“I did tell him.” Mrs Fosdyke paused and leaned on her mop. “And if he’d been struck dead it’d’ve been no wonder.”
“I wouldn’t care if I had been,” said Jack dully.
Mrs Bagthorpe advanced to put her hand on his head but he pushed it away.
“You might be delirious!” she cried. “You sound as if you are raving!”
He went blindly among the mops and bucket brigade and into the hall.
“Take off your wet shoes,” called his mother helplessly after him.
Jack trudged up the stairs past Daisy’s mottoes and along the landing and into his room. He stood and stared disbelievingly. He actually knocked his forehead with a clenched fist to settle his brains, as Mr Bagthorpe sometimes did. Then a wet Zero was prancing at his knee, tail going as it had never gone before, and giving little excited snorts.
“O, Zero, Zero, good old chap!” Jack had to sit suddenly on the bed and Zero danced about his feet.
He’s safe, thought Jack. And he found his way home. Even without the trail he did it. He’s a genius!
It later transpired that Zero had arrived back only moments after Mr Bagthorpe had replaced the receiver after his conversation with Jack. He had squelched through the kitchen, slipping and cursing under his breath, opened the back door, and been bowled to the ground by Zero in full tilt. His front paws, aimed at the middle of the door, had landed flat on Mr Bagthorpe’s chest. He had leapt clean over him, straight past a squealing Rosie and Tess who were mopping, up the stairs and into Jack’s room.
“Like a rat,” Mr Bagthorpe afterwards said, “into its bolt hole.”
He asserted that not even during active service in a World War had he been so rudely and unexpectedly assaulted.
“Even war has rules,” he said. “There’s an International Code. That hound knows no bounds. This family is going to have to split up. People are going to have to make a choice between the hand that feeds them and the teeth that bite it.”
When Jack pointed out that Zero had never in fact bitten Mr Bagthorpe, he dismissed this as a quibble.
“How I ever rose again is a mystery,” he declared.
How Zero actually got home was a mystery, even Jack admitted this. He had certainly not followed the trail. In the end, Jack decided that Zero had been quite capable of finding his way home all along, but had just never felt like it before.
“He just needed a good reason to do it,” he explained to the others. “Like a storm, for instance.”
They remained unconvinced. Zero never repeated the performance, so perhaps they were right. But then, never again did Zero find himself alone at night in a spinney with a storm raging about him. The question was left open.
Chapter Nine
The clearing of the Bagthorpes’ house after Daisy’s Flood lasted approximately till Christmas. It was a complicated operation – the walls needed doing on two separate counts, and other parts of the house too had been subjected to both Fire and Flood. In any event, for the next two months or so the house was never at any given moment free of workmen of one kind or another. They were not called in, however, until the preliminary mopping up had been completed by Mrs Fosdyke and her brigade, who took an unconscionably long time over this and were, Mr Bagthorpe asserted, actively enjoying it.
“They are in their element,” he declared. “They feed on destruction and human misery. Only a corpse discovered in some dark corner could make them happier.”
There were days on which he said he might well be driven to supplying one or two such corpses himself.
He detested Mrs Pye and Mrs Bates even more heartily than he did Mrs Fosdyke, and perhaps the only good thing that came out of the matter for him was that from this time on he did not see Mrs Fosdyke as the ultimate in aggravating and purblind humanity. He had seen worse, his eyes had been opened. He particularly detested Mrs Pye who, he maintained, was upsetting the vibrations of the whole house to the point where he could hardly bring himself to write a single word.
When asked to describe what it was in particular about Mrs Pye that had this effect, he was at a loss to put it into words that convinced anyone else of her direfulness.
“Haven’t you noticed the way she holds her mop?” he would demand. “And have you ever seen anyone scrub the way she does? She scrubs like she was Lady Macbeth outing a damn spot.”
Mrs Bagthorpe dismissed all these allegations as far-fetched and fanciful, though she herself had been irritated by having descriptions of her house relayed to the interested village, and then repeated to herself by acquaintances. Their home had been represented, she said, as a large-scale hovel.
“It is a hovel,” returned Mr Bagthorpe flatly. “It became a hovel within an hour of that accursed infant being left here.”
He absolutely ignored Daisy for the remainder of her stay, and was itching for Uncle Parker to return so that he could tell him what he thought of her, and have the biggest all-out row he had ever conducted with him. He had the advantage, he knew, of having all the ammunition, and also several days in which to compose choice insults and exquisitely worded sneers. He went about the house tripping over brooms and pails, rehearsing these, and also made notes of them while in his study. Jack caught snatches of them, and trembled for Uncle Parker.
At the same time he could not help feeling a certain thankfulness that somebody had done more to invoke his father’s anger than himself. Mr Bagthorpe had certainly taken the loss of the laundry relatively lightly. Beyond remarking that if only Zero had been struck by a thunderbolt the socks of the entire household would have been well lost, he had little to say.
It was Mrs Fosdyke’s wrath that had been particularly incurred. First she dispatched Jack and a protesting Rosie on a full-scale search of the fields along the route Jack had taken. Jack took Zero too, though not with any real hope of his sniffing out the missing articles.
“You can’t expect him to,” he told Rosie, as they plodded disconsolately through the long, sodden grass. “Even a trained bloodhound couldn’t do it after all that rain.”
“You know Zero can’t sniff things out,” she told him crossly. “He never has been able to. Father says he couldn’t even sniff a mutton bone at five yards.”
They returned, predictably, empty-handed, and with Zero’s ears at a pronounced downward slant. He must have understood some of the things Rosie had been saying. Jack took Zero up to the sanctuary of his room before going down to tell Mrs Fosdyke that the search had been fruitless.
She had cast pregnant looks at Mesdames Pye and Bates, who rolled up their eyes and clucked in sympathy.
“You see now,” she told them, not without a certain satisfaction, “what I’m up against. You see now what I have to cope with.”
They nodded sagely. They did, they said.
“That washing,” Mrs Fosdyke declared, “must’ve been worth all of ten pound. Twenty, I shouldn’t wonder, and all want replacing. Your ma’ll have to be told.”
Mrs Bagthorpe was accordingly told, but she had other Problems to occupy her mind. Not only did she have to oversee the restoration of Unicorn House, but now she was worried about Daisy.
“She is psychologically disturbed,” she told her husband. “It is a definite sign.”
“Psychologically disturbed?” he repeated on a rapidly ascending scale. “Is this supposed to be news? Are we supposed to leap to our feet and cry Eureka? Psychologically disturbed, she says!”
What had happened was that Daisy had begun to hold lengthy conversations with somebody called Arry Awk. It was Rosie who first noticed this. She hovered around Daisy a good deal, partly in the hopes of a chance to plait her hair or push her on the swing, and partly because she was afraid that if she committed any further misdemeanours Mr Bagthorpe really would despatch her somewhere on a boat.
On the morning after the deluge Daisy had, for the first time, voluntarily returned to Rosie’s room straight after breakfast. Rosie, hopeful that this meant that she wanted, at last, to play, foll
owed after her. She could hear Daisy’s voice as she went along the landing.
“You are a bad boy, Arry Awk,” she was saying. Then, “You are my bestest friend in the whole world, Arry Awk.”
(At first the Bagthorpes had not known quite what to make of the name of Daisy’s invisible friend – and, it later transpired, accomplice. It was some time before they realised that she had read the name on a framed and illustrated version of Widecombe Fair that hung in the downstairs lavatory along with Spanish bullfight posters and Victorian texts.)
When asked who Arry Awk was, Daisy replied that he was the person who had turned on all the taps in the house on the previous day. It was this that worried Mrs Bagthorpe.
“It is a clear case of transference,” she said. “Whatever shall we do?”
Her husband replied that the main thing to do was make sure that Arry Awk turned no taps and lit no fires for the next three days, and that thereafter he would be the sole concern of Uncle Parker and Aunt Celia.
“And Uncle Tom Cobley and all, as far as I am concerned,” he concluded. “The whole pack of ’em – Dan Stewer, Bill Skewer, Peter Gravy – you name ’em.”
“You are being silly, Henry,” said his wife. “This is a serious matter. Daisy is only four years of age and is a guest and under our protection. She is holding conversations with an invisible friend called Arry Awk, and we must think what to do about it.”
“You think,” he told her. “I’m through with thinking. But if you really want to know what I think, it’s that this Arry Awk who has suddenly cropped up is part of a malicious and well-laid plot.”
“Whatever do you mean?” cried his wife.
“I mean,” he returned, “that we are coming to the nub of the whole thing – the Insurance, and the compensation. If that crazy infant makes out she’s crazy, and that it wasn’t her that went writing all over everywhere and reducing this house to a shanty – if she makes out it was this Arry Awk fellow that did it, where are we then with the Insurance?”
“Surely we are adequately insured?” queried his wife.
“We are adequately covered by any normal standards,” he replied. “I had imagined we were insured against every possible contingency – I extended the cover, you remember, after Mother’s Birthday Party. But we are not insured against the total devastation of the entire house by an invisible entity by the name of Arry Awk. There is not an Inspector in England who would entertain such a claim. You could scrutinise the small print until you were cobalt blue in the face and find no possible loophole through which you could conceivably slip this Mr Awk.”
“All right, dear,” replied Mrs Bagthorpe. “I perfectly understand. There is no need to labour the point.”
“Some points need labouring,” returned Mr Bagthorpe, “and this is one of them. I do not wish to hear any more about the matter. And just keep her out of my way. I am an easygoing man, but I must not be tried beyond endurance.”
The next trial of Mr Bagthorpe’s endurance was to take place the following day, with the arrival of the first prize resulting from the recent spate of Competition Entering. This prize was not for Mr Bagthorpe. It was not even for anyone whom he could have borne to have won. It was, incredibly, for Grandma and Daisy.
No one had any inkling that Grandma had been entering competitions, let alone Daisy, and the Bagthorpes erupted in a manner that was highly gratifying to Mrs Fosdyke, who felt that now, at last, her friends would understand what it meant to move even on the fringes of their lives.
“I can certainly see,” conceded Mrs Pye, above Mr Bagthorpe’s yelling and William’s thundering tattoo, “that you have your hups and downs, Glad.”
“It’s always like this,” she told them. “I’ve tried to tell you, and now you can see for yourselves.”
“I wouldn’t have your job,” agreed Mrs Bates, “for all the tea in China, and shudder to think how near I come to getting it.” (She had been an unsuccessful applicant for Mrs Fosdyke’s position years before.)
To win this prize Grandma had, of course, cheated. Mr Bagthorpe felt particularly hamstrung about this. He longed to expose her, but knew that in so doing he would bring humiliation and ridicule on the whole family including, inexorably, himself. He was forced to accept the thing, if not stoically, at least relatively silently, when other people were about.
The way Grandma had cheated was in representing herself to be a regular user of a particular brand of toilet soap. This falsehood had been extended to cover Daisy’s ablutions too. Mr Bagthorpe contended that Daisy was not in the habit of using any soap whatsoever, so far as he was aware, let alone BLUE LAGOON LANOLIN-ENRICHED, and it was well known that Grandma would consider nothing but Pears. She had once gone four days without washing when the village shop was temporarily out of stock.
Mrs Bagthorpe, although a very conscientious person, did not take this aspect so seriously.
“A bar of BLUE LAGOON LANOLIN-ENRICHED was purchased,” she said, “and Mother and Daisy obviously gave glowing accounts of its performance. And Daisy has the skin of a peach, and will look perfectly lovely in the advertisements.”
“If that child has the skin of a peach,” he returned, “then we have yet another demonstration of cosmic chaos and injustice. She deserves to have the skin of a blackcurrant. She has not, to my knowledge, washed since she has been here. We must now hope that she has not contrived to win a prize for a toothpaste Slogan.”
Some men from BLUE LAGOON LANOLIN-ENRICHED soap came swiftly on the heels of the letter to confirm the good tidings, and in fact Mrs Bagthorpe did have time to bundle a protesting Daisy into the bath before she was presented.
“Arry Awk never has bafs,” she squeaked. “Arry Awk ’ates bafs!”
“It is not Arry Awk who is to be photographed for an advertisement,” Mrs Bagthorpe reminded her, adding cunningly, “nor who is to win a thousand pounds.”
“When I get my money,” Daisy confided in a voice muffled by a soapy flannel, “I shall buy a pussy. If I have enough money, I shall buy two.”
“You will have enough money for a thousand pussies,” Mrs Bagthorpe rashly assured her, thereby laying the foundations for a month-long battle of wills between Daisy and her parents.
It transpired that what the BLUE LAGOON LANOLIN-ENRICHED SOAP COMPANY had been in search of, was a family who had used their product through the generations (this despite the fact that it had been on the market only a few years). What they wished to do was photograph both Daisy and Grandma (the latter suitably touched up to look half her age) and use it in conjunction with a Slogan to the effect that if one used BLUE LAGOON LANOLIN-ENRICHED SOAP regularly, one could confidently expect to have much the same skin at seventy as one had at four.
Grandma herself was delighted by the idea, and told endless fibs to the BLUE LAGOON men. One of them was about her age, from which she subtracted five years. When she later saw the touched-up portrait of herself, she regretted, she said, that she had not made it twenty.
These men were particularly interested to meet Daisy. They had not expected, they said, to be lucky enough to find a child so young for their advertisement, as most children of that age were not able to read, let alone write. Grandma thereupon proudly took them on a conducted tour of Daisy’s slogans, by which they seemed suitably impressed, if bewildered. One of them asked, rather hesitantly, whether perhaps there had been a recent accident? He made vague gestures towards the surrounding signs of Fire and Flood.
“Not an accident,” Grandma told them loftily, “but yet another manifestation of my granddaughter’s creative genius. She is a shining jewel of a child.”
At this, Mr Bagthorpe, who had sat back grimly swallowing every one of Grandma’s pronouncements so far, showed signs of imminent cardiac collapse and left the room suddenly.
Daisy herself then appeared, well scrubbed and happy at the prospect of a thousand kittens in the offing. Obligingly she went through her paces for the benefit of the BLUE LAGOON men, who were clearly staggered at
having lighted upon so uncommon a ménage. They had been prepared for the unusual after reading Daisy’s testimony on behalf of BLUE LAGOON LANOLIN-ENRICHED soap – it had read “I was my face in blue lagon sope and I wash my hands and my toes and my tumy and all over and I am a genius and allways rite” – but were nonetheless bowled over by meeting its perpetrator.
Daisy confessed early on that she did not in fact use BLUE LAGOON soap.
“I don’t wash very much,” she told them. “Auntie Bag made me just now and I did ’cos of the fousand pussies but Arry Awk never does.”
The pair of them nodded bewilderedly at this cryptic confidence, but at the same time begged her to let it be a secret among themselves.
“If anyone ever asks you,” they pleaded, “just pretend you use BLUE LAGOON soap, will you? You know, like a kind of game.”
“Tell a fib, you mean?” asked Daisy disconcertingly.
“I could not for a moment countenance that,” said Grandma at once. “That child is a miracle of innocence and truth.”
“Of course, of course,” the BLUE LAGOON men agreed hastily, “and we wouldn’t dream—”
“And it was no part of the Competition,” went on Grandma piously, “that anyone was to tell any untruths.”
“Of course—”
“We are not paid to tell untruths,” she continued, “or to act parts, or call it what you will. We will receive one thousand pounds each prize money, with no strings attached. I shall probably buy a fox fur with my money, and some ecru underwear.”
“I wouldn’t mind ’tending to wash,” piped up Daisy who seemed, uncannily, to have caught Grandma’s drift. “Would I get paid extra?”
There was a silence. No one could take exception to such a suggestion coming so artlessly from one so young. It seemed, indeed, to have a simple and childlike logic.
“If I did,” went on Daisy speculatively, “I could get even more pussies.”
“I am certain that something could be arranged,” said the senior BLUE LAGOON spokesman, avoiding his colleague’s eye.
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