Absolute Zero

by Helen Cresswell

  His wife listened to this harangue with relief. She had been starting to worry about him, but realised now that he was his old self again.

  “I’ll make us all a nice cup of tea,” she said, as Borderland TV packed up for the day, “and then we’ll discuss our plans for Christmas. I think it would be nice if you and Celia, Russell, came to us for the day this year. Then we could all watch our programme together at teatime.”

  PJ heard this. He paused by the door.

  “Oh, by the way,” he said, “we’ve got a new slant we’re going to use at the encl. The boss thought it’d be a good idea if we came back here Christmas Day, and did the last five minutes of the show live.”

  “I think that’s a terrible idea,” said Mr Bagthorpe instantly. “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it, either,” rejoined PJ. “For one thing, I can think of ways I’d rather spend Christmas Day, and for another, I think it’s courting disaster.”

  “What is?” demanded Mr Bagthorpe aggressively. “What d’you mean by that?”

  “I mean,” returned PJ, “that so far you have all acted Happy only when thoroughly rehearsed. May I ask you, as a matter of cold fact, whether you do contrive to be happy on Christmas Day?”

  “Of course we do!” cried Mrs Bagthorpe.

  “Certainly,” lied Mr Bagthorpe. He raised his voice to somewhere near a shout because William had just broken out on the drums overhead. “You appear to have a very shallow view of happiness. You are mistaken, for instance, if you suppose the family not to be Happy at this present moment. People have different ways of being Happy.”

  Mrs Bagthorpe was so touched by this speech that she edged up to him and squeezed his hand, which he instantly snatched away.

  “Happy, are you?” said PJ cuttingly.

  “You try proving we’re not,” replied Mr Bagthorpe calmly.

  “Dealt with him all right, Henry,” said Uncle Parker handsomely when PJ had gone. “Check and mate, I thought.”

  “You were marvellous, Father,” agreed Tess. “That man is malevolent, excruciating and non-essential to the nth degree.”

  The Bagthorpes were thus temporarily united against a common enemy, which was better than not being united at all. And when Mrs Fosdyke entered to announce that there were only two remaining unlabelled tins in the pantry, the gloom lightened further.

  “Just think,” sighed Rosie, “at Christmas we’ll be able to choose what we eat. We’ll be able to have real mince pies.”

  “If you’ll just come and give ’em a shake, then,” said Mrs Fosdyke to Tess, whose turn it was, “you can have your teas.”

  “There’s no need to shake them,” Tess pointed out. “They’re going to be opened anyway, aren’t they?”

  Mrs Fosdyke had not thought of this. She looked baffled for a minute, then nodded, and scuttled off back to the kitchen. The two tins turned out to be both cling peaches, which was not a bad way to end the Tin Shaking era, and everyone was sitting round in pleasurable anticipation when the front door knocker banged.

  “Would you believe!” exclaimed Mrs Fosdyke. Like Mr Bagthorpe, she thought people who visited the house did it only to annoy. Everyone got on with the meal while she went off to deal with the intruder. A minute or two later she was back.

  “I’ve let ’im in,” she announced. “’E’s in the ’all.”

  “Who is it, Mrs Fosdyke?” enquired Mrs Bagthorpe, rising.

  “It’s a Mr Sugden,” she replied, “and I think he’s for you. ’E said something about a problem, anyhow.”

  “But I only deal with Problems by post!” Mrs Bagthorpe none the less patted her hair and went out. She was gone quite a long time, in fact so long that she was forgotten and all the cling peaches were eaten up. When she returned Zero was just Begging for the last morsels of jam roll. Uncharacte‌ristically, her eyes went straight to him.

  “Oh dear!” she murmured. “Oh dear!”

  “What is it, Mother?” asked Jack, who could see nothing wrong with Zero’s performance.

  “Oh, Jack, dear, I hardly know how to tell you. It’s dreadful!”

  “Have a cup of tea,” suggested Mr Bagthorpe, not without a degree of sarcasm.

  “Is it something to do with Zero? Who is it?” asked Jack.

  Mrs Bagthorpe sat down suddenly.

  “I think you had better go and talk to him,” she told her husband, “and see what you make of him. Oh, what a thing to happen, after all this time!”

  “I don’t know anybody called Sugden,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “Why should I go and talk to him? Who, Laura, is Mr Sugden?”

  She avoided Jack’s eye.

  “He says… he says – that he’s Zero’s real owner! And he says he wants him back!”

  At this there was a really long silence. The Bagthorpes, for once, were lost for words. They were also, to their own astonishment, finding themselves in the grip of deep and conflicting emotions – with the exception of Jack himself, whose feelings were perfectly straightforward. He loved Zero, had always loved him, and that was that. The rest of the family, however, genuinely despised Zero and had no feelings of affection for him whatsoever – or so they had thought until the news that he might suddenly be taken from them for ever forced their real feelings to the surface. These feelings took them by surprise. Rosie was the first to speak.

  “He’s not – he can’t be – he’s ours!” she cried, and promptly burst into tears.

  “The man’s raving,” said Mr Bagthorpe tersely. “Show him out, Mrs Fosdyke.”

  She did not move. She knew, as did everyone else there present, that the man in the sitting-room possibly was Zero’s real owner. Zero had simply appeared one day two years previously in the Bagthorpes’ garden, and stayed. They had advertised him in the Lost and Found column of the local paper, but nobody seemed to have recognised the description, or come forward if they had. At the time, Mr Bagthorpe had thought this understandable.

  “If ever we get a chance to lose him,” he had said, “we’ll take good care we don’t get him back through any Lost and Found column.”

  “Whatever shall we do?” This Problem was beyond Mrs Bagthorpe.

  “He’s not having Zero,” Jack said. “I’d die first. I’m going to go and tell him so.”

  He felt all at once very brave.

  “Come on, Zero.”

  Jack went out and Zero trailed after him. The others followed.

  A short, balding man with a waistcoat button missing was planted on the hearthrug with his back to the fire. As Jack entered, he caught sight of Zero and exclaimed loudly:

  “Cuddles! Cuddles, old boy – it’s you!”

  “It’s what?” Jack was incredulous.

  “Cuddles?” repeated Mr Bagthorpe disgustedly. “You’re mad.”

  Mr Sugden ignored them. He concentrated on Zero, who was still at Jack’s side and had remained totally untouched by his effusive greetings.

  “Hey! Cuddles – come on, old chap – it’s me. Come on. Walkies, boy, walkies.”

  “It is no use your using trigger words in the hope that the animal will wag his tail and appear to recognise you,” Mr Bagthorpe told him coldly. “That dog responds to no trigger words known to man. If you had been his true owner, you would have known that.”

  Mr Sugden now turned his attention from the apathetic Zero and looked at Mr Bagthorpe instead.

  “You aren’t casting aspersions, I hope,” he said belligerently, “on my rightful ownership?”

  “That’s right,” agreed Mr Bagthorpe. “I am.”

  “He doesn’t know you,” put in Jack. “You can tell he doesn’t.”

  “Not to be expected, after all this time,” countered the visitor. “He’ll soon come round, won’t you, Cuddles, old chap?”

  “Stop calling him that, will you?” snapped Mr Bagthorpe.

  At this point Grandma stepped in.

  “I can read you, sir,” she addressed herself to Mr Sugden, “like an open book, I fear.”

/>   “Oh yes, madam?” he returned, aggressively enough, though with a slightly hunted air, confronted as he now was by the entire Bagthorpe ménage in a solid phalanx.

  “You have read,” Grandma told him, “of the animal’s unprecedented rise to fame. You have read the accounts – grossly exaggerated, I might say – of the large sums of money he earns. You have also read that he appeared in our garden as a stray. I think we can all put two and two together.”

  “You are quite mistaken,” replied Mr Sugden. “I recognised his picture, certainly. He hasn’t changed a whisker. My wife broke down and cried when she saw him on the telly.”

  “If you are claiming ownership,” put in Tess surprisingly, “presumably you will not object to establishing that ownership by answering a few pertinent questions. Perhaps, for instance, you can tell us what is his favourite food?”

  “Well. Yes.” Mr Sugden appeared slightly shaken. “It’s been a long while, of course – difficult to remember – but yes, I think I can. Liver.”

  “A fair guess,” said Mr Bagthorpe.

  “Wrong!” crowed Mrs Fosdyke triumphantly. “Garlic sausage!”

  “He never had that at our house,” blustered Mr Sugden. “We never go in for foreign stuff.”

  “That dog’d eat toadstools if they’d a sprinkle of garlic on ’em,” continued Mrs Fosdyke, pressing her advantage with the ruthlessness of a seasoned prosecution counsel, “and he must’ve got the taste for it somewhere.”

  “Can he, for instance,” interposed William smoothly, “fetch sticks when they are thrown?”

  “Of course he can.” Mr Sugden immediately regained confidence. “All dogs can fetch sticks.”

  “Good morning, Mr Sugden,” said Mr Bagthorpe with an air of finality. “Mrs Fosdyke will see you out.”

  “Now just a minute!” Mr Sugden was advancing now, fumbling in his jacket pocket. “Take a look at this! What about this, then?”

  He was waving a photograph. Mr Bagthorpe stepped forward and snatched it, and the rest crowded round. It showed a modern bungalow, Mr Sugden and a woman who was presumably his wife, and sitting in the foreground doleful and unmistakable, Zero himself.

  “Well?” It was Mr Sugden’s turn to sound triumphant. The others were still staring disbelievingly at the photograph and trying to find some point of dissimilarity between the dog in the foreground and Zero himself.

  Jack could not believe his eyes. He knew quite certainly and instinctively that Zero had never lived with this man and been called Cuddles and fetched sticks. Yet there he was. Jack was bewildered and at the same time suddenly chilled. The photograph looked like proof. Anyone who did not know Zero as Jack did would surely say that it was proof.

  “Well?” Mr Sugden had his thumbs in his waistcoat now and it was easy to see how he lost buttons.

  “Give it me,” came Rosie’s voice.

  She took the photograph and held it away from her, then near, half squinting her eyes with a professional air.

  “It’s a fake,” she finally announced. “It’s trick photography. Someone has used one of the publicity photos of Zero and superimposed it on another negative.”

  “Now look here!” Mr Sugden made to snatch the photograph away but Rosie deftly swooped it out of reach.

  “It’s easy, actually,” she continued with the utmost self-possession. “I could do it myself.”

  “Oh, Rosie!” Jack wanted to hug her but knew she would not thank him.

  “If this is going to be your attitude,” blustered the visitor, “I’m not at all sure I want the dog.”

  “Good,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “And I’m not sure that I’m not going to prefer charges for fraudulent impersonation. Hadn’t you better leave before I come to a decision?”

  Mr Sugden, who was now interestingly red in the face, moved quickly and reached the front door even before Mrs Fosdyke, though she was there in time to give it a thoroughly satisfying slam behind him.

  “Rosie, darling, how clever of you!” exclaimed Mrs Bagthorpe. “Fancy your detecting that the photograph was a fake!”

  “I didn’t,” she replied simply. “I guessed. But I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “That hound –” Mr Bagthorpe was eyeing Zero with all his old weariness – “has been nothing but trouble since the day he came. Why in the name of heaven didn’t we let him go while we had the chance? Must’ve been a brainstorm.”

  Jack, bending to pat Zero to hide his emotion, heard this, but did not believe it. He could never again quite believe the things his family said about Zero. It seemed to him that this day had been the most triumphant of Zero’s life – more of a landmark, even, than the day he was discovered by BURIED BONES.

  “They stood by you in your hour of need,” he told Zero exultantly in the privacy of his room. “Every one of them – even Grandma, even William. They would have fought for you to the death. Just you remember that, old chap.”

  He was going to have to, of course. The Bagthorpes, Zero’s future secured, reverted at once to their former stances, and Mr Bagthorpe would often, in years to come, refer bitterly to the day when he had the chance of ridding himself of Zero, and passed it by. On one of these occasions Jack reminded him that he had fought as hard as anyone to keep Zero, but he denied it.

  “I was simply testing the fellow out,” he maintained. “That might be the most mutton-headed, non-productive hound that ever went on four legs, but it was the least I could in all conscience do. I am a humane man, I hope, and a fair one.”

  Jack did not reply to this but was, for once, actually inclined to believe that it might be true.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Season of Goodwill was now relentlessly approaching and the Bagthorpes were labouring under an even stronger than usual sense of impending doom. They seemed hedged about left and right by deadlines. On top of all the last-minute Christmas preparations they had to contend with a battalion of workmen in the house, a continual spate of unwanted prizes and above all the certainty that when Christmas Day did finally come, all would not be joy unconfined. PJ and Borderland Television would presumably see to that.

  The buying of gifts had been to some extent simplified this year by the presence in the house of the prizes so far won and surplus to the Bagthorpes’ own requirements. They were stacked in the dining-room and it looked, as Mr Bagthorpe observed, as if somebody were getting married and had forgotten to send out a Wedding Gift List.

  “Who, for instance,” he enquired, “has had the lack of foresight to send off ten entries for toast racks in a household where the general gluttony is such that no toast ever gets as far as a rack? No one in this house who depended on toast getting as far as a rack could ever survive.”

  “They were runners-up,” Tess told him. “They could have been a dishwasher. We can give them as presents.”

  They did, though not to one another. A good deal of ingenuity went into the sifting of the winnings and matching of each to a suitable recipient. All three yoghurt-makers, for instance, went to Aunt Celia, with the words FIRST RESSERVE and SECOND RESSERVE carefully painted on two of them by Rosie.

  “She’ll think it’s a proper set of three,” she told the others with satisfaction. When it was pointed out that the professionalism of the job was somewhat dissipated by the unorthodoxy of the spelling, she replied:

  “It’s Olde Worlde. Aunt Celia will like it. She likes poetry.”

  Mr Bagthorpe’s toolkit was, as he had promised, designated for Uncle Parker, though Jack himself secretly bought him a floral cravat to match his lavender suit. As parcels arrived, from now on people took them to some hidden corner before unwrapping them, in case there was a usable Christmas gift inside. No one was very much looking forward to opening presents this year. They were all well aware that as they were doing, so they would be done by.

  The renovation of the house proceeded relatively smoothly up until December 17th, when Mr and Mrs Bagthorpe were rash enough to go into Aysham with their children, leaving Daisy alone wit
h Grandma and Grandpa. Both the latter soon fell asleep and Daisy inevitably, once she had finished mixing Mrs Bagthorpe’s face powder into the flour bin because it smelled as if it would taste nice, set off in search of a real challenge in the way of Reconciling the Disparate.

  The decorators were finishing a room upstairs and Daisy first went up and enquired whether she might help. This offer they declined with spirit. They were by now aware that it was Daisy’s handiwork they were currently attempting to remove all trace of, and were at last within sight of this goal. They were not, however, aware of just how deadly Daisy could be at her most creative, and ill-advisedly told her to go and paint something of her own.

  Daisy did not, of course, have her own paints with her, but she trotted off to Rosie’s room to see if there were any oil tubes lying loose there. Disappointed to find only one tube of purple, from which she could squeeze only sufficient to daub a flower on the door with her finger, she went back downstairs.

  All the decorators’ materials were scattered untidily on a large dust sheet in the still uncarpeted dining room. Each tin of paint (the colours of which had been lovingly blended by Mrs Bagthorpe herself) had been carefully labelled to avoid confusion: SITTING-ROOM WINDOW WALL, MASTER BEDROOM WALLS 1 & 2, and so on. The hall was already finished, but there were still a couple of inches of terracotta paint left in the tin. This Daisy carefully transferred to a large, almost full tin labelled DINING ROOM ALL FOUR WALLS. Using one of the rods she stirred it thoroughly in, and was eventually rewarded by seeing the colour transformed to a murky khaki.

  She later said that this was meant to be “toad colour” and that it had been Arry Awk’s idea.

  “He thought you’d like it,” she said. “He likes toads best of anything and he’s being a good boy like Mummy said or he won’t get anything in his Christmas stocking.”

  When Mr Bagthorpe learned that Arry Awk intended to hang up a stocking, he swore that he would personally ensure that it was filled to the brim with toads, and probably would have done, had the thing been feasible.

  Daisy had only just finished Reconciling the Disparate tins of paint when the decorators came down to put the final coat on the dining room.