by Nina Bawden
‘He went to shut up the chickens,’ Albert Sandwich said. ‘I expect he went for a walk after.’
‘But it wasn’t a person,’ Carrie said, speaking slowly to make them understand. She wasn’t so frightened now. Albert had spoken so calmly that it made her calm too. She said, ‘It didn’t talk, it went gobble-gobble.’
‘That’s Mister Johnny’s way of talking,’ Albert Sandwich said. ‘You must admit, Hepzibah, it could frighten someone.’ He looked at Carrie, quite sternly. ‘Though I expect you frightened him just as much. How would you feel if people ran away from you when you didn’t mean to hurt them?’
Hepzibah called softly into the darkness, ‘It’s all right, Mister Johnny, all right, come on in.’ Her voice wasn’t Welsh. A different, throatier, accent.
Someone appeared in the doorway and stood close to Hepzibah, as if for protection. A small person in a tweed suit and a spotted bow tie with a shy, scrumpled-up face. He tried to smile but he couldn’t smile properly: one side of his mouth seemed dragged down.
Hepzibah said, ‘This is Mister Johnny Gotobed, children. Mister Johnny, say how-do-you-do to our visitors, will you?’
He looked at her and made that queer sound in his throat. Chuckle-gobble – only now it did seem like talking. Some strange, unknown language. He rubbed his right hand on his trousers and looked at it. Then held it out, shakily.
Carrie couldn’t move. Though he wasn’t a ghost she was still too scared to touch that small, shaky hand. But Nick said, ‘Hallo, Mister Johnny,’ and went up to him as if it were the easiest and most natural thing in the world. ‘I’m Nick,’ he said. ‘Nicholas Peter Willow and I’m just ten. It was my birthday last week. And Carrie, my sister, will be twelve next May.’
‘Hch. Harch-a. Chala. Larschla,’ Mister Johnny said. He spat a bit as he spoke and Carrie dreaded the moment when she would have to shake hands and be spat at.
But Hepzibah saved her. She said, ‘The goose is ready for you. But you’ll take a little something first, won’t you? Albert, take Carrie to fetch the goose while I set the table.’
Albert took a candle from the dresser and lit it. Carrie followed him, through a door at the back of the kitchen, down a stone passage into a dairy. The goose lay, neatly trussed, on a cold, marble slab. There were speckly eggs in trays on the shelf, slabs of pale, oozy butter, and a big bowl of milk with a skin of cream on the top.
Carrie felt hollow with hunger. She said, ‘I thought Mr Gotobed was dead. Mr Evans’s sister’s husband.’
‘That’s not him,’ Albert said. ‘Mister Johnny is a sort of distant cousin of that Mr Gotobed. He used to live in Norfolk but when his parents died he came here with Hepzibah. She’s been his nurse since he was born.’ He looked at Carrie as he set the candle down to give himself two free hands for the goose. ‘Bit of a shock, I suppose, the first time.’
Holding the bag open so he could put the goose in, Carrie said, ‘Is he mad?’
‘No more than a lot of people. Just a bit simpler than some. Innocent, is what Hepzibah calls him.’ Albert pushed the goose down and tied the string round the top of the bag. ‘She’s a witch,’ he said calmly.
‘A witch?’
He grinned at her. ‘Oh, not what you’re thinking of. Not black cats and broomsticks! Just what country people call a wise woman. When I was ill she gave me some herbs made into a medicine and I got better quite quickly. The doctor was amazed – he had thought I was going to die. I never thought that lad would see the spring, was what he told Hepzibah.’
‘So that’s where you’ve been. In bed, ill!’ Carrie said, and then blushed. This might sound, to Albert, as if she’d been looking for him. She said quickly, ‘What’s been wrong with you?’
‘Pneumonia. Rheumatic fever,’ Albert said. ‘Just about every medical crime in the calendar. It’s lucky I was sent here, to Hepzibah, or I’d be pushing up daisies. Though it wasn’t luck, altogether. I told the billeting officer I liked books and he said there was a library here. And there is. A proper library, in a house!’ He spoke as if this still amazed him. ‘Shall I show you?’
They left the goose in the dairy and went back along the passage and through a swing door with baize on one side into a wide, dark hall where a grandfather clock ticked in one corner and a small oil lamp threw shadows. ‘Here,’ Albert said, opening another door and holding his candle high so that Carrie could see. Books – shelves and shelves of books, reaching up to the ceiling, most of them bound in pale calf with gold lettering on the spines. ‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ Albert said in a reverent voice as if he were speaking in church. ‘And to think no one uses it! Only me!’
‘Where’s Mrs Gotobed?’ Carrie asked.
‘Gone to bed.’ Albert laughed and his spectacles flashed. ‘She’s dying, I think.’
The idea of someone dying, here in this house, frightened Carrie. She looked up at the ceiling and shivered.
Albert said, ‘She’s been ill for ages. I read to her sometimes when she isn’t too tired. Do you like reading?’
‘Not much,’ Carrie said. This wasn’t quite true but all these books made her heart sink. So many words written; it would take a lifetime to read them.
‘What do you do then?’ Albert asked in a tone of surprise. ‘When you’re not at school, I mean.’
‘I help in the shop sometimes. Mr Evans’s shop. Nick’s not allowed now, but I am. And I play on the mountains and I slide down the slag heap.’
Albert looked as if he thought these were rather childish occupations. But he said, politely and kindly, ‘If you don’t care for books much, perhaps you’d like to see the screaming skull. There’s an interesting story about it. Untrue, I daresay, but interesting all the same.’
He advanced into the room and set the candle down on a desk. Carrie hung back. ‘It sounds horrible.’
‘Oh, it’s only a skull,’ Albert said. ‘Come and see.’
There was a box on the desk and inside it, resting on velvet, a small, ivory skull. Pearly-smooth and grinning.
‘Touch it,’ Albert said, and Carrie touched the top lightly. It was warmer than she’d expected. She said, ‘What’s the story?’
‘Ask Hepzibah,’ Albert said. ‘She tells it better than I would. It’s supposed to be the skull of an African boy who was brought here during the slave trade, but I don’t believe it. It’s not a boy’s skull. You just look.’
He picked the skull out of its velvet bed and showed it to Carrie. The bottom jaw was missing and some of the teeth from the top, but the sockets were there. ‘It had sixteen teeth in the top jaw,’ Albert said, ‘which means its wisdom teeth too. And you don’t get your wisdom teeth until you’re eighteen, at least. I looked it up in Gray’s Anatomy and that’s what it says. And you see those wiggly lines on the top? That’s the sutures, where the bones are starting to join up. So it must have been a grown person’s skull but it’s too small and light for an adult male, so it must have been a woman. What I think is, there’s an Iron Age settlement at the top of the Grove, and I think someone found this woman’s skull there, and made up a story about it, the way people do.’
He put the skull back and looked at Carrie. ‘That’s me making up a story, of course. I don’t know. But you can test the age of the bones. I’d like to take this skull to the British Museum one day and get them to test it. The British Museum can find anything out, it’s the most marvellous place in the world. Have you been there?’
‘Once,’ Carrie said. She remembered going with her father one day, and being dreadfully bored. All those old things in glass cases. ‘It’s very interesting,’ she said, to please Albert.
His eyes danced as if he guessed what she really had thought. He put the skull back in its box and the lid on the top. He said, ‘Would your brother like to see it?’
‘No, he’d be scared,’ Carrie said. ‘That sort of thing scares him.’
Scared her a little too, though she wouldn’t admit it to Albert. Not the skull, but the thought of the live person
it had once been: a woman with eyes and hair who was dead now. Just pale, shiny bone in a box in a dark, musty library where the shelves of old books reached up into shadow. She said, ‘Shouldn’t we go back to the kitchen? I expect tea’s ready by now.’
And it was. The cloth on the table was so stiffly starched that it stuck out at the corners. There was a huge plate of mince pies, golden brown and dusted with sugar, a tall jug of milk, a pink ham, and slices of bread thickly spread with the lovely, pale, sweaty butter Carrie had seen in the dairy. Nick was already at the table, tucking in, and Mister Johnny sat beside him, a white napkin round his neck. He chuckled excitedly as Carrie came in and she said, ‘Hallo, Mister Johnny, can I sit next to you?’
Albert looked at her approvingly. He said, ‘Hepzibah, I’ve been showing Carrie the skull. Tell her that old tale, will you? She’d like to hear it. Though it’s a lot of old nonsense, of course!’
Hepzibah put a brown teapot down on the table and aimed a fake blow at his ear. ‘I’ll give you nonsense, my lad! Mister Albert Uppity-Know-All. You don’t know so much yet, or you’d know that wise people don’t mock what they don’t understand!’
‘Charsh, hcha,’ Johnny Gotobed said.
‘That’s right, Mister Johnny.’ Hepzibah bent over him, cutting up the ham on his plate. ‘You’ve got more sense in your little finger than he’s got in his clever young head.’
‘I’m sorry, Hepzibah,’ Albert said. ‘Please tell Carrie.’
‘Oh, it’s a foolish tale, his young Lordship thinks.’ Hepzibah sat down, smiling at Carrie and smoothing her copper hair back. She had a rather broad face, pale as cream, and dotted with freckles. Carrie thought she looked beautiful: so warm and friendly and kind.
She said, ‘Please, Miss Green.’
‘Hepzibah. That’s my name.’
‘Please, Hepzibah.’
‘Well then. Perhaps I might, since you ask me so nicely. Fill up your plate now – go on, you can manage a bit more, growing girl like you. It’s not home-cured ham, I’m sorry to say, though it would have been once. They had a good home farm, the Gotobeds. They made their money out of sugar and slaves and then moved here and made a fine place of the house. I heard about them long before I came to live here. When I was in service in Norfolk with Mister Johnny’s parents, they used to tell me about their rich cousins in Wales and the screaming skull and the curse on the house. It’s a queer old story, too …’
She sipped her tea thoughtfully, staring in front of her and frowning a little. Then she put her cup down and began to speak in a soft, sad, dreaming voice that seemed to weave a spell of silence in the room. ‘He was brought here, the African boy, when he was ten or so. It was the fashion at that time for rich people to have a little black page, dressed up in silks and satins and riding on the step of their carriage. So they fetched this poor innocent away from his family, across the sea, to a strange land. And of course he cried, as any child might cry, taken from his mother. The Gotobeds weren’t hard people, the young ladies gave him sweets and toys and made a real pet of him, but they couldn’t comfort him, and in the end they said he could go back home one day. Perhaps they meant it, but he died of a fever his first winter here and it must have seemed to him that they’d broken a promise. So he put a curse on the house. He said, on his death-bed, that they could bury his body but when his flesh had rotted they must dig up his skull and keep it in the house or some dreadful disaster would come. The walls would crumble. And they believed him, people believed in curses then, and they did what he said. The skull has been kept in the library ever since – it only left the house once, when old Mr Gotobed’s grandmother was a girl. She couldn’t abide the thought of it, sitting there grinning, it gave her bad dreams she said, so she took it one morning and hid it in the stable loft. Nothing happened at all, she waited all day to see, and then went to bed, no doubt very pleased with herself. But in the middle of the night there was a great scream – like a screech owl – and a loud crashing sound. And when the family came running down in their night-clothes, all the crockery was smashed in the kitchen, all the glass in the dining-room, every mirror in the house cracked to pieces! Then of course the girl said what she’d done and they fetched the skull back and had no trouble after …’
‘With sixteen teeth in its upper jaw,’ Albert said. ‘Count your teeth, Nick. You’re the same age as that boy would have been, see if you’ve got sixteen!’
Nick blinked at him.
Carrie said, ‘It’s a lovely story, Albert Clever Sandwich, don’t you dare spoil it!’ Though she thought, secretly, that it was a comfort to know it might not be true. She said in a sentimental voice, ‘A lovely sad story. Poor little African boy, all that way from home!’
Nick sighed, very deeply. Then he got down from his chair and went to stand by Hepzibah. He put his head on her shoulder and she turned and picked him up and sat him on her broad lap, her arms tight about him. She rocked him gently and he nestled close and put his thumb in his mouth. The room was quiet except for the hiss of the fire. Even Mister Johnny sat still, as if the story had lulled him, though perhaps it was only the soft sound of Hepzibah’s voice.
Carrie looked at Nick on Hepzibah’s lap and felt jealous. Of Nick, because she would like to be sitting there, she wasn’t too big. And of Hepzibah, because she was comforting Nick in a way she knew she could never do.
She said, ‘We ought to go, really. Auntie Lou knew we might stay to tea but it’s getting late now and she’ll start to worry.’
Then she thought of going back, through the dark trees, and her stomach seemed to sink down inside her. That noise she had heard, that deep, sighing breath!
Perhaps what she was feeling showed in her face because Albert said, ‘I’ll come with you if you like. As far as the railway.’
‘Not with your chest, you won’t,’ Hepzibah said.
Albert grinned. ‘I could hardly go without it, could I? Go on, Hepzibah, I’m strong as a horse now and I could do with some air.’
‘Not night air,’ Hepzibah said. ‘Besides, I want you to come and read to Mrs Gotobed while I settle her, it puts her mind at rest for the night. Mister Johnny will see them safe through the Grove.’ She smiled at Carrie, her eyes so bright, suddenly, that Carrie felt they saw straight into her mind. Though this was an odd feeling, it wasn’t frightening somehow. Hepzibah said, ‘You’ll be all right with him. No harm of the kind you’re afraid of, ever comes near the innocent.’
Carrie said, ‘Mr Evans says no harm can ever come to those who trust in the Lord.’
‘Perhaps that’s another way of saying the same thing,’ Hepzibah said. She gave Nick a last hug and tipped him off her lap. ‘Come again, love. Both of you, whenever you like. Are you ready, Mister Johnny?’
He seemed to understand her. He was on his feet, holding out his hand to Nick who went to him and took it trustingly.
And so Mister Johnny took them up through the dark yew trees, carrying the goose and holding Nick’s hand. Carrie walked behind because there wasn’t room for three on the path, but she wasn’t afraid. Mister Johnny talked in his gobbly voice all the way and it seemed a friendly noise now, pushing the night back. Gobble-gobble, chuckle-chuckle – after a bit, to Carrie’s surprise, Nick began to talk too, as if answering. He said things like, ‘Yes, she was, wasn’t she?’ And, ‘Oh yes, I’d love to do that.’
Carrie thought he was just being polite. But when they reached the railway line and Mister Johnny set the goose down and said, ‘Gurlyi, gurlyi,’ she knew what he was trying to say.
She said, ‘Good-bye, Mister Johnny,’ and smiled at him, and at first he tried to smile back, twitching the good side of his mouth. Then he covered his face with his small, fluttery hands and backed shyly away.
‘Don’t look straight at him like that,’ Nick said. ‘It upsets him, people looking. Good-bye, Mister Johnny.’
They took the goose between them and set off along the line that shone silver in the moonlight. When they put the heavy bag d
own for a rest and looked back, Mister Johnny had gone.
Carrie said, ‘He was trying to say good-bye, wasn’t he? You didn’t understand anything else that he said, did you? Not really? I mean, I couldn’t.’
‘Only because you weren’t listening,’ Nick said, rather smugly.
‘All right, then. What did he say? Come on, since you think you’re so clever!’
‘If you carry the goose. It’s too heavy, it hurts my poor arm.’
‘Baby!’ But she picked the bag up and staggered along while Nick skipped beside her, jumping the sleepers.
He said, between jumps, ‘He said a lot of things … He said we must come back again and he’d show us his cow … He said he’d show us his cow and then where the gulls nest, up on the mountain … He said he liked us and wanted us to come back, though he liked me the best … He said you were cross because I sat on Hepzibah’s lap!’
‘Liar,’ Carrie said. ‘You’re making it up. What a mean, dirty trick!’
He looked at her slyly. ‘Well, you were cross, weren’t you?’
‘Only because you’re too old for that sort of thing. It made you look silly.’
‘It didn’t feel silly,’ Nick said. ‘It felt nice.’
Carrie looked at him and saw his mouth turning down at the corners.
Carrie said, ‘Don’t cry, I can’t bear it. I wish we lived there, Albert Sandwich is lucky. But if we lived there, we wouldn’t have it to look forward to, would we? I mean, we can look forward to going there, not every day of course, but once a week perhaps, and that’ll be nice. Hepzibah did say we could go whenever we liked, didn’t she?’
She put the goose down and looked at Nick. He said, ‘Oh, Carrie, I don’t want to look forward, I want to be there all the time. I don’t want to go back to the Evanses’, I really don’t, I never did want to be there but it’s worse now, not better. I want to go home …’
Carrie knew what he meant. Sitting in that lovely, bright, happy kitchen had made the Evanses’ house seem colder and bleaker than ever. But Nick was working himself up into one of his states, and she had to harden her heart.