Absolute Zero

by Helen Cresswell

  “Rum shade,” said one of them, dubiously eyeing the toad colour.

  “There’s more than shades rum around this place,” returned one of his mates. “Rummiest lot I’ve ever come across, that’s definite.”

  No one could dispute this, and so the four of them divided the toad colour into their individual tins and set about the transformation of the dining-room.

  The Bagthorpes arrived home late in a cheerful mood with Christmas trees on the roof rack and a carrier full of food from the Chinese takeaway. The decorators had by then finished for the day, and Grandma and Grandpa were watching television while Daisy wrote her latest thoughts on the back of Christmas cards.

  Mrs Bagthorpe immediately tripped into the dining room to inspect the progress of work, and almost swooned on the spot. With the bare floor, unshaded lights and toad walls it looked, as Mr Bagthorpe said, a veritable hell hole.

  “There is no question of my ever eating anything in there,” he told Mrs Bagthorpe. “I could not down a single mouthful within walls of that shade. Have you gone mad, Laura?”

  Mrs Bagthorpe, who prided herself on her taste in general and colour sense in particular, was so maddened by this that she and her husband were soon well into an all-out row, while the strains of Silent Night, Holy Night floated out from the television next door and the Chinese food congealed in its carrier. Just as Daisy’s guilt was finally established Uncle Parker and Aunt Celia arrived to collect her, and all hell broke loose.

  The row ended with Aunt Celia (who now immovably maintained that she believed in Arry Awk – and for that matter, probably did) bearing Daisy off in her arms and screaming over her shoulder at Mr Bagthorpe:

  “You are a destroyer of innocence! You are a worm within the bud!”

  Mr Bagthorpe followed the retreating Parkers to the front door and yelled after them:

  “And don’t you come back till Christmas Day, I warn you! If I see you back here again before Christmas Day, I’ll—”

  The last part of the message of goodwill was mercifully drowned by the roar of Uncle Parker’s exhaust and the spinning of tyres on violently scattered gravel.

  The Parkers did not return until Christmas Day and when they did Mr Bagthorpe was placed in the mortifying position of presenting to Uncle Parker a toolkit that was not wanted in return for a case of extremely expensive vintage port that clearly was. There are few more untenable positions than that of receiving a costly and desirable gift from an adversary. Mr Bagthorpe’s expression on opening up his gift was, being a mixture of gratification and a reluctance to appear gratified, a unique grimace. Uncle Parker, on the other hand, affected extreme delight at his own offering.

  “By Jove!” he exclaimed. “Really, Henry, old chap, you shouldn’t have. Just the sort of thing one always wants, don’t you know, but never quite likes to treat oneself to.”

  Which, while being true of the case of vintage port, was certainly not true of the toolkit, as Mr Bagthorpe well knew, and Uncle Parker knew he knew, and Mr Bagthorpe knew Uncle Parker knew he knew.

  The atmosphere, then, was highly charged even before Christmas dinner began. None of the Bagthorpes had been particularly taken with their gifts, with the exception of those given by the Parkers, which had been intentionally chosen for their costliness and covetability, and had nothing to do with Competition Entering. Every one of them had a giant suntan oil from William (who was no longer getting answers to his letters to Atlanta) even including Grandma and Grandpa, though the latter at least had the grace to look pleased by this offering.

  Matters were not improved by the fact that Christmas dinner was to be partaken of in the kitchen while the dining-room was being dressed for Christmas tea by a sulky and hungover crew from Borderland Television. Mrs Fosdyke had herself laid out the table on the previous day with all the best silver and china in the hopes of impressing Mesdames Pye and Bates who would undoubtedly be watching the programme at five o’clock.

  “Though what it’ll all look like,” she lamented, “with walls the colour of stewed liver, I don’t know. If that Daisy was drowned at birth it’d be no more than she deserves.”

  She was clearly regretful that the moment for this operation to be carried out had already passed.

  The Borderland TV people props department were adding details of their own, including candles, Mrs Fosdyke noted with trepidation, and crackers.

  “You watch out!” she hissed into the ear of a mystified Borderland man. “There’s a pyrotechnic in the house!”

  She was alone in her misgivings, however, because the Bagthorpes had made the fatal mistake of thinking that Daisy had shot her final bolt for the current calendar year in perpetrating the toad walls. Daisy herself was very carefree and happy. She brought most of her presents and those of Arry Awk along with her, laid them out on the sitting-room floor and was Reconciling them, with the willing aid of Grandma. All she had time to do before dinner was tip three jigsaws out and mix all their pieces together, and this assured the others that the procedure would keep Daisy quiet for longer than if she solved the three puzzles separately.

  Mrs Bagthorpe always took Christmas very seriously and had three trees in the house, all real, one each in the sitting- and dining room and one in the hall.

  “I love the house to smell of real fir!” she would sigh ecstatically. “Such nostalgia!”

  Usually the trees were lit with fairy lights, but this year she had insisted on old-fashioned candles for the dining room, where the Bagthorpes were to be shown to the Nation being overwhelmingly Happy over the Christmas Tea.

  “There are little children all over England who have never seen candles flickering on a Christmas tree,” she said, “and never known their magic. Think, Henry, think, Mr Jones (PJ”s real name, which, for obvious reasons, he did not use in such a competitive milieu), it may bring about a revival!”

  Whether or not it did was never established, but it certainly brought about other consequences that could in no way be described as a revival. It had been arranged that this year each member of the family should receive an extra gift, from Borderland TV (up to the value of £10 per head), and that these should be placed about the candlelit tree. After a minute or so’s live film of the Bagthorpes being Happy round the Christmas cake and mince pies, these presents were to be opened. No one but the props man knew what was in these enticing-looking boxes, though they had been shaken around a lot during the few days they had been in the house. Each member of the family, however, had privately told the props man what he or she would most like to receive, and there was no real reason to suppose that these wishes had not, in general, been granted. The Bagthorpes, indeed, were looking forward to opening these parcels.

  At one o’clock, when Mrs Fosdyke was due to dish up the dinner, most adults present were considerably elevated by the liberal dispensation of spirits. Mrs Bagthorpe herself, being more than usually nervous and determined that things should go with a Dickensian swing, handed out more than usually plentiful potations of home-made punch, and she was not, of course, to know that Borderland TV had brought their own supply of stuff in anticipation of a hard and depressing day. Mr Bagthorpe felt himself both bound and inclined to open one of his bottles of vintage port after the well-brandied Christmas pudding. The result of all this was that the adults spent most of the afternoon sleeping – even Aunt Celia who had evidently been affected by auto-suggestion after drinking a bottle of her own elderflower champagne.

  Teatime, then, was soon upon the Bagthorpes, and found them still sleepy and not fully on their guard. At four o’clock the make-up girl started work on Grandma, who had expressed a wish to appear looking as much as possible like Dame Sybil Thorndyke, followed by Mr Bagthorpe who asked her, sotto voce, to emphasise the already considerable hollows under his eyes. By 16.55 hours the entire gathering was seated round the festive board (Grandma and Daisy both wearing their BLUE LAGOON and GENERATION GAP outfits in the certainty of being recognised and receiving fan mail). It was very hot and cra
mped in there, what with the lights, camera and production team, and the jellies and icings were already beginning to melt. From 17.00 hours to 17.25 the family were to eat their tea in the usual way, while watching their filmed performances on one of the three monitor sets that were placed about the room.

  When the credits began to roll on to the screen with first of all the title HAPPY CHRISTMAS HAPPY BAGTHORPES followed by a list of the names of everyone present, Mrs Fosdyke, who had had her tots along with everyone else but did not really have the head for it, began to sniff loudly.

  “You’d better cut that out before 17.25,” PJ warned her in a savage whisper, and took a long consolatory swig at his beer. (All the crew were drinking beer now because they said the strong lights dehydrated them.)

  The family chewed steadily, their eyes fixed on the screen. They were quite pleased with what they saw but not so pleased with what they were eating. Mrs Bagthorpe’s face powder had definitely affected the flavour of the pastry and this was particularly noticeable in the case of the sausage rolls. They all reached first for one of these (with the exception of Grandpa, who started straight in on the stuffed eggs) and were naturally made unhappy when they found them all but inedible. When Mrs Fosdyke noticed that no one was finishing them, and that dark looks were being directed towards herself, she became unhappy too, and started sniffing again.

  By 17.20 hours each of them had a hand on a cracker as if on a trigger. When the studio announcer said “and now, over to the Happy Bagthorpes, live at home…” they were all to pull them and appear extremely jolly and put on their paper hats. Mr Bagthorpe, noting with satisfaction that his dying Keats performance was coming over well, mentally resolved not to do this.

  “Keats could never, ever, have worn a paper hat,” he decided.

  Jack had been requested by his mother to hold Zero’s collar while the crackers were being pulled.

  “We don’t wish a repetition of Grandma’s Birthday Party,” she had said smilingly. “Not that history ever repeats itself.”

  As PJ started the countdown to 17.25 hours the atmosphere became electric. The production assistants moved in and lit the Christmas tree candles, though they looked less than magical under the harsh glare of lights.

  At a warning signal from PJ crackers were raised and as he dropped his arm as if holding a starter’s flag, the Bagthorpes went into action. Crackers were pulled if not with hilarity at least with a lot of shouting and confusion that could easily pass as hilarity. Grandma pulled so hard that her arm ended up in a half-melted jelly and Aunt Celia jibbed at pulling her cracker and put both hands over her ears instead. Jack, with one eye on a monitor, noted that a bottle of beer inadvertently left on the table by the sound man was figuring largely in the foreground of the shot, and releasing Zero’s collar, stretched out to remove it. He knew his mother would not want the nation to see beer bottles on her tea table.

  What happened next was never really very clear afterwards, but it had something to do with Zero understandably backing away from all the banging and shouting and getting his paws inextricably wound in the flex leading to the boom. The man holding the boom did not notice this, but, finding himself short of flex, gave the boom a jerk to release it, and in so doing caught the top of the candlelit Christmas tree. From then on, history did not so much repeat as excel itself.

  PJ alleged afterwards during the Insurance investigation that if the Bagthorpes had kept their heads none of the things that did happen would have happened. Nobody at the time seemed to be keeping their heads. Everybody screamed and shouted and fought to get clear of the blazing tree. Mr Bagthorpe hurled his tea at it and the production team threw their beer but not before the glittering and highly inflammable wrappings on the Borderland parcels had caught fire.

  “Dial 999!” yelled Mr Bagthorpe and gave the table cloth a mighty yank so that food and crockery flew out at everybody. At the time, the rest thought he had yanked the cloth off because he had become unhinged, but what he had intended, apparently, was to throw it over the flames and stifle them. But before he could wrench it away from William and Uncle Parker, who were both hanging grimly on to it in case he did something rash with it, Daisy’s fireworks had started to go off. There was nearly twenty pounds’ worth of these because Daisy had persuaded Borderland TV to give them to Arry Awk as well as herself.

  Up to this point everyone had acted as if the situation could eventually be salvaged and the cameraman in fact kept on filming the whole time. Even after the fireworks started going off and the dining-room had hastily been evacuated he stood in the doorway filming and a lot of what he shot was used later, on the News. (The Bagthorpes’ tea party had now definitely crossed the frontier between Light Entertainment and News, and Jack could see from the one remaining monitor that their transmission had been cut, and an orchestra was playing instead.)

  When the firemen arrived three of them turned out to be those who had come to put out Grandma’s Birthday Fire, and when they saw all the rockets going off and blue and green lights glowing and so forth, you could see that they were so bewildered they could hardly do their job properly. Nearly all the ingredients of this fire were identical to those of Grandma’s; only details differed, like its being Mr Bagthorpe rather than Zero who dragged the tablecloth off.

  When the fire was out the firemen would not stay even for a drink. They said this was because they were on duty, but it was obvious that the real reason was that the Bagthorpes made them nervous. The Borderland people packed their blackened equipment in a daze and stumbled off into the night. Before he left, PJ told the Bagthorpes that they had probably ruined his whole life.

  “No man should ever have his worst fears realised,” he told them, “and that is what happened to me today. From now on, I shall be a cynic. All my natural optimism has vanished at a stroke. You have destroyed my faith in life.”

  None of the family felt particularly repentant about this, but Mrs Fosdyke’s equally shattered faith was something that struck much nearer home.

  She had shrieked out her notice several times during the course of the fire, but the distractions were such that no one had paid any attention. At some stage she must have packed her bag and silently crept away, because when the Bagthorpes were left confronting the all-too-familiar sodden ruins of the dining-room she was suddenly registered as missing. Mrs Bagthorpe wanted her husband to take the car and go after her, but he refused.

  “I’m in shock,” he told her. “I am in no fit condition to drive a car.”

  He persisted in this refusal and in the end Mrs Bagthorpe decided that as Mrs Fosdyke must almost certainly be in shock too, it might be better to wait a while before making any overtures.

  “Though my Christmas will be quite spoiled by the uncertainty,” she said, “I cannot possibly continue with my Problems without the assistance of Mrs Fosdyke.”

  And so Christmas Day drew to a close with the door of the burnt-out dining room finally closed and everybody in the sitting-room allotting blame for the events of the day and arguing endlessly. The television was switched on for the News, and there they saw the whole awful scene re-enacted and all started pointing and yelling “Look – there you are – see that?” and so on. William announced his intention of asking the Borderland people to do an Action Replay at a private showing.

  The News finished and a commercial came on. The battered Bagthorpes stared numbly at the close-up of Zero gazing at them from the screen. Unhurriedly he scrunched his Buried Bones.

  “By Jove!” exclaimed Uncle Parker. “Keeps his cool. Shows the lot of us up.”

  “I do not accept that,” Mr Bagthorpe told him. “The hound is an idiot, and it shows. And seeing him on the screen is all I needed to round off my day. I shall go to bed, so that the New Year will come more quickly. I have never before so strongly needed to make a fresh start with a clean slate. I consider my present state to be as near rock bottom as it has ever been.”

  Later, the family discovered that he had written on the wall
in the hall on his way up to bed. (There was to be a fresh spate of writing thoughts on walls as a natural outcome of the fire.)

  What he had written, was:

  HELL IS ABSOLUTE ZERO

  The others could sympathise with this sentiment, but Grandma, when nobody was looking, penned sanctimoniously underneath:

  NO, HENRY, HELL IS ONESELF under which during the course of Boxing Day Mr Bagthorpe unguardedly wrote:

  THAT DEPENDS WHO YOU ARE OF COURSE beneath which, inevitably, Grandma wrote:

  PRECISELY, HENRY and drew under it a thick, triumphant line punctuated with a daisy, like a full stop.

  The Bagthorpe Saga

  ORDINARY JACK

  ABSOLUTE ZERO

  BAGTHORPES UNLIMITED

  BAGTHORPES V. THE WORLD

  BAGTHORPES ABROAD

  BAGTHORPES HAUNTED

  BAGTHORPES LIBERATED

  BAGTHORPES TRIANGLE

  BAGTHORPES BESIEGED

  BAGTHORPES BATTERED

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  http://www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London, SE1 9GF

  http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  http://www.harpercollins.com