The Lion Tamer’s Daughter

by Peter Dickinson

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m OK. Let’s get on.”

  They struggled out through a sort of shrubbery, making enough noise, it seemed, to wake all Hampshire. Derek’s head was just sore on the outside now. Blood was running down his cheek. David was already running, a dark limping shape about twenty yards away. His leg must have gone duff again after all that effort. Derek followed him across the moonlit slopes and levels. They made no effort to hide. If anyone had been watching from the house they must have seen them, the moonlight was so strong. At last they stood panting by the fence of the spring. The rim of shadow still made a thin line under a wall.

  “Done it,” whispered David. “I thought I was stuck.”

  “What’d have happened?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What’s it like … the other side?”

  “Different. Shhh.”

  The shadow vanished and the reflection of the moon moved onto the troubled disk. Derek glanced sideways at his brother’s face. The rippled, reflected light glimmered across it, making it very strange, gray white like a mushroom, and changing all the time as the ripples changed, as if it wasn’t even sure of its own proper shape.

  David climbed the fence, grasped the bottom rail, and lowered his legs into the water. Derek climbed too, gripped David’s hand, and crouched to lower his brother—yes, his brother still—his last yard in this world. David let go of the rail and dropped. Derek gripped his hand all the way to the water.

  As he felt that silvery touch the movement stopped, and they hung there, either side of the rippled mirror. David didn’t seem to want to let go, either.

  Different? thought Derek. Different how?

  The hand wriggled, impatient. Something must be happening the other side. No time to make up his mind. He let go of the rail.

  In the instant that he plunged toward the water he felt a sort of movement around him, very slight, but clear. It was the whole world closing in, filling the gap where he had been. In that instant, he realized everything changed. Jackie would still be at home, Fran would be asleep in his room, not needing to share with Cindy. Nobody would shout at him to come to breakfast. His parents would go about their day with no sense of loss; Jimmy Grove would keep no place for him on the school bus; Mum would be a director of her company, with a car of her own … and all the photographs in the albums would show the same cheerful family, two parents, three daughters, no gap, not even the faintest shadow that might once have been Derek.

  He was leaving a world where he had never been born.

  TOUCH AND GO

  1. About Me

  My name is Cyril Batson. I am a bookseller, aged sixty-five. I have a little shop in Chelsea, London, and two rooms above where I live with my cat. I have never married. Don’t be put off. Most of this story is about stuff that happened when I was twelve, but first I’ve got to explain a few things.

  My father was in the Merchant Navy, but he wasn’t a real sailor. He was a ship’s cook, working on the Union Castle line, the big ships that took passengers out from England to South Africa and back. Nowadays almost everyone goes by air, but it was ships then. Liners, they called them. My mother used to take me to see my father’s ship come in. It had three red funnels with black bands round the top.

  Each of his trips lasted almost six weeks—eighteen days out, four days there, and eighteen days back. Then he had three days at home with us and one day to go and see his mother. She was a cook too, in a big house in London, but my mother didn’t get on with her so I hadn’t seen her since I was small. Then my father would have another six weeks away.

  In the end my mother couldn’t stand it anymore. She fell in with a man called Maurice who lived somewhere up north, and while my father was away she ran off with him. Before she left she took me up to London, to a square with a garden in the middle and large white houses all round. She made sure I knew which was the right one and then we walked along to the next corner and stopped. She gave me a letter and told me to go back to the house she’d shown me and go up the steps and ring the bell, and then give the letter to whoever opened the door and wait there.

  I did what she said, only before I went up the steps I looked back to make sure she was waiting for me, and she was. A maid came to the door and told me to go to a different door, in a little dark yard down some stone stairs. As I came down the front steps I saw my mother wasn’t waiting for me anymore. I ran to the corner to look for her, but she was gone. I never saw her again except in dreams.

  I went back to the door the maid had told me about and rang and someone came. I showed her my letter and she took it in. I waited. Then my grandmother came and told me in a cross voice to come in. She was a short fat woman who limped from a bad hip. She took me into a big kitchen and told me to sit down and gave me a mug of milk and a slice of bread and dripping, much nicer than we had at home. Then she told one of the maids to go and ask if she could have a talk with the lady who owned the house.

  The lady wasn’t pleased about me, any more than my grandmother was, but they both did the best they could, by their lights. My grandmother was a good cook and the lady didn’t want to lose her. She let me stay in the house for a couple of days until they found a place for me in an orphanage not too far away. The lady said she’d pay the fees until my father came home and made arrangements. (My grandmother told me all this later.)

  My grandmother came to see me on her afternoons out—just one afternoon a week she had. It wasn’t easy for her because of her bad hip. My father didn’t find out what had happened until his ship came in several weeks later and he went home and found the note my mother had left him. I expect he was upset but he didn’t say anything when he came to see me. He took me to Madame Tussauds. And he saw the lady who owned the house and they sorted out about the orphanage fees and decided I’d better stay on there.

  All this sounds very bad, the sort of thing nobody ought to do to a kid, and I didn’t like it at the time, but pretty soon I was really glad it had happened, because there were several ways the orphanage was much better than Southampton. The first was that there were no real bullies there. I was the sort of boy bullies seem to pick on, small, a bit fat, a bit oily, no use at games and so on—nobody would ever have taken one look at me and decided they wanted me for a friend. There were three boys who used to wait for me in the school yard. Day after day I’d have to go off, knowing they were going to be there.

  Another good thing was the women at the orphanage found out about my eyes. At Southampton they’d decided I was stupid, but it was because I couldn’t see the blackboard. These women gave me some spectacles. They didn’t take me to the oculist to have my eyes tested, but they had a box of spectacles which people had given them and they tried them out until they found some which weren’t too bad. These ones were too big and they kept falling off so we kept them on with sticking plaster behind my ears, and at least I could see the blackboard now.

  The third good thing was that there was a case of old books in the matron’s room. Until I’d got my specs I couldn’t really read much except the large-print books for small kids, and there weren’t enough of those, anything like. Now I could read real books, though I still had to get my nose pretty well up against the paper. The books were the sort people give away when they’re clearing out, mostly not for kids at all—old Pears’ Cyclopedias, or Travels in the Holy Land, or My Life in Merchant Banking—even those I’d read. But others were stories about things like explorers in the jungle, or young ladies who didn’t want to marry the person their parents had chosen for them and ran away and got a job as a kitchen maid and fell in love with the under-gardener who her parents wouldn’t approve of at all, only his father’s really a lord who’s not going to approve of him marrying a kitchen maid, and he’s got his own reasons for not letting on who he really is, but they both find out in the end so they can get married after all. I used to read it all as if it was dead true. I even read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine as if it was true.
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  I was nine when the war started. This was the Second World War, against Hitler’s Germany. I didn’t understand anything about it. Nothing much changed for a bit, and then everything did. First, the people my grandmother worked for decided to go to America till the war was over, so she had to get a new job. While she was doing this my father’s ship was sunk and he was drowned. Then the women who ran the orphanage said London was going to be bombed and we’d all got to move out, only they couldn’t find anywhere for us to stay together. I remember one called Mrs. Wimbush going round actually wringing her hands and telling everyone she couldn’t think what was going to become of us.

  What became of me was that my grandmother got a job cooking for a rich woman in a big house somewhere out in the country called Theston Manor. My grandmother went for an interview and explained about me, and this woman—Miss van Deering, her name was—said I could come too provided I kept out of her way. I think she might have had her own reasons. Because of the bombing they were sending all the kids out of London—thousands and thousands of them. Evacuees, they called them, and they were going round telling anyone out in the country who’d got a bit of spare room that they’d got to have some. There was certainly plenty of spare room at Theston Manor, but Miss van Deering didn’t want any evacuees there if she could help it. She was the sort who likes everything just so, and a pack of London kids wouldn’t have been that. Maybe she thought that having one kid there already would mean she didn’t have to have any more. If so, it worked, or something did. The people looking for places left her alone.

  2. Miss van Deering

  I was at Theston Manor for the rest of the war and a bit after, until I was sixteen, and if you’d asked me afterward I’d have told you that in all that time I’d met Miss van Deering just the once. Really met, I mean, to talk to, alone. I saw her in church on Sundays because she passed quite close on her way out. We sat at the back and she had her own pew, third on the right in front, and of course we used to wait for the gentry and the people who wanted to think they were gentry to leave first. As she passed us she used to nod and give a tight little smile to show she’d spotted we were there. She was a small woman, plump but neat, with silver hair and a soft round face. I used to think that she was like one of those cats you see, sitting in the sun with its paws drawn in under it, looking as if it’s got the world exactly the way it wants and you’d better not mess around with it.

  The time I met her happened like this. It would have been early in the summer holidays and I must have been coming up twelve. When the weather was OK I was supposed to help Mr. Frostle in the garden, if you could call it helping, because I was pretty useless at anything he gave me to do. Tuppence an hour I was paid, and I wasn’t really worth that, but it meant I finished up with three shillings at the end of the week. Then I had all the long afternoons to fill up. Theston village wasn’t that far off, where I went to school, and there were other kids amusing themselves down there, but I wasn’t the sort to make friends, so I was on my own.

  Now I’d better try and give you some idea of what the Manor was like. It was the sort of place you see in ads for Bentleys and Jaguars and such. There were twenty-eight bedrooms, not counting the attics where me and my grandmother slept. Heaven knows how many windows there must have been, and the wardens were very strict about the blackout, even right out in the country like that. And quite right too. A couple of villages away some people had been coming out of a dance one night and they’d left the door open too long and a German bomber who’d lost his way must have spotted it and dropped his bombs to get rid of them, and three houses got hit.

  A lot of the rooms at the Manor they just took the electric bulbs out of and locked the doors, but the passages and such they had to do something about, and there wasn’t anyone to go round taking the blackout down every morning and putting it up again in the evening, so it just got left up except in three or four rooms and a few other places. So there was this huge old house, all so dark that even on sunny days you had to switch the lights on to get around it. Not that the lights were that good, what there were of them. The electrics had been put in way back, before the First War, and they ran off their own generator, which the fuel was rationed for and the ration wasn’t enough, nothing like. So they’d taken out a lot of the bulbs in the passages too, and the rest were about ten-watt, and you had to remember to turn them off as soon as you’d gone by or you were in dead trouble.

  And, my, was it cold in winter! But that’s not part of the story, which I’d better get on with.

  One of the rooms which was kept locked because it hadn’t got any blackout was the servants’ hall. This was where the maids and footmen and such used to have their meals and sit around when they weren’t wanted. There’d been nine of them living in the house in peacetime, Kitty told me, just to look after Miss van Deering, not counting the ones who came in by the day from the cottages and the village. They’d all gone off to war work now. The servants’ hall was along a corridor from the kitchen, at the back of the house and down from the main ground floor. I’d gone in there once to help my grandmother carry something she needed, and while she was rooting around looking for what she wanted she opened a cupboard and I saw it was full of books. I didn’t dare ask, for fear of being told no (that was the sort of kid I was), but I spotted where she put the key after she’d locked up, and as soon as she was into her after-dinner nap (that’s what people call lunch now) I sneaked back for a look. They were just what I wanted, the same as I used to read at the orphanage, romances about gentry pretending to be servants and such, as well as a lot of old thrillers. So after that as soon as dinner was over I used to tell my grandmother I was going for a walk, which she was all in favor of as she couldn’t bear to have me hanging around in the kitchen lounging and scratching, as she put it, and she had the idea that fresh air was good for me. “Never did your father any harm, out on the ocean briny,” she used to say, knowing quite well he’d spent most of his time in a hot little galley frying stuff up for the crew. I’d put on my boots and my waterproofs if it was wet and start off on my walk, but as soon as I was out of sight I’d slip into one of the sheds and read. There were acres and acres of garden, mostly gone wild, with apple stores and an icehouse and log sheds and a coach house and potting sheds and stables and kennels and tool rooms and so on. I found a place up some stone stairs above the stables where there was a pile of musty hay and a window and nobody ever came. Winter I’d read till it got too dark to see. Summer I’d work out how many pages I’d get through before I’d got to go in and do my homework and mark the place and stop when I got there.

  “Well, you ought to have a bit of an appetite,” my grandmother used to say when I got in. Luckily, reading gave me just as much of an appetite as walking would have done, for my grandmother’s food, at any rate. She was a really good cook. She couldn’t bear to cook food which wasn’t interesting to eat. Day after day we’d have meals better than any I’ve tasted since, and all out of the scraps of stuff she could get hold of in wartime. Apart from that I don’t know that I can give you much idea of her. Like I’ve said, she was short and fat and had this bad hip. I don’t know that she was fond of me, but she looked after me and did her best for me because that was right, but I don’t remember that I ever had a hug from her or anything like that. She liked things to be very definite, so she knew where she was. Later on, when I took to reading to her, she used to bother about why anybody should go to the trouble of making stories up, and whether there wasn’t something not really right about listening to what amounted to a pack of lies.

  I must have found the books in the servants’ hall the autumn before the time I met Miss van Deering, and by then I’d read most of them twice over. That morning it was sheeting with rain, and while we were finishing up breakfast Kitty came in for her usual cup of tea and said since there wasn’t any point in my going out to help Mr. Frostle I might as well come and give her a hand in the library. Kitty was an old woman who’d worked in the house more
than fifty years. She’d been an under-housemaid to start with, living in, but then she’d married the groom, Benjie Prior, and gone to live with him in one of the cottages. Now she just came in to clean the bits Miss van Deering used, her bedroom and so on, and a little room right above the kitchen, called the office, which was her day room. Doing the library was something else.

  Getting on three years I’d been living at Theston, but I’d never been up on the main floor, where the library was, and all the other big rooms. In the old days, when there’d been all those servants, the gentry liked to pretend they weren’t there except when they needed them, so the servants had their own steep wooden stairs running up at the back of the house, with doors through to all the floors, so they could get in and out to do their work when the gentry weren’t around. To get up to our bedrooms in the attics we used the back stairs as far as the second floor. Someone had decided it wasn’t worth doing the blackout any further, so they’d shut the stairs off from then on, and we had to slip through and on up some other stairs to the third floor, which the gentry had used for guests who didn’t matter that much, and for their own kids. Then one more lot of stairs took us on to the attics. (This is all going to come in later.)

  Well, Kitty took me up from the kitchen into this long dark passage on the first floor, switching the dim lights on and off as she went by. Then she took a key from a shelf and unlocked a great big door and switched the light on until she’d drawn the curtains and opened the heavy wooden shutters behind them. The furniture was covered with dust sheets and all the shelves had newspapers on them, folded to cover the tops of the books and hang down the spines. It was still really summer outside, but it looked like winter in the room with the wet gray light falling on the snowy dust sheets. There were three tall windows with old blotchy mirrors between them. Otherwise it was bookshelves all the way round, from the floor almost to the ceiling, except for the door and a huge fireplace opposite the windows. Each stack of shelves had a letter at the top. We were doing stack C.