The glowing dust whirled upward toward the peak of the roof, then fell suddenly like a heavy mist. Mrs Langley stood there. At first she was simply a wash of moonlit fog, and then, like the city above the Moonvale Hills, she grew slowly solid until she stood there grey and bent, an old woman in a shawl and outsize bedroom slippers, smiling at Helen. ‘Have you seen Jimmy?’ was the first thing she said.
Helen blinked at her. ‘No, I haven’t. Should I have seen Jimmy?’
The old woman squinted at Helen, shaking her head in rapid little palsied jerks. ‘He might come across, Jimmy might. He was always one for coming across. I’ve got to leave a bundle of clothes under the trestle at the cove. I’m late this year. I always try to get it out early.’
Helen nodded and grinned. She had no idea at all what Mrs Langley was talking about. Helen had only heard speaking spirits a couple of times in her life, and they hadn’t amounted to much. One ghost had recited its multiplication tables up to eight times eight and then had been very proud of itself and quit. You didn’t know what to expect from a ghost.
‘Did you drop Peebles down the stairs?’ asked Helen.
‘Is that his name? It sounds like rocks, doesn’t it? Very ugly little rocks. I’m certain he deserved to be dropped downstairs. He deserved worse, I dare say. You should have seen him carry on before you arrived. It was shameful. Diseased, is what it was. I had to take the cats into the back, poor things, and I neglected to take Peety with us. Heaven knows what the sight of such things will do to him.’
For a moment Helen guessed that Mrs Langley had mixed up Jimmy and Peety, whoever they were. But Peety, it turned out, was the canary, who’d suffered through Peebles’s foul behaviour because of having been left behind. Helen was at a loss. She couldn’t think of anything to say, but it was impolite to say nothing. She reached down to pet the grey cat, but her hand passed through it. ‘I’m reading your book,’ said Helen. ‘It’s really quite nice. The illustrations are lovely.’
‘Yes, they are,’ said Mrs Langley. Then she sat down on a chair and the grey cat jumped into her lap. Helen wondered why she didn’t fall through the chair – why, for that matter, she didn’t fall through the floor.
‘Did you paint them yourself?’ Helen asked, and then remembered that she hadn’t, that there’d been mention of an illustrator.
‘No,’ said Mrs Langley, petting the cat. ‘Jimmy painted them. Before he went off He’ll be coming back, and he’ll need these clothes. There’s nothing funny about not having a change of clothes when the clothes you’re wearing are growing like hops. Be a dear and take Jimmy’s clothes to the cove for me. I’m an old lady, you know.’
‘Not so old as that – ’Helen began, thinking to say something nice. But Mrs Langley gave her a look and interrupted.
‘You know precious little about it, young lady. I’m older than you imagine, very much your senior. What I say oughtn’t to be questioned, I suppose – not by a girl, I have no idea how old I am. I rather lost track of it. An old friend of Jimmy’s took the clothes down last Solstice, but he hasn’t been around since. He would have been. He and I were fine friends. He was very interested in my writings, but he was a sad case. I fear he’s gone across too, for equally sad reasons. He would have been back otherwise, like I said. Very understandable, though, his going across. I helped him, didn’t I? I told him what to mix up and what to let alone. You’d know him, perhaps.’
Helen shrugged. ‘Perhaps. What was his name? That was rather longer ago than I can easily remember, though, if it was at the last Solstice.’
‘Lars Portland. You’d have been a little girl then, wouldn’t you? There’s a trunk behind the wardrobe.’
Helen nodded, startled by the shifting direction of the conversation. Lars Portland! What in the world did that signify? Did Jack know that? Did Skeezix, and they hadn’t told her? She’d murder both of them. And there was a trunk behind the wardrobe. Helen had seen it. It was locked, though, and so she hadn’t had a look inside, even though she was eaten up with curiosity about it. She hadn’t told Skeezix and Jack, because they’d have wanted to pry it open, and Helen didn’t think they had any business prying into Mrs Langley’s trunk. Thank goodness Miss Flees didn’t know about it, she’d have been at it years ago with a crowbar. Miss Flees had found a heap of old newspapers once, hidden away beneath the attic stairs, and she’d pulled them apart a page at a time for hours on end, insisting that there might be money between the pages. Old people, she’d said, were clever at that sort of thing – squirrelling money away. There’d been only newspaper, though, and she’d flown into a rage and made no supper that night, saying she’d been denied her ‘windfall’ and she couldn’t afford feeding ungrateful children.
Mrs Langley nodded slowly at her and pointed a spindly finger in the general direction of the trunk. ‘The key is hidden under the handle on the right-hand side, if you’re facing the front of it; on the left-hand side if you’re facing away. But then you can’t see it, can you, if you’re facing away?’ She waited, as if she expected an answer.
‘No, ma’am,’ Helen said.
‘Good. You’re a shrewd young lady. Much as I was once. That’s why I’ve let you inhabit this attic. There’s a woman downstairs. What is her name?’
‘Miss Flees, ma’am.’
‘How unfortunate.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Helen waited. Mrs Langley sat there, grey and thinking, with a hand on her chin. For a moment Helen was afraid she’d run down, like a clockwork engine. The ghosts that talked through mediums at the carnival sometimes did that, as if talking to living people had seemed to be a good idea to them when they set in, but they could see now that nothing would come of it, and so they tired out and went off somewhere, letting their voices trail away into nothing. ‘The trunk, ma’am.’
‘Have you seen Jimmy?’
‘Not a glimpse of him. I’ll keep an eye out, though. I’ve been seeing some strange things these past few days, to be sure. I wouldn’t be half surprised to see Jimmy too. What does he look like?’
‘He’ll be naked as a fish,’ said Mrs Langley, perking up a bit now that the subject had come round again to Jimmy.
Helen didn’t much know what to say. There was no denying that he’d be easy to recognise, but all of a sudden keeping an eye out for him didn’t seem to be even a half-good idea. ‘Why will he be naked as a fish?’ she forced herself to say.
‘Well, he might not be, mightn’t he?’
‘I hope not, certainly. Is that why you want to take him a change of clothing?’
Mrs Langley peered at her closely for a moment. ‘Is there a better reason?’ she asked finally.
‘Not at all. No. I can’t think of one. He needs a change of clothes under that sort of circumstance, doesn’t he?’
‘Of course he does. And you’ll take it to him. To the cove, under the railway trestle. There’s a heap of rocks along the wall. He’ll be coming out of the ocean. At least I think he will. He came up through a gopher hole the first time, but it didn’t suit him. Too –what is it? – “subterranean”, I believe he said. Too like a mole. He couldn’t tolerate moles. It was his single downfall, if you want the truth. I’m as fond of moles as I am of anything. It’s the business on the end of a mole’s nose, if you ask me, that Jimmy couldn’t abide. Also they have mismatched feet. God gave them the feet of some other beast – heaven knows what.’
Helen nodded, wondering what to say next. ‘Who is Jimmy?’ she asked – as good a question as any.
‘Why he’s my husband, child. You’ve been reading my book. Your young man borrowed it from me, didn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ began Helen. ‘That is to say, my friend Jack borrowed it. But I asked him to. He was saving me from having to crawl back in there to get it. He’s not my “young man” exactly. He’s … just Jack. He lives with Mr Willoughby.’
‘Just Jack,’ said Mrs Langley flatly and nodding her head. ‘Just Jack.’ She screwed one of her eyes shut and peered at Helen out of th
e other. ‘I had a “just Jimmy” for years. Then I realised he was a good bit more than that. He painted, like you do. He was better at it, but he was older wasn’t he? When he set up as a painter he was a mess – friends from San Francisco. All of them wore exotic hats and drank far too much champagne and had “artistic temperaments”, which, of course, means that they were able to behave like fools and infants and get away with it. Ah, poor Jimmy, poor Jimmy. He wasn’t as bad as the worst nor yet as good as the best. But then who is?’
Helen thought for a moment, wondering if someone ought to be. It sounded like a mathematical puzzle to her. Mrs Langley, though, obviously hadn’t expected an answer. Her philosophies weren’t arguable. Helen remembered suddenly who Jimmy’ was. He was James Langley, no doubt, the man who’d illustrated Mrs Langley’s book. The wonderful paintings of the magical land were his, the cloud drift, the sketchy landscapes, the pastel colours of evening fading into shadow. ‘Where did he go, exactly, your Jimmy?’
‘Why, he went across at the Solstice, child. Years ago. Let me see. Five twelves is – what? I’m worthless at numbers. Sixty. He was back twice. First through the gopher hole, as I said. Cats nearly got him when he came in. He was covered in dirt and twigs and went to sleep in a drawer that first night, tucked into a pile of sweaters like a doll. Somewhere around two he grew too big for it and burst the front right off – spilled out onto the floor and like to have broken his hip. Next morning he was right as rain, though. He walked abroad like a man of stature – not the hint of a midget about him.
‘Then twelve years later he went across again, and this time he returned by sea. I missed him, of course. But he was a wanderer –couldn’t be tied, he said. The wide world was his canvas, and he intended to paint it all. He was a fearful romantic, Jimmy was. Anyway, it was the most astonishing coincidence, him coming by sea that second time. I was walking along the cove, thinking I’d never see him again, and here he was, out of the seaweed like a god. It was late evening, thank goodness. He was immense. You can hardly imagine. He’d floated in from out to sea somewhere, so he’d had some time to shrink, and his clothes had all fallen off him long before. It was appalling, I can assure you. Bits and pieces of them floated ashore for a week, but we managed to find them all, I think. The weather was foul, so no one frequented the beach much. It wouldn’t have done to have the clothes found. I’m not sure why. He was fearful, I seem to remember, that they’d be traced to him, that everyone in the village would be after him for the – secret, I suppose you could say. Men would kill for it, and worse. There’s others, like Jimmy, who wouldn’t.
‘The Jimmies of this world are after something – some little bit of wonderful music they hear playing in the back of their heads –and they’re certain that if they listen closely enough they’ll be able to capture the tune and remember it and whistle it any time they want. Others, though’ – Mrs Langley shook her head at the idea of these others – ‘they haven’t got any music at all, only noise.
‘Your fellow with the herbs and the sulphur matches. He’d … well, there’s no saying what he’d do. But they get desperate, and the less happy they are with their lot, the more desperate they get. Some people simply go about hating, don’t they? I’ve had an eye on your Miss – what is it again? Bugs?’
‘Flees,’ said Helen.
‘Of course. Your Miss Flees. I’ve been watching her. She talks to herself, you know: gibbers. She hates everything, I think. Everything, and all of it equally. She curses her hair and this house and you children and the weather and the sad broth that she cooks down in the kitchen. And she curses the very idea of cooking something that tastes better. She hates one thing as much as the other, and what makes her very dangerous indeed is that she doesn’t know it. Mark my words, child. She hasn’t an inkling. Neither docs your fellow with the matches. They’re certain you hate things too, that the world is made out of dirt. But that’s what gives you the edge; they can’t understand you. Your painting confounds them. The fat child’s love of food; that confounds them too. And he laughs a good deal, doesn’t he? All of you laugh, for the pleasure of it. That must drive them wild. They’re a dangerous lot, and yet there’s worse than them, depend on it. They’re looking to break out a window in this world and climb into the next. But they’d just break it up too. They’re stupid. That’s what makes them tiresome, isn’t it?’
Helen nodded. They were tiresome. She wasn’t being told anything that she didn’t already suspect. It was good to have such things confirmed though – by another party, so to speak. She spent too much time trying to be cheerful to them. She knew that, and had known it. But it would never work for them. Their lives were like machines assembled by feebleminded drunken men. Still, it was as easy to be cheerful, to make the effort, as to declare war openly. At least it used to be. Peebles had rather pushed things this time.
‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ Helen said. Mrs Langley had drifted into a sort of lethargy. She seemed to hover on the edge of sleep. And she’d become almost transparent, as if she and the cats were slipping away, and with almost nothing solved. ‘The clothes? Are they in the trunk?’
‘Of course they are, dear,’ said Mrs Langley.
Helen’s heart lurched suddenly. A giant from the sea. Jimmy had come home. Of course he had. They’d found his shoe, hadn’t they? And his spectacles and cuff link and the crystal out of his pocket watch. Heaven knew what good it would do to tell a dead woman that her live husband had ‘come across’, but she couldn’t very well keep the news to herself. Mrs Langley listened intently, her head cocked, her eyes hopeful. Then she shook her head.
It wasn’t Jimmy, she told Helen. Jimmy didn’t wear spectacles. And he didn’t own a watch. He never had. Time hadn’t meant anything to him. He and his artistic friends made a point of that. They knew time, they said, and weren’t constrained by watches. And cufflinks? Mrs Langley had to laugh. Jimmy’s cuffs wouldn’t be constrained by cufflinks. He and his friends from down south despised cufflinks. They probably despised cuffs, for that matter. Helen had found someone else’s clothes. It hadn’t been Jimmy who had come across.
She peered at Helen for a moment, as if thinking that Helen had made up all this cuff-links business in order to get out of taking Jimmy’s clothes down to the cove as she’d promised. But Helen got up then and went after the trunk, asking questions of Mrs Langley almost continually, fearful that the woman would drift away without explaining the gopher holes and Jimmy and ‘coming across’ and all the rest. Their conversation hadn’t clarified things; it had deepened the mystery. The only thing for certain was that Jack and Skeezix were caught up in the same oddities that had entangled Jimmy.
Helen managed to shove the bits and pieces of furniture around enough to wedge herself back in toward the trunk. There was a bit more room behind the wardrobe than there had been in front of the bookcase, so she didn’t have to worm her way underneath things like Jack had. ‘Her Jack.’ She grinned with embarrassment and then tried hard to dissolve the grin but couldn’t. There was the trunk – an old leather and wood chest with a heavy hinged lid. She thought about rights and lefts for a moment, fiddled with both handles, and found herself holding the right one, which had come away in her hand. Sure enough. The key lay beneath it, slid under a bit of leather.
‘I don’t understand the part about the gopher hole,’ she said to Mrs Langley as she slipped the key into the keyhole.
‘What is it about gopher holes that you don’t know, child? When I was your age they were commonplace. The garden was a mess with them.’
‘How could Jimmy have gotten into one?’ Helen pushed the lid back. Inside was a sort of wooden box, open on top, filling half the trunk. In it were men’s clothes, including a pair of heavy shoes, as Mrs Langley had promised.
‘Why he was coming back across, child, just like I said. He’d gone over into what he called “the twilight” and he’d found his way into another time … It’s all rather complex, for someone ignorant of the entire business. Are yo
u sure there isn’t anything you know?’
Helen rummaged in the clothes, wondering what to say. ‘No,’ she said after a moment.
‘Do you mean no, you’re not sure or no, there’s nothing you know?’
‘No, there’s nothing I know. Try to explain it to me. I’ve found his clothes in a bundle. Will he want them all?’
‘I dare say he will. He won’t have a stitch, will he? He can’t wear clothes built for a giant, nor for a Tom Thumb either, if he comes that way. But I very much doubt he will. Every time he thought about running into a mole down there he shuddered. I’m certain it’s the growth on their nose.’
‘Of course it is,’ said Helen. There seemed to be no mistaking what clothes it was that Mrs Langley wanted. Below them were what appeared in the dim light to be bits and pieces of costumes. Jimmy wouldn’t want those; he’d have troubles enough without finding a rabbit outfit under the rocks.
‘Ours is one of many worlds,’ said Mrs Langley, quoting from her own book. Helen shut the trunk lid and listened to her. She slid back out into the candlelight. Mrs Langley sat as before. One of the cats had come around to lie across the old woman’s feet, but at the sight of Helen it slipped away.
‘How many worlds are there?’ asked Helen.
‘Only one, actually. I phrased it – how shall I put it? – figuratively there. It’s tempting, when you write a book, to colour things up. It’s time, really, that’s meddled with at the Solstice. Jimmy tells me it’s like a railroad train, exactly like that, with stops along the line, and each stop a different point in time. All of them falling into line, mind you, at the Solstice.’
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