by Hilary McKay
“Listen, Clarry!” interrupted Peter at this point. “When I was a kid I believed that too. But I was stupid; I saw that years and years ago. It wasn’t your fault; you didn’t choose any of it. Vanessa should have told you that.”
“She did. And she said she knew you didn’t blame me. She said you were much too decent. I wish someone could have helped Mother, though, Peter. Wouldn’t everything have been different now if they had?”
Peter nodded, picking up the little picture again.
“Vanessa says you can get copies of photographs,” Clarry told him. “How much do you think it costs? Might there be somewhere in Oxford?”
“I’ll find out,” promised Peter. “And one day we’ll do it, however much it costs.”
“Take it with you, then. It’ll be safer with you. Father might—”
She jumped suddenly at the sound of the front door, they glanced at each other, Peter stowed the picture back in the dictionary, the dictionary in his bag, and his bag under his arm, while Clarry hurried into the hall.
There he was, meticulously rolling his umbrella, taking off his hat.
“Hello, Father!” said Clarry brightly. “You’re just in time. I’ve filled the kettle for tea and we saved you hot sausage rolls!”
“I’ve eaten, thank you, Clarry. Is Peter back again? I see his coat.”
“I’m here,” said Peter, appearing with his bag. “How are you, Father?”
“Quite well, rather too busy. All well with you?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“I lit a little fire in the sitting room to make it comfortable for you,” said Clarry.
“Thank you, very thoughtful,” said her father, and went in and closed the door.
“I expect he’s tired,” said Clarry.
“What he is . . . ,” began Peter, and then looked at Clarry, and shut up, a thing he would not have done a year before, but then, Peter was changing.
Twenty-Two
THE WINTER THAT FOLLOWED WAS very hard to bear. The war news was terrible. No one heard from Rupert. School helped Clarry through, the sane, cold classrooms, the friendly faces, the solid comfort of books.
In spring they said, “Well at least it’s spring,” but no one dared say “Over by Christmas.” And then summer came around again, and to Clarry’s complete surprise, her grandmother wrote to ask her and Peter to visit. Clarry and her father met at the foot of the stairs, each holding a letter, each smiling with delight.
“Very helpful, very helpful,” said Clarry’s father, rubbing his hands together. “No more than they should do of course, but even so . . . er . . .”
Clarry looked at him in sudden apprehension, recognizing that something uncomfortable was coming.
“I have been wondering if it would be sensible for you to . . . be in Cornwall long-term.”
“Long-term?”
“Out of danger. Air raids. I suppose you can’t be expected to know, but there were air raids on London only a few weeks ago. Zeppelins. Very unpleasant.”
“We had a talk about zeppelins at school from the geography teacher,” said Clarry. “She said we were not to fuss about air raids because the prevailing winds from the Atlantic make it almost impossible that they will ever come this far west.”
“Be that as it may,” said her father impatiently, “I’m sure your grandparents would be glad to have you. There is no need for you to stay on at school once you are over fourteen.”
“There is! There is!”
“The fact is, Clarry, well, this house. I’ve been thinking of giving it up for some time now. It seems hardly worth the cost, just for . . . er . . .”
He glanced away from Clarry’s eyes. His face was quite expressionless, almost unconcerned.
“I have to go to school,” said Clarry. “I’m sure Grandmother would say so too. And where would you live? And Peter, in the holidays?”
“Peter could go to Cornwall. Something could easily be arranged for myself. As a matter of fact there is a very pleasant set of rooms directly above the offices.”
Clarry turned to the hall window and looked blindly into the street. After a while a movement across the road caught her eye. Miss Vane, gathering up a cat.
“Perhaps . . . ,” she began, and then started again. “Perhaps I could live with someone else. They would have to be paid, of course, but maybe Grandmother would help.”
“No, no, no!” exclaimed her father. “Whatever would people say? I assumed you would like to live in Cornwall. Please forget the suggestion. At any rate you will be there for the summer, which is something.”
It was something. It was the summer that Clarry properly made friends with her grandmother. Peter, whose last year of school was coming up, spent most of his time studying. Clarry took schoolbooks with her too, but she also found time to garden with her grandmother in the long silky summer evenings, and to look through photograph albums of Victorian strangers who might, or might not, have been distant relations. Last of all came herself, Peter, and Rupert.
“Rupert is very like his mother used to be,” said her grandmother. “Those golden good looks! We hardly hear from him, you know. I write to him weekly and his grandfather sends messages but there has been nothing back for months.”
Clarry didn’t reply. She had heard from Rupert, a few forlorn lines that she thought it best her grandmother didn’t know.
I’m sorry Clarry. It’s all a bit of a mess, isn’t it? I try not to let myself think.
His friend was dead. His wild, mad, Latin-quoting, football-captain, red-haired Irish friend, Michael. Killed in no-man’s-land, a mile or so from where Rupert was stationed, but word had come racing down the trenches to him. “He’s out there. We can’t fetch him in.”
“I’ll fetch him in,” said Rupert, and went crawling out into the terrible summer night, through cracked swamps of mud and splintered metal and wire and stiffened bundles that were not men or trees or anything recognizable anymore. Miraculously, although the dark was splattered with gunfire, no sniper’s bullet found him, and he came to his friend all broken in a shell hole, still alive but clammy cold. There were strange shapes where his boots should have been and his right arm ended too soon but he got one eye open and croaked, “Rosy,” out of the good side of his mouth.
Rupert pulled flasks from his pockets and said, “Rum? Water? Come on, my mad Irish,” but he couldn’t swallow. So then Rupert lay beside him and put his arms round him and said, “We’ll get out a stretcher party and have you back before the pubs shut,” and his friend’s good eye glared at him, the white showing bright. “Go to sleep, get your head down,” said Rupert. “Busy day tomorrow, if we’re to get you home before dark.”
“Cold,” whispered his friend, so Rupert dragged his own jacket off and tucked it round his chest. He thought his back was probably broken as well as everything else, because of the way his legs were sprawled like a puppet with the strings cut. Right overhead a flare popped, greenish silvery light. Rupert felt the eye on him again. It seemed to take a long time for the flare to fade, and then there was another, but not so close, and a crump of explosion farther down the line.
“Cleaning the chimney,” said Rupert, which was an old school joke from the time of Clarry’s great idea and Peter and Simon’s rocket. He wished his friend would hurry up and die, but he was young and strong and so it took until morning. Then Rupert tried to pick him up but he couldn’t, so he walked back empty-handed in his shirtsleeves, forgetting his jacket. He took no care walking back but strangely nothing happened to him.
The next day he wrote a letter to Ireland saying how lucky that his friend had died from a single bullet, instantaneously, never knowing a thing.
It was only two years since they both left school but it felt an awful lot longer.
Twenty-Three
IT TOOK A VERY LONG time for Miss Vane to overcome her mistrust of the girls’ high school, that racketing collection of the unfeminine and inky.
“I always notice their stockings,” she told h
er tortoiseshell cat (having few humans to talk to, she very often turned to this animal), “and their deplorable hats. Clarry will be spoiled.”
By this she meant that Clarry would become noisy, opinionated, and “rough,” said Miss Vane to the tortoiseshell, who blinked in dismay.
When this did not happen, Miss Vane said Clarry would ruin her health with overwork.
This also turned out not to be true. In fact, away from the seeping carbon monoxide fumes from the Miss Pinkses’ paraffin stoves, Clarry flourished. None of Miss Vane’s other predictions came true either. Clarry didn’t destroy her eyes with reading, or begin arguing with her father, or even take to eating buns in the street, as Miss Vane had observed high school girls doing in the past. Miss Vane, watching suspiciously from behind her curtains, and always ready to dash across with reproachful remarks and offers to broker a reconciliation with the spurned Miss Pinkses, detected none of these things. It made her sad. She missed having Clarry as her perpetual Good Deed. She also missed having a person who would appreciate her latest cat story, or admire her knitting, or chatter beside her on a walk along the front. And so one gray afternoon in early fall she was very thankful to see Clarry sneezing in the street as she fumbled for her door key.
“She will neglect that cold and it will turn to pneumonia!” the delighted Miss Vane told her tortoiseshell cat. “I have seen it happen time after time!”
With this untrue but energizing statement, Miss Vane turned to her kitchen cupboard, and an hour afterward Clarry answered a knock on the door, and there she was bearing onion soup, a strip of red flannel to wrap around her throat, a large tin of mustard powder, and such a smile of pure happiness that Clarry welcomed her as if the last two years of crossness had never happened at all.
“You should shake a little dry mustard into your stocking feet on very cold mornings,” said Miss Vane, quite husky with joy at the warmth of her welcome.
“I should never ever have thought of that,” said Clarry, hugging her again.
By these means, Clarry’s sneeze was banished, and she and Miss Vane became friends once more. Clarry was, as Miss Vane told the tortoiseshell cat, the same dear girl as ever. Still writing letters to the boys, still painting her butterflies, still tiptoeing around her father. Rather too confident about the safety of zeppelin raids, and still hobnobbing with the rag-and-bone man. “But that is nothing,” Miss Vane assured her cat, “compared to what I had feared.” In her joy she unearthed a length of tightly woven blue striped cloth that she had put away for curtains, and made for Clarry a brand-new dress. It turned out to be her finest creation ever.
“You are kind!” said Clarry.
“It has a four-inch hem and the gathers will let out,” said Miss Vane a little proudly. “It really is almost your color, you know. I don’t see why it shouldn’t last you for years.”
Clarry didn’t see why it shouldn’t either, and encouraged by this new friendliness asked, “Miss Vane, have you ever thought of having a . . . another person to live with you?”
“Goodness, Clarry!”
“Not for very long. Just until I finish school. Because Father said he may . . . he talked of closing up this house and going to live in some rooms over the offices, and of course Peter and I couldn’t go there too. Father thought that Peter might go to Cornwall in the holidays, and that I might live there all the time.”
“Well, yes,” said Miss Vane, in a smoothing, understanding voice. “He knows how pleased you have always been to visit. And I expect he thinks you would be safer there too. I should miss you, but it would be much less worry for him.”
“But there’s school . . . ,” began Clarry.
Miss Vane waved away school as if it didn’t exist, and continued, “I think that you are old enough to understand, Clarry dear, that your father has found parenthood difficult from the start. Why, after Peter was born, for instance, he was rarely at home, absent with his work, for weeks at a time.”
“Weeks!” exclaimed Clarry.
“Naturally, as a neighbor, I took an interest. And your poor mother was plainly not well.”
Clarry managed to steady her voice. “Did she tell you that?”
“No,” said Miss Vane, straightening her shoulders. “She told me nothing, and it was not my place to ask. I tried . . . I simply tried to be . . .”
A tear rolled down her cheek, an honest, ungossiping, remembering tear.
“Kind,” she said, blotting it. “Oh, dear. I hope I haven’t said too much. Please don’t repeat it, Clarry. It was a sad time. Little Peter and his mama, and your father so silent. It brings it all back, remembering.”
Miss Vane paused to smooth the folds of the blue-striped frock. “Since then, of course,” she said brightly, “he has soldiered on wonderfully! All the same, I do see what a help it would be for him to have you both in Cornwall, and I couldn’t possibly, Clarry dear, interfere. Besides,” she added, just as Clarry’s father had, “whatever would people say?”
All that evening Clarry’s mind was a tangle of the shadowy past, and the uneasy present. Her schoolbooks were some comfort, though, a little escape that perhaps might one day become bigger.
Peter, Clarry wrote, when you said about university for me, did you really mean it, or were you being nice?
Twenty-Four
I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU mean, “being nice,” replied Peter, rather grumpily. What’s the point of pretending you haven’t a brain when you have? Obviously you will have to work. Like I do. You can send me your math to correct, if you like, and any Latin translation you need looking at. Once you get there you can earn money tutoring during vacation, enough to pay for somewhere to live, I should think. If I’m there too we could share and it would be cheaper. Last week I took the picture you found into Oxford to get it copied and I ran into someone there who gave me an idea. . . .
Vanessa said, “You’re always inky!”
“Often, but not always,” said Clarry, delighted to see her friend again. “How’s Simon?”
“Bothered,” said Vanessa, after considering the question. “Bothered, bony, doesn’t speak much, goes and visits Rupert’s Lucy, sits and draws her on the letters he sends . . .”
“Letters to Rupert?”
“Yes, letters to Rupert. And he reads about the war all the time. He collects those magazines in the Times—don’t say, ‘What magazines?’ I can see you’re just about to do!”
“We don’t have a newspaper here anymore.”
“They’ll have the Times at school. They always did. Look in the library. Oh, Clarry, Clarry, Clarry, I hate this war but I sort of love it too. Is that awful? Yes!”
“It’s because you’re doing something useful,” said Clarry.
“Wise Clarry! You’re right. And I make them laugh—the boys, I mean. The boys in the beds, that’s what I call them, I kiss them like this. . . .” Vanessa kissed two fingers and planted them lightly on Clarry’s nose. “Dad’s ship was in a battle. He was taken prisoner. Simon knows. Did you hear?”
“No!” Clarry exclaimed. “No, I didn’t! Oh, Vanessa! Oh, I’m sorry! When? What do you know?”
“Now, now,” said Vanessa. “Don’t fuss! Are you or are you not a high school girl? We don’t know anything except he’s alive. Or was. Don’t look like that! Make me weep, and I’ll slay you, Clarry! Do you notice I don’t smell of carbolic today? French perfume, that’s what!”
Clarry sniffed and asked, “Where did you get it from?”
“Clever Rupert brought it, last week when he was back. . . . Clarry, you didn’t see him? Oh, stupid me and my big mouth . . .”
“Rupert was back?” croaked Clarry.
“Only for a few days. In a very odd mood. Couldn’t get anything out of him except he’d spent a day in Cornwall and it had been awful. Clarry, don’t stare at me like that.”
“Grandmother writes, but she didn’t tell me.”
“Perhaps because it had been awful. He would hardly talk, just frantic rushing about on a motor
bike with me hanging on the back for dear life. He looked wonderful, so don’t worry.”
“Oh, good.”
“Clarry, they often can’t be bothered with family much. The boys in the beds. Well, not can’t be bothered, but they don’t want the questions and the tears and . . .”
“Fuss,” said Clarry.
“Yes. All right. Fuss. Can’t bear it. Neither can I.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t talk about Rupe. Don’t talk about Dad. How’s Peter? I do love him. So steady on his wobbly leg. So gorgeous and glum. He and Simon will be leaving school soon. Will you come to the speech day with Mum and me? We’ll have to clap hard, to make up for Dad. Oh, where is he? I went home and Mum was hugging the globe. Wailing. Fussing. She went to the wrong school, obviously. Now you’ve made me howl!”
Vanessa sobbed, drooping against the wall, tears splashing on the brass-topped table. Then she sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, said, “Adore you, Clarry, got to go now. Sorry about Rupert. Love to Peter. Peter the rock. My lovely dad, prisoner, imagine! No, don’t! I’ve found some beautiful new shoes for dancing! Four straps, two on the foot and two above the ankle, red patent leather, shall I teach you how to tango right now?”
“Yes, right now!” said Clarry immediately, and so they did, up and down the hall and into the musty cold dining room and out back to the front door, and then Vanessa was gone. “I’ll write!” she cried, and she did, a picture of her new shoes drawn on a postcard. Clarry wrote painfully back, dragging the words from the air one at a time and wrenching them grimly onto the paper.
Your poor mother, worrying. And your dad. I’m glad you could cheer up Rupert. Those shoes, the heels are pretty. Miss Vane says to tell you to clean patent leather with old bread! I hope you smell nice today.
Yours unfussingly,
Clarry
Simon thought that if the only way of being in contact with someone was by words written on paper, then those words must be both worth reading and true. For this reason, as often as he could manage, he made the long weekend journey by bicycle and train from school to his great-aunt’s cottage in order to check up on Lucy. After Lucy, it was a nine-mile cycle ride to see Clarry. Sometimes he stayed the night there, but often he went back to the cottage in the evening, caught a morning train north to Oxford, cycled from Oxford to school, and was back for five o’clock evensong. This weekend break was called an exeat. There were no exeats granted for those who missed evensong, but Simon never did. He would stand beside Peter in the choir, breathless, exhausted, but with something to write about that night.