“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he replied, “that I am not in the habit of writing my name and address at the top of every script I write. I write the title, Laura, as is usual in such cases.”
“Oh. No. Of course.” Mrs Bagthorpe was temporarily floored. “Never mind,” she said, “we can turn it into a game.”
“Laura,” said her husband, “you are wandering. I am talking about the irreplaceable loss of a priceless piece of creative work, and you are talking about a game. We are at cross-purposes.”
“We are talking about exactly the same thing,” she said firmly. “We shall all go to the study after tea and we shall play Hunt the Script.”
Mr Bagthorpe vetoed this instantly and emphatically. Nonetheless, in the privacy of his study, he was himself to play Hunt the Script during the next few days. This involved taking down almost every volume in the room (there were library steps in there, and Daisy had dodged from shelf to shelf) and first of all retrieving all eighty of the cut-down pages. He had then collected nearly two hundred strips of paper, and armed with Sellotape set about attaching them to their counterpart pages. None of this did he regard as a game. He found it tedious, tiring and, at times, hopeless. Eventually, however, he fitted the jigsaw together and set about retyping the rough draft, this time in duplicate.
So traumatic an effect did this incident have upon Mr Bagthorpe that for the rest of his life he compulsively typed everything in duplicate, and kept all his duplicates in a locked chest. From time to time he would type (in duplicate) bills to Uncle Parker for all the extra paper involved, but these were never paid. All sane people, Uncle Parker declared, typed things in duplicate, and he maintained that Daisy had done Mr Bagthorpe an invaluable service in bringing this point so strongly home to him.
Before setting about playing Hunt the Script, Mr Bagthorpe telephoned the travel agency to find out Uncle Parker’s whereabouts in the Caribbean. He then sent an expensive cable to the effect that if Uncle Parker did not return on the appointed date, Daisy would be put on the next ship to the Caribbean in care of the stewardess.
“So far as I am concerned,” he said, “the lot of them can go round the world in circles for ever, like the Flying Dutchman, or whoever it was.”
Grandma, the minute she found out what he had done, sent a cable saying “Daisy is a true Bagthorpe and can stop here for ever.”
She was crafty enough not to tell anyone about this. And neither she nor Mr Bagthorpe knew that Mrs Bagthorpe privately sent her own cable, saying “Ignore storm in teacup.”
Later during Daisy’s stay there was to be another spate of cables. The response to these first three was a semi-hysterical call from Aunt Celia on a very crackly line. She refused to speak to anyone but Daisy, and when Daisy got on the line nobody could tell from her end of the conversation what was being said at the other end.
The Bagthorpes gathered round unashamedly to listen, but gleaned nothing. Daisy was saying things like “I like Grandma Bag,” and “I helped Uncle Bag with his scips,” and “We had peas an’ custard for dinner again today.”
When she put the receiver down she turned to the others and said, “Mummy was crying, I think. I wish she was here, so’s I could make her feel better.”
Mr Bagthorpe said nothing, but his expression spoke volumes.
“Goodness alone knows,” Grandma said, “how Celia ever managed to produce such a jewel of a child.”
The others looked at her sharply. It began to appear that Daisy was in line to succeed Thomas in Grandma’s affections. If so, it boded ill.
The two of them went off together and Rosie looked forlornly after them. The only time she ever had Daisy to herself was at night. When she went up she would tuck Daisy in unnecessarily, and look fondly down at her and arrange teddy bears and rabbits round her. (This was for Rosie’s own gratification – Daisy awake would have no truck with soft toys.)
“Never mind, dear,” said Mrs Bagthorpe, seeing her daughter’s downcast face. “Go and practise your violin. Henry, what are you doing?”
Mr Bagthorpe was writing on the wall.
“These are my walls,” he said, “and I am writing on them.”
He was writing:
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE AND THEIR CHILDREN
Chapter Seven
During the second week of Daisy’s visit it seemed at first that an unaccustomed lull fell over the Bagthorpe household. The Competition Entering was falling off as they ran out of Competitions to enter and, in the case of the younger Bagthorpes, funds.
“It’s an investment,” William told his mother, when she timidly suggested that perhaps he was overspending on magazines and stamps, and buying commodities he was never likely to use, simply in order to enclose part of their packaging with his entry.
“What, for instance,” she asked him, “will you do with three giant tubes of suntan cream? They will hardly make suitable Christmas gifts.”
“At Christmas,” he replied, “I shall be skiing in Austria, or else in Tenerife. I shall need a lot of suntan cream. I shall ask Atlanta if she wants to come with me.”
Mrs Bagthorpe looked very dubious at this (it reminded her of her Problems) but said nothing.
Daisy seemed to have gone into a Quiet Phase. She had not written anything on the walls for a week, though other people had. If the walls were to be redecorated anyway, no one wanted to miss the chance of writing something clever on them. As small children they had never been allowed to do this, and must have been harbouring secret ambitions in this direction, judging by the spate of thoughts and bons mots that streamed from them.
Even Jack did it. He tried to get Zero into most of the things he wrote, not because he thought Zero could read them and be encouraged by them, but because he hoped they would have an effect on the family.
He wrote, for instance:
ZERO IS A DARK HORSE
and
ZERO COULD DO ANYTHING HE WANTED TO, HE JUST DOESN’T WANT TO.
He also wrote ZERO HOUR IS COMING under which William wrote PREPARE TO MEET THY DOOM under which Mr Bagthorpe wrote IF THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT IS COMING I HOPE TO GOD AT LAST WE’LL SEE SOME JUSTICE DONE underneath which Grandma wrote AMEN. Grandma usually had the last word.
Daisy’s Quiet Phase lasted until the Tuesday of the second week.
“She has really settled down beautifully,” Mrs Bagthorpe said, “and it’s delightful to see how happy she and Mother are together.”
“I don’t agree,” returned her husband. “That pair are as dangerous as –” here he stopped for want of a strong enough simile, and gave up. “They’re terrorists,” he said. “They’d stop at nothing.”
Grandma, as it happened, had very little to do with the events of the second Tuesday, though Mr Bagthorpe did not believe this, and always maintained that she had put Daisy up to them. Grandma did not contest this because she wanted to feel she had played a part in them, and really wished that she had.
It was in fact Mr Bagthorpe who unwittingly triggered the whole thing off by a chance remark at lunch. He was talking about Uncle Parker, because another card had just arrived, even more irritating than the first.
“It would seem like paradise to him, of course,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “Because he’s never done a day’s work in his life. Lying around swigging gin and doing crosswords – in his element, of course.”
“What’s an element, Uncle Bag?” piped up Daisy, whose mother had told her always to ask the meanings of words she did not understand.
“You tell her,” Mr Bagthorpe told William.
He did not care to enter into conversation with Daisy, because it interfered with his pretence that she did not exist. He used this kind of ‘blotting-out’ technique with Zero, as well, and was always pretending he had never set eyes on him before. Jack, in a bold moment, had once challenged him directly about this.
“If I thought that mutton-headed hound was going to stop here for ever,” Mr Bagthorpe had replied, “I should lose my sanity. It’s a nece
ssary defence mechanism.”
Tess and William both started to explain to Daisy what an element was, the former using a literary approach, the latter a scientific. Tess was talking a lot about Shakespeare and Chaucer, and not only told Daisy what an element was, but what a humour was as well. On the whole Daisy listened more to Tess than to William, and the latter gave up in the end, saying:
“We outgrew Chaucer and that lot centuries ago.” Afterwards he said he was glad Tess had told Daisy what an element was because it was a responsibility he wouldn’t wish to have to live with.
The rest of the meal Daisy went very quiet and thoughtful, but nobody noticed this. The Bagthorpes rarely noticed other people.
Daisy, being after all only four, had grasped only dimly what an element was. Tess had, however, mentioned fire and water in the same breath, and this had struck a chord. Later, Aunt Celia was to claim that it had struck an ancient, primitive, unconscious chord, and showed at how deep a level Daisy’s mind was already working. Mr Bagthorpe then said that the word he would use was not deep, but low, and a semantic argument had developed out of this that drew the fire off Daisy altogether. This may even have been what Aunt Celia intended. She was certainly very expert at defending Daisy and had probably had to develop this art, being her mother.
Fire and water, then, became inextricably linked in Daisy’s mind. She already knew about fire, of course, and probably felt she had experimented far enough with this element for the time being. Water, however, was something else again. Daisy had done hardly any experimenting with water other than splashing about in the bath and paddling. A whole new world seemed to open up for her. She must have spent the rest of the meal silently thinking about water, and what she would create with it. Even so, it was a relatively short time in which to develop an all-out obsession, which was what Daisy appeared to have done. All the Bagthorpes got obsessions but nobody had ever developed one quite so quickly as this before.
Daisy’s behaviour during that afternoon was that of an all-out obsessive. It was as if, had she had the necessary tap to hand, she would have flooded the whole world. It later turned out that Noah’s Ark was one of her favourite stories, and she also had a record of CAPTAIN NOAH AND HIS FLOATING ZOO which she never tired of hearing. She probably really did believe that if she turned all the taps on and waited, the Bagthorpes would be going two by two before the day was out. This prospect, to the four-year-old mind, was understandably attractive, though in the event there were only two other people who said they could understand it – Aunt Celia and Grandma.
Things would not have developed to the pitch they did, however, had not Mr and Mrs Bagthorpe decided to go into Aysham that afternoon to see a French film. William, Tess and Rosie accompanied them, but Jack said that he did not like French films.
“The subtitles have gone before you have time to read them properly,” he said.
Tess scornfully told him that when you went to a French film you were supposed to be listening to what was being said, not reading English. Jack openly admitted that his French was not up to this, and said that he intended to take Zero for a long walk. Daisy, then, had been left in the charge of Grandma and Grandpa, neither of whom appeared to have any qualms about the matter.
Mr and Mrs Bagthorpe set off leaving Grandpa having his post-prandial doze, Grandma and Daisy playing Ludo (in which, astonishingly, Grandma allowed her partner to win occasionally) and Jack setting off across the meadow with Zero.
Jack had said that he was taking Zero for a walk, which was true, but not the whole truth. It was becoming increasingly clear that Zero had a potential that until recently had never been allowed to develop. Now that he could Fetch, and Beg, Jack intended to add another skill to his repertoire.
That’ll make three Strings to his Bow, Jack thought with satisfaction.
What Jack had in mind, was that Zero should learn to find his way back home from a long distance. This he had never been able to do. If he ever wandered out of calling range, what he always did was to sit or lie down, and wait till he was reported missing and a search party sent out. This party usually consisted of Jack alone, though sometimes Rosie came too, on the off-chance that something exciting might have happened that she could keep a record of.
Once Zero had mastered this, Jack intended to give him a period of intensive training so that he could develop into something between a homing pigeon and a bloodhound.
He had given a lot of thought to the method he would adopt to bring about this end. To some extent he would have to be ruthless. Zero had to be genuinely lost. This meant that Jack, when Zero was looking the other way, would have to swing into a tree or else dodge away behind a hedge, leaving Zero absolutely on his own.
There was no reason to suppose that Zero would not then adopt his usual tactic of slumping down and waiting to be found. Some other element had to be added to the situation to make it possible for Zero to extend himself. This was where the bloodhound aspect of the operation came in.
For a week now, Jack had been stuffing his washing – T-shirts, socks, underwear and so on – into a duffel bag instead of the laundry basket. He had got this idea, indirectly, from a dimly remembered telling of Hansel and Gretel. Instead of dropping pebbles, Jack was going to drop clothing. If Zero sniffed around enough he should, with the aid of these clues, gradually work his way home.
He’d follow my scent to the ends of the earth, Jack thought fondly. He’s a one-man dog.
None the less, he realised that Zero was going to have a shock when he found himself thus heartlessly abandoned – much more than Hansel, who had at least overheard his stepmother planning the whole thing, and had prepared for it. Accordingly, Jack spent the outward journey throwing a lot of sticks for Zero, and doing a great deal of patting and praising. He hoped that this would help Zero not to take the necessary desertion too personally.
Halfway across the meadow Jack opened the duffel bag. Everything in there seemed suitably smelly and would give Zero a good strong scent to follow. He waved a sock under Zero’s nose.
“Sniff, boy!” he commanded.
Zero sniffed obligingly and growled and made to worry the sock. Jack snatched it away and threw a stick. While Zero was fetching it Jack surreptitiously let the sock drop, and walked on. He kept this kind of thing up for the next mile or more. At intervals of around two hundred yards he dropped an item of clothing. He ran out of clothing to drop in the middle of a spinney.
It seemed an ideal place to set about losing Zero because he was very much preoccupied by rabbits and squirrels. He had never yet caught a rabbit (indeed Mr Bagthorpe swore to having once seen Zero pursued across the meadow by a rabbit). Nor, of course, had he ever caught a squirrel, though it was not for want of trying. He ran round trees barking at them and making great futile bounds, and gave the impression that he thought if he practised these often enough he would get to be able to fly, and corner the squirrels that way.
Jack watched him now, and felt at heart a traitor. He could not even say goodbye. It would be cheating.
“It’s all for your own good, old boy,” he told him silently. Zero was in full pursuit now, prancing into the distance after a squirrel running above. Jack saw his chance. He turned and ran. He did not stop until he was right out of the spinney. Very faintly he could hear Zero still barking.
Jack looked about for the vest he had dropped at the edge of the spinney, but could see no sign of it. There was not much wind and so it could not have blown away.
It doesn’t matter if I can’t see it, he thought. I can’t sniff it out like Zero can. He’ll do it.
He set off confidently home, walking fast in case Zero caught up. From time to time he caught a glimpse of a sock or T-shirt. The trail was still intact.
It was Jack’s misfortune, then, to be the first to encounter Daisy’s flood. Because he was there when the Bagthorpes returned, upstairs with Grandma, he too was counted as an accessory after the fact, and came in for a good share of Mr Bagthorpe’s fury.
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Jack met the flood at the kitchen door. (There were several separate floods – one, in fact, for each source of water in the house – but this happened to be the first.) He looked down at his feet.
“Crikey!”
Water was actually flowing under the door. He pushed it open. The deserted kitchen was awash. Drifting over the tiles in little mad flotillas were empty paper cake-cases in rainbow colours, which were, Daisy later explained, “the Navy”. Jack did not at the time know this. He stood and boggled and wondered by what strange kind of accident they had come to be there. Here and there was a wooden spoon, a peg, and, like a raft, the bread board.
Jack was so thrown by this amazing sight that it was nearly a full minute before he registered that he could not only see water, he could hear it. His eyes went to the sink. Then he threshed his way through, ankle-deep, to the taps. By the sink was the chair Daisy had stood on to reach them. Still he heard water. Jack groaned. He splashed his way to the utility room. As he passed the open larder he could see a giant packet of SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS drifting aimlessly past the vegetable rack.
When this tap was turned off there was relative quiet. Jack listened. Still he heard water, dripping now, steadily and heavily. He went back into the kitchen and raised his eyes. Water was seeping in droplets, gathering, and splashing down on to the flood below.
In the hall the parquet was just covered and the rugs squelched slightly – as did his shoes. He pushed open the door of the sitting-room and saw water coming down the walls and through the ceiling. Grandpa sat dozing, as yet high and dry. Jack decided to leave him. There was no immediate threat to his life, and it would take more time than Jack could afford to explain to him what was happening – even had he known.
Instead he ran up the stairs two at a time, to meet a fresh flood on the landing. Now he could hear Daisy’s voice.
“Soup, soup, bootiful soup,
Booootiful pea-green soup!”
Horrified by the implications of this chant, Jack threshed his way to the bathroom. His worst fears were confirmed. Daisy had poured a whole bottle of green bubble bath into the overrunning bath and washbasin. She said afterwards that this was to make things more real, that she wanted the water to look like the sea, all green and foamy. When Aunt Celia heard this, she murmured something about “the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn”, and clasped Daisy to her.
Absolute Zero Page 7