Absolute Zero

by Helen Cresswell

  “She is going to be a poet,” she told everybody.

  Daisy at present wore only her knickers and was busy ladling the green water out of the bath and into a flower bowl.

  “Hello, Zack!” she squealed, seeing him. “It’s lovely – oooh, it’s lovely!”

  He rushed past her and turned off all the taps.

  “This is soup, Zack,” Daisy told him, apparently not noticing that the supply had been arrested. “Bootiful pea-green soup. It’s not cold enough for sea, so it’s soup.”

  Jack looked helplessly about him. He did not know where to start.

  “And upstairs,” continued Daisy happily, “there’s a fountain and waterfall.”

  Jack rushed for the door and bounded up the next flight of stairs. The shower, trained directly at the floor, was at full pressure. Jack put one arm across his face to shield it, and advanced. He was soaked from head to foot by the time he had groped for and found the taps. A telltale chair, its padded velvet saturated, stood by the basin.

  Jack really did not know what to do. He stood mesmerised and noticed that he had little green bubbles fringing the bottom of his trousers. Should he dial 999, he wondered? Did the fire brigade deal with floods as well as fires? He decided probably not. He went down and found Daisy just about to enter Grandma’s room.

  “I’m taking Grandma some soup,” she told him. Jack actually found himself opening the door for her. Grandma was sitting by the window, a book in her lap, asleep.

  “Wake up, Grandma Bag!” shouted Daisy. “It’s dinner-time!”

  Grandma blinked her eyes and snorted and turned.

  “What? What’s that?”

  “Look!”

  Daisy triumphantly plonked the flower bowl on the dressing-table, and green water and foam slopped out.

  “Soup, Grandma Bag,” Daisy told her. “I know it’s foamy, but it’s not sea, I promise. It’s too hot for the sea.”

  “Thank you, Daisy,” said Grandma, recovering herself and realising she was caught up in some kind of game.

  “You haven’t got a spoon.” Daisy trotted to the door. “I’ll fetch you one. I bet the ocean’s full in the kitchen.”

  “A true Bagthorpe,” Grandma told Jack as she disappeared. “What is the child talking about?”

  “Grandma…” Jack croaked. “Grandma…”

  He had to be careful, he realised. Grandma was seventy-five. He had to break it to her gently. He was still working out the best way to do this when from down below came blood-freezing yells of fury and despair. The rest of the Bagthorpes had returned. It turned out that Mr Bagthorpe had looked in the previous week’s paper by mistake, and the French film was not showing. He hated to be wrong, but he hated above all to be seen to be wrong, and had driven back to Unicorn House in a mood of suppressed fury.

  When he opened the kitchen door this fury instantly became unsuppressed. He had waded across the kitchen and was now standing, wet to his knees, in his study, and yelling:

  “Through a locked door! I don’t believe it! Through a locked door!”

  Jack left Grandma and ran halfway down the stairs. Through the open study door he could see his father’s soaked trousers and shoes, and hear dripping and spattering. Mr Bagthorpe’s desk had been flooded.

  The rest of the day was, even by Bagthorpe standards, memorable. Their annals were not without incident, but this particular event still stood out even years later.

  Daisy’s flood divided the camp. Grandma and Rosie both fell heavily on to Daisy’s side, Jack was neutral, his mother tried to be, and the rest were ranked against her. A fresh batch of cables was sent off at enormous expense, as Mr Bagthorpe was to discover when his telephone bill arrived.

  Mr Bagthorpe’s own cable was to the effect that if Uncle Parker did not return immediately and remove his unhinged daughter, he, Mr Bagthorpe, would not be responsible for his actions. It also advised Uncle Parker to hang on to his money, as he would need every penny he possessed to restore the Bagthorpes’ ruined house and furniture.

  Grandma’s cable said DAISY IS A TRUE BAGTHORPE STOP SHE CAN STOP HERE FOR EVER STOP SHE IS A SHINING JEWEL OF A CHILD, and Mrs Bagthorpe’s IGNORE HENRY BUT DAISY REALLY HAS BEEN MOST TRYING.

  The Bagthorpes had certainly been tried, as in Grandma’s inaccurately quoted Methodist hymn (for “so” read “but”, and for “lot” read “not”).

  From trials unexempted

  Thy dearest children are

  So let us lot be tempted

  Above what we can bear.

  Chapter Eight

  Some measure of the dimensions of the Bagthorpes’ latest disaster can be deduced from the fact that the very elements, it seemed, came out in sympathy. It was like something out of Shakespeare. The witches on the blasted heath, the storm on the eve of Caesar’s death, the tempest in The Tempest, all reflected the turmoil going on in human lives. And to the benighted Bagthorpes, the gale that blew up out of nowhere around teatime seemed like a direct expression of their own agony.

  The Bagthorpes knew it was teatime only by the clock. There was no question of anybody actually having any tea. The devastation was hideous. Even as Mrs Bagthorpe summoned her resources and tried to think what Stella Bright would do under similar circumstances, the sky began to darken and the first eddies of the gale rattled the windows.

  “Go and look at all the beds,” Mrs Bagthorpe eventually told Tess, “and see how many of them are wet. That is first priority, I think. The rest of us will all remove our footwear, because being barefoot will not be nearly as dangerous as having damp shoes or socks.”

  The rest numbly and obediently took off their footwear with the exception of Mr Bagthorpe, who made a point of ignoring any sensible suggestion his wife might make.

  “It’ll be quicker to tell you whose beds are dry,” said Tess, returning. “Grandma and Grandpa’s, and Jack’s. Everybody else’s is wet.”

  Mrs Bagthorpe had a sudden inspiration. It was Mrs Fosdyke’s half-day but she was well known to love calamities that happened to other people. This was one of her truly human traits.

  “Jack,” said his mother, “take your bicycle and go and ask Mrs Fosdyke whether she could kindly come and help us.”

  “You stop where you are,” Mr Bagthorpe told him. “We’ve enough troubles already.”

  “Don’t be silly, dear,” his wife said. “Mrs Fosdyke’s help will be invaluable.”

  “Why not invite a whole team of harpies while you’re at it?” enquired Mr Bagthorpe. “What about that pair that sit either side of her in The Fiddler’s Arms? They’d enjoy it.”

  “What a sensible idea!” exclaimed Mrs Bagthorpe. “Jack, please ask Mrs Fosdyke whether Mrs Bates and Mrs Pye could come along too? Really, we can’t have too many helpers.”

  “Who we really want is Hercules,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “He is the one person I can think of who’s had any kind of training for this kind of job. Why can’t we be an ordinary, happy family like everybody else? All I want is to be happy. Tomorrow I may go and see Aunt Lucy in Torquay.”

  His wife pursed her lips. He was waiting, she knew, for her to point out that he detested visiting Aunt Lucy in Torquay. (He did so because she had few surviving relations, and was rich.) This would then give him the cue to say that he did, indeed, detest doing this, and did so only when driven. Mrs Bagthorpe usually fed her husband with cues fairly readily, but at the present moment was in no mood for it.

  “Hurry up, Jack,” she contented herself with saying. “And tell Mrs Fosdyke that if she is able to come Mr Bagthorpe will collect her in his car – and her friends as well, of course.”

  “Why will I?” he demanded. “She moves fast enough.”

  “Because it is the polite thing to do,” Mrs Bagthorpe replied firmly. “Especially as she will be doing us a favour, and it is such a stormy night.”

  It was then that Jack remembered Zero.

  “I can’t!” he cried. “I’ve got to go and look for Zero!”

  “I don�
�t suppose he’s drowned,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “That would be hoping for too much.”

  “He’s not here – he’s out!”

  “If you are going on your bicycle he won’t be going with you,” said Mrs Bagthorpe. “It’s dark now, and it would be most dangerous. Do hurry, dear.”

  Jack did not care now how much he went down in the estimation of the family. All he could think of was Zero, lying in the darkened spinney, the wind and rain buffeting about him and his eye fixed dolefully ahead for a sign of a rescuer.

  “You don’t understand!” he said desperately. “Zero’s lost. I left him up in that spinney the other side of The Knoll.”

  “Jack, do hurry,” repeated Mrs Bagthorpe, urgently wringing out her cloth. Jack looked helplessly about him. Everyone was either wringing out a cloth or wielding a ladle or saucepan. Concern for Zero was at an all-time low, he could see that.

  He rushed out. The wind was so strong that he could hardly steer a straight course. The rain lashed against his face and he had a picture of Zero, sodden now, his fur flattened, still lying there, waiting.

  Mrs Fosdyke was just sitting down to a cup of tea when Jack hammered on the door.

  “What’s all the banging for, then?” she demanded. “I’m not deaf you know. You better come on in; look at you – drenched to the skin. Does your ma know you’re out?”

  “She sent me.” Jack explained about the flood, but felt that words could not really do justice to the awfulness of it.

  “Everything’s sopping,” he ended. “Absolutely sopping.”

  Mrs Fosdyke had sat sipping her tea as he said his piece. Now she set her cup down.

  “There’s plenty,” she observed, “that’d give their notice over this.”

  “Oh, there are,” Jack agreed. “And I wouldn’t blame them.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s worth asking if that child has had her backside tanned,” she continued.

  “Will you come?” Jack was impatient to be gone. “And will the others?”

  “I can’t speak for them, of course,” replied Mrs Fosdyke with maddening prevarication. “They might, or they might not.”

  Mrs Fosdyke knew full well that unless they were prevented by an Act of God, they would not only come, but do so with alacrity. They were inveterate inspectors of the interiors of other people’s houses. By now they had seen the inside of most houses in the village by various means, varying from the legitimate – attending a coffee morning, perhaps – to the more devious methods of delivering unnecessary messages or selling raffle tickets.

  The Bagthorpe residence had, however, proved an impossible nut to crack. Mr Bagthorpe had told his wife that any coffee morning would be held over his dead body. If anyone came round collecting money for any cause whatsoever, he would either slam the door in their faces, or start shouting and go on shouting after the luckless collector right down the drive.

  Mrs Bates and Mrs Pye, of course, often plied Mrs Fosdyke with questions in The Fiddler’s Arms, and by now had a fair idea of the geography of the place, and knew that the television set was hired, and that the best dinner service was Royal Worcester and that there was a chair in the hall that had been sat in by William the Conqueror. (This last being a drastic piece of misreporting by Mrs Fosdyke, who did not always quite follow Mr Bagthorpe when he was being sarcastic.)

  “I don’t know if I want them to come, for that matter,” said Mrs Fosdyke now.

  “Why on earth not?” Jack felt he must have understated the case badly. “Honestly, the whole house is sopping – it’ll take half the night to clear it up.”

  “Because,” replied Mrs Fosdyke, nonetheless rising and donning her coat, “I have my pride.”

  Jack was mystified by this declaration, but relieved to see that Mrs Fosdyke evidently was going to ask them.

  Mrs Fosdyke was, indeed, torn between soliciting the help of her two cronies and dissuading them from giving it. She had secretly cherished the hope that one day they would see the interior of the Bagthorpe residence, but on a day when she had everything polished to the last degree of brilliance, the silver set out on the sideboard and the artistic flower arrangements trailing everywhere.

  From what Jack had said it was clear that the look of the place, far from being at its best, was probably at an all-time worst. On the other hand, she often described to Mrs Pye and Mrs Bates how she suffered in the service of the Bagthorpes. Sometimes she had the feeling that they did not quite believe her, that they had no real grasp of the kind of people the Bagthorpes were. She felt powerless to put it adequately into words. The nearest she had come was once after the recent tin-opening ceremonies.

  “Sometimes,” she had told them over her third Guinness, “it comes over me that when I get up that drive I’ve left the whole world behind me. And when they all got hooting over that asparagus I’d meant for a trifle I could’ve took to my heels for ever. It was like one of them mad Dracula films on Friday telly.”

  Now, then, was clearly the moment when her friends should witness the Bagthorpe life as actually lived, even if it was not the optimum time from the aesthetic angle.

  “I’ll ask ’em,” she said, whipping her chiffon headscarf into a tight knot. “But I can’t promise. You wait here.”

  Three minutes later she was back, her face glistening wet and unnaturally excited-looking.

  “They’ll come,” she announced. “And a storm you’ve never seen the like of. Thunder and lightning and the lord knows.”

  “I heard it,” Jack said. “I saw it. I’ll go to the phone box and let Father know. He’ll pick you up in the car.”

  Mr Bagthorpe was less than enchanted to hear that Mrs Fosdyke and Co were coming to mop up. He did not know Mrs Pye and Mrs Bates, but this had not prevented his having formed an unshakable opinion of them. From time to time he popped into The Fiddler’s Arms himself for a quick snorter and the three of them were invariably present, their eyes like gimlets above their glasses of stout.

  “All they want is a guillotine behind them, and some knitting,” he said, “and you’d have it to the life. They are waiting, I swear, for severed heads to roll. They are the Three Furies. They’re Valkyries. They’re termagants.” Mr Bagthorpe never minded mixing his metaphors in the interests of piling on an effect.

  “In the name,” came his voice over the crackling line, “of all that is wonderful, I want to know why this kind of thing keeps happening to me. Why can’t we be happy like other families?”

  “I’ve told them you’ll pick them up,” Jack told him. “And tell Mother not to worry if I’m a bit late. I’ve got to go and get Zero.”

  “Hell’s,” came Mr Bagthorpe’s gritted voice, “bells!” and the line went dead.

  The storm seemed right overhead now. Jack flinched and ducked each time the lightning tore down. He hated storms. He usually spent them in his room, the curtains drawn, under the bed with Zero. Zero hated storms as well. His ears went right down and he shook all over and seemed to shrink nearer the ground. Now he was crouched all alone in the spinney.

  And thinking I’m a traitor, thought Jack. This was the worst part. He had deliberately abandoned Zero. It was with the best of intentions, but Zero could not be expected to know this.

  I feel like Judas Carrot, Jack thought.

  He banged on Mrs Fosdyke’s door again.

  “I’m leaving my bike in your porch!” he shouted above a clap of thunder. “I’m going over the fields.”

  He began to run to forestall argument. Sure enough he heard her voice following him.

  “Here! You don’t go near trees, you hear? You’ll be strucken. Come back! What’ll your ma-a-a- say?”

  Jack turned his face manfully away from the village and went out beyond the lights into the utter darkness of the meadow. The storm racketed about him and lit the scene every minute or two with a weird brilliance. The worst moment, the one that stood out ever after, was when something clammy and white slapped over his face from out of nowhere, blinding him. Jac
k yelled and stumbled and clawed at the empty cloth. He held it out at arm’s length and the lightning flared. It was one of his own aertex vests.

  Jack groaned. He had forgotten the carefully laid trail of laundry in his concern for Zero. Even now, his priorities seemed clear. All hell, it was true, would break loose later when the loss of his underwear and socks was discovered. Hope that they would ever turn up, in whatever condition, was slight.

  But they’re dead anyway, Jack thought as he panted on, the vest stuffed in his pocket. Socks and pants can’t suffer the way Zero can. He’d die for me, I know he would. So it’s up to me to die for him.

  He reached the spinney at last and drew a deep breath. Mrs Fosdyke, he knew, had been right about trees. They did attract lightning.

  But at least we’d go together, he thought. He climbed the fence and pushed his way through the brambles towards the clearing, and began to call now, above the din of the wind and thunder.

  “Zero! Zero! Come on, boy, it’s me. Zero!”

  He stopped dead. He was in the clearing. A long flare of lightning lit the whole scene distinctly. Jack shut his eyes and opened them again.

  “Zero!” he called, forlornly now. Again the lightning flared. The clearing was deserted. Zero had gone.

  By the time Jack returned an hour later Mrs Fosdyke and Co were in occupation and had taken over the whole operation. To the dazed and stricken Jack it seemed for a few moments when he pushed open the door that he was seeing treble. He saw three Mrs Fosdykes wringing, darting, pouncing, and heard three of them clucking. It was an extension of his nightmare and he actually groaned aloud.

  Mrs Bagthorpe came in then, and obviously her yoga and breathing had failed her in her extremity, because she became almost hysterical at the sight of her son, drenched, mud-spattered, white-faced and staring.