“Plums and haricots, beans and tomatoes.”
Still no one else spoke. There seemed no answer to this kind of remark. After another pause she elaborated on her theme.
“Pineapple and mince, a dozen of cling peaches there was. Which is what, and whatever else?”
Mrs Fosdyke really did sound poetic as never before. She sounded like the Fool in Lear, rather. She turned back into the pantry and lifted two large packets and held them out. They were SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS. The tops of both had been torn off. Again she wagged her head.
“Who?” she asked, half to herself. “Who would ever? And why? What have I done? What can it mean?”
She paused after asking these five questions, and seemed to be casting around herself for an answer.
“Aha!” Jack heard Uncle Parker exclaim softly. “I think I see the light.”
“I should’ve stopped at home,” mourned Mrs Fosdyke. “I nearly never came. Not after last night.”
“What was wrong with last night?” demanded Grandma instantly. She had not been very interested in the tin rolling and poetry, particularly as it had interrupted a good argument. “I enjoyed last night.”
“I’ve never been in trouble with the police,” went on Mrs Fosdyke. “Never. And now this. I can’t carry on.”
“Nonsense!” Grandma told her briskly. “Jack, pick up those tins. Why are you rolling tins, Mrs Fosdyke?”
“Beans, peaches, tomatoes, plums. All sorts.”
“Somebody,” observed Uncle Parker, “is going in for Competitions. Somebody, Mrs F, has been removing labels and lids from your pantry to send off with Competitions.”
“Not me,” said Jack promptly. He surfaced, holding the tins, caught sight of his father’s face, and saw the truth written on it.
“The whole family’s going in for Competitions,” blustered Mr Bagthorpe. He didn’t care who found out about this so long as Uncle Parker never did. “It’s you that started it with that wretched Caribbean thing.” He had evidently decided that attack might be the best form of defence. Another row would act as a smokescreen.
“Which brand of cling peaches is it, I wonder,” mused Uncle Parker, “that could be offering a month in the salt mines?”
“Luckily, my salt’s all right,” soliloquised Mrs Fosdyke dismally, off on her own again. “And my sugar. And my marmalades and jams is all right, I suppose, even without labels. It’s my tins. You can’t see through tins.”
This was incontestable. As they stood and pondered the matter Mrs Bagthorpe came in and pieced the story together and went into the pantry to inspect the damage.
“Everyone will have SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS at breakfast now,” she announced, “until they are all used up. We must eat them before they go soft. Some of us could have them for supper as well. When we find out who is responsible for this irresponsible act, then that person will probably be required to eat SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS at every meal. It would have a certain poetic justice.”
“But the tins!” wailed Mrs Fosdyke. “What about my tins?”
What happened about the tins was to affect the Bagthorpes’ lives, and particularly their eating habits, for a long time to come. Meals could no longer be counted on in the way they once could. The family had never before, for instance, eaten processed peas with custard. Nor did they now, for that matter. But Mrs Bagthorpe had ruled that whatever tin was opened, its contents must be consumed, so they ate the peas first, then the custard separately afterwards. This particular combination came up quite often, because the sound of a tin of processed peas when shaken was practically indistinguishable from that of raspberries or prunes or fruit salad.
All the Bagthorpes took up Tin Shaking, and there would be fearful rows at first. William maintained that the tins could be identified by an elimination method, as in the game Master Mind, but his identification record was as bad as anyone else’s. He was particularly bad at distinguishing between condensed soup and rice pudding, and the family often found themselves ending a meal with soup having started it in the same way. Sometimes they even got the same flavour. They were really furious with William when this happened.
In the end it was decided that a rota should be drawn up, and each Bagthorpe in turn should Shake a Tin, and try to produce the commodity Mrs Fosdyke required. Being Bagthorpes, they could not, of course, leave it at this, and developed a scoring system which was pinned on the pantry door next to the rota. Points were awarded from One to Five, depending on the accuracy of the guess.
You could only score Five by being dead accurate – in the case of soup, say, you actually had to produce the required flavour. Nobody got Five very often. Four was awarded to a near miss, such as raspberries for strawberries, and Three to successfully producing the right category, i.e. fruit as opposed to soup or savoury. Two was for a tin of tomatoes (Mrs Fosdyke had been hoarding them for months and one’s chance of picking them out was at least five to one) and One point went to asparagus, which the Bagthorpes adored, and did not mind eating even at breakfast, following the mandatory SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS.
For anything not in any of these five categories you simply scored nothing, with the sole exception that if you opened processed peas at breakfast you got five deducted. William actually went to the lengths of buying a tin of peas from the village shop, so that he could compare how it sounded when shaken, but this created violent opposition and was ruled out of order.
Grandpa was put in the rota at his own request. He had great confidence in his new hearing aid (he had lost the old one in Grandma’s Birthday Party Fire) and it must have been fairly effective because his scoring was more or less on a par with everyone else’s.
The Bagthorpes, if they were in a good mood, quite enjoyed the Tin Shaking, but Mrs Fosdyke never did. She nearly gave in her notice over it.
“It’s not good enough,” she told her cronies in the Fiddler’s Arms, “when I’ve done a beautiful sponge for a trifle, and one of them goes and opens a Condensed Oxtail. You could weep. And the best of it, for a grown man to have done it. If it’d been that Daisy, I could’ve understood it. He’s mad, no doubt about it. Really mad.”
On being reminded that she had only the other evening informed them that Mr Bagthorpe was in one of his sane spells, she replied curtly that as often as not these only lasted five minutes, and now he was right back to normal – mad.
Mr Bagthorpe was certainly mad on this present occasion when his Competition Mania was revealed under Uncle Parker’s irritatingly amused gaze.
“I wish you the best of luck, Henry,” he said. “You deserve a break.”
“I shan’t need luck!” snapped Mr Bagthorpe. “Luckily for me, I don’t need luck, because I never get any. All my Competitions will be won by skill.”
“Will you be taking it up full time?” enquired Uncle Parker. “You’ve obviously got your work cut out for a long time ahead, judging by the state of the pantry. Giving up the scripts, are you?”
“I might,” returned Mr Bagthorpe, “when the money starts flooding in. On the other hand, it won’t make any difference how many yachts and Rolls Royces I get. I’m a driven man.”
“Oh, you are,” agreed Uncle Parker. “Though I’m surprised to hear you admit it.”
“I mean driven by my genius!” Mr Bagthorpe was beginning to shout. “You wouldn’t know about that.”
“No, I don’t,” confessed Uncle Parker. “I don’t think I am a genius. If I am, I should be surprised.”
“You? You?” Mr Bagthorpe’s voice was on a rising scale now. He stopped and looked about and suddenly noticed that he had an audience. All other Bagthorpes within earshot (and that meant a considerable radius) were now in the kitchen to find out what was going on. When they did find out, it was hideously embarrassing for Mr Bagthorpe.
“Crikey, Father,” said William, after an inspection of the pantry, “you don’t do things by halves, do you?”
The larder really did look ridiculous with all its bare tins, and packets with squ
ares cut out of them. Rosie giggled.
“You are funny,” she told Mr Bagthorpe. “I’m going to take a photo of it for my records. Will you stand in the pantry while I take it, holding up some scissors? Really big scissors would be best, like pinking shears.”
“I most certainly will not,” he told her.
“It would be really unusual,” she said. “It might even win a Photo Competition.”
“The day you win a Photo Competition,” Mr Bagthorpe told her, “will be the day pigs fly.”
He was going to be proved quite wrong about this, and Rosie herself was almost certain of it, and giggled the more at the memory of the pictures of Zero, which were now away being developed.
“If you can’t stop that, leave the room,” he told her tersely.
“That’s rather unfair, Henry,” said Mrs Bagthorpe. “I really think that if anyone should leave the room, it is you.”
“Right!” He seized the cue gratefully and flung off and they heard the study door bang.
“Poor Henry,” said Uncle Parker. “It’s to be hoped he wins something.”
“I’m going to,” Tess told him. “I’ve sent off three already and I’ll win them all. I shall win a home hairdrying kit (not that I want one) – that’s a dead cert, because they’re giving a hundred of them away – a fully fitted kitchen (not that I need one of those, either), and a thousand pounds.”
“Lovely, darling!” cried Mrs Bagthorpe. “How clever you are.”
“You think you will,” said William jealously. “You want to watch out. I’m in for the thousand pounds, as well.”
“And me,” piped up Rosie. “But I’m not telling the others because it’s a secret.”
“What about you, dear?” Mrs Bagthorpe turned to Jack.
He shrugged.
“Me and Zero don’t go in for Competitions,” he said. “They’re a waste of time.”
“They’d certainly be a waste of a postage stamp in your case,” William told him.
“No one ever wins them, anyway,” Jack said.
“I did,” Uncle Parker reminded him.
“Just a fluke,” Jack said. “I mean, I don’t mean to be rude, but—”
Uncle Parker held up his hand.
“Say no more. I take your point. You are absolutely right, of course. Nonetheless, Celia and I shall be floating about the Caribbean this time next week.”
“Oh, of course – and about Daisy,” put in Mrs Bagthorpe. “Of course we’ll have her. We’d love to.”
“I’ll look after her,” said Rosie. “I can hardly wait. Will it be all right if I put her hair in pigtails some days? I promise I won’t every day, because I know it makes your hair go kinky, and spoils it, but can I some days?”
“You can do anything you like with it,” said Uncle Parker generously.
“Oh, thank you!” Rosie was ecstatic. “I think she’ll look even sweeter with her hair in pigtails and more naughty. I think she’ll look lovely.”
Uncle Parker could have put in a word here on the subject of Daisy’s naughtiness – something to the effect that if pigtails were going to make her go further in that direction than at present, they had best be avoided. He did not do this. Nobody but the Bagthorpes would take Daisy while the Parkers were away. Nobody else would even contemplate it, with or without the knowledge that she had gone into a new Phase of Reconciling the Disparate. If he told the Bagthorpes this, even they might put their feet down. So he said nothing, and left the Bagthorpes to find out for themselves.
Chapter Five
JACK FELT LONELY and left out now that the Competition Entering was well under way. He did not believe that the rest of the family would win every single thing they entered, as they themselves did, but he did believe they would win quite a lot of them. Every one of them but himself was more or less a genius, and it stood to reason that only if they came up against other genii would they have any difficulty.
The Bagthorpes spent a lot of time holed up in their rooms even in the normal course of things, because of having so many Strings to their Bows. They practised instruments and read French novels and held radio conversations with names like Carlotta from Madrid or Anonymous from Grimsby. They painted portraits and wrote poetry and made calculations and did Judo. Now that they were in the grip of this new mania, however, it seemed to Jack as if the only time they ever came out of their rooms was to feed. Even at mealtimes the conversation was restrained and wary. Everybody was afraid of giving something away. They didn’t even make jokes any more, in case somebody else had found a Joke Competition to go in for.
Jack knew it was hopeless for him to compete with the other Bagthorpes. He had tried to write a Slogan, because he didn’t like to give up too easily. He had tried putting in the right order eight reasons why he would like an electric lawn-mower (which he would, actually, because he nearly always got the job of mowing). Then he had to supply a Slogan. He thought of “Don’t let the grass grow under your feet, buy a C— Mower tomorrow.” But he knew it was too long. He had heard Tess telling William that slogans had to be succinct. Jack went and looked this up in the dictionary and realised at once that his slogan was nowhere near succinct.
Another complication arose. It turned out that to enter a lot of these Competitions you had to sign and say you were over sixteen years of age, and in some cases eighteen. (Occasionally, of course, you had to sign and say you were under these ages, but the prizes for this kind of Competition were seldom very exciting.) Even William, who was just sixteen, sometimes had to get his entries sent off by an adult. Nobody chose to have their entries sent in under Mr Bagthorpe’s name because nobody trusted him to hand over any prizes that might result.
The young Bagthorpes, being of a suspicious cast of mind, even got their mother, when she obligingly sent off in her name, to sign a statement, saying:
I, Laura Fay Bagthorpe, hereby undertake that should any prize result from my sending off an entry for a Competition sponsored by.… .… .… .… .… .… .… .. [Here a space was left for the name of the sponsor to be filled in], I will immediately pass it over to my son/daughter, Jack/William/Tess/Rosie (Delete as necessary) who is the rightful winner.
Signed:.… .… .… .… .… .… .… .… .… .… ..
Witnessed:.… .… .… .… .… .… .… .… .…
William said he doubted if this document would hold up in a court of law, but Mrs Bagthorpe was after all their mother, and he thought they could trust her better than anyone else.
Jack trusted Mrs Fosdyke too, but none of the others did. Jack actually got Mrs Fosdyke to send two entries off for him secretly. He preferred using her because she thought his entries were good, and might win, whereas Mrs Bagthorpe was unlikely to think this. He did not think it himself, and sent nothing else out. He really could not afford the stamps.
Jack was depressed too at the thought of Uncle Parker being away for a whole fortnight. He was the only real ally Jack had, apart from Zero.
“We’ll have to stick together, old chap,” he told him.
As it happened, it was not Jack and Zero who were to be the butt of the rest of the Bagthorpes during the ensuing fortnight, but the luckless Daisy who was, after all, only four and not entirely accountable for her actions.
The first thing Daisy did after the departure of her parents in a flurry of gravel, was not to burst into tears as might have been expected. Mrs Bagthorpe had, indeed, been fully prepared for this, and had bought a new toy for Daisy to console her. Daisy waved till her parents were out of sight and then, with the utmost self-possession, turned and went back into the house. Rosie herself, disappointed that Daisy had not cried, because she had looked forward to cuddling her, made to follow. Mrs Bagthorpe stopped her.
“I should leave her alone a while, dear,” she said wisely. “I expect she’ll go and have a little cry by herself somewhere, and then feel a lot better.”
What Daisy was in fact doing was probably as therapeutic to her as a good cry. She was in the sitt
ing-room where Grandpa was dozing, writing her thoughts on the walls. She did a lot of this at home and was in fact encouraged to do it by Aunt Celia, who said she herself used to do it as a child and got slapped for it by Grandma. Aunt Celia, on the other hand, was liberally-minded and believed in Self Expression. The walls of the Parker residence were accordingly thick with Daisy’s thoughts and slogans. Mrs Bagthorpe had requested that she should discontinue this practice during her two weeks’ stay at Unicorn House. Aunt Celia had promised she would have a word with Daisy about it.
“Though it is a pity,” she had added. “The child needs an outlet.”
Aunt Celia might have told Daisy, or she might have forgotten, but in either case Daisy was at present finding the first of what were going to be many more outlets. She used a different colour for each different thought, and evidently considered these thoughts worthy of immortality, or at least some measure of permanence, because she used indelible felt tips to inscribe them. On her return, Aunt Celia said that she could tell in what order Daisy had written her thoughts by the way they became successively more complex and profound.
First, then, according to Aunt Celia, she wrote NO PARKING in red by the china cabinet, and proceeded to state I AM A GENIUS AND ALLWAYS RIGT in purple just by the television set. This infuriated Mr Bagthorpe, who said he could not concentrate on watching his scripts. He said Daisy’s statement was always with him, right in the corner of his eye. In the end Mrs Bagthorpe fetched an oil painting of some shaggy Highland cattle out of the loft and hung it over Daisy’s thought. He reluctantly admitted that this was better, but not much.
In green, by the bookshelves, occurred the more mystifying declaration A DAISY IS WITE AND YELLOW BUT NOT ME I HOP. This, Aunt Celia later explained, was part of a natural identity crisis that took place in children of Daisy’s age. To this Mr Bagthorpe curtly replied that if Daisy was in two minds as to whether she was a flower or a human being (and he personally had his doubts about either), he recommended psychiatry – as he had been doing for years. Daisy was, he said, a psychiatrist’s dream, and her casebook would probably make history and get published all over the world.
Absolute Zero Page 5