.
“I’ll be bringing Billy to see you again some time,” said Daisy, “but it won’t be for a month or two. They tell me he’s taken a Saturday job in a garage shop. So it will be some Wednesday in the school holidays before he can get here. He’ll expect to come. He enjoyed it so much the last time. But he’s a well-behaved lad. There’s no fear of him doing you any harm.”
So Billy has been here before, thought the listeners. They had no recollection of him. It must have been before we came back to life, they thought. All except Soobie . . .
Soobie alone had different thoughts about Billy. Though it had all happened more than three years ago, Soobie clearly remembered the soft-hearted boy who had wanted to save him from the bonfire. What will he say when he sees me? thought Soobie . . . What will he do?
As the weeks went by Daisy and the Mennyms became more relaxed with one another. The Mennyms became less afraid of giving themselves away. They were still careful not to overstep what they knew to be the mark, but if a chair was out of place, or if a newspaper was unaccountably left on the table, they did not worry unduly. Daisy for her part deliberately did not comment upon these minor variations. It was never clear to the Mennyms whether she even noticed them. She always sat in the same seat and talked to them, sometimes watching television, sometimes bringing paperwork of her own and doing it at the table. If she needed anything from the store-rooms she would include that task in a Wednesday visit, being careful to let her ‘family’ know if Michael or Ted was coming up with her.
At times her conversation made the Mennyms feel that she knew that they were not confined to the house. It was sprinkled with news about events outside that Daisy thought they might find interesting.