by A. M. Howell
Helena stared at Boy. “He?”
Boy puffed out a small sigh. “Bertie.”
Helena drew in a sharp breath. “Who…is Bertie?”
Boy looked utterly miserable. It was as if she was wishing for Psammead, the sand fairy from Five Children and It to grant her a wish. What was Boy wishing for?
“Tell me, Boy,” said Helena, leaning forward. “Tell me the truth and maybe we can put things right.”
Boy’s eyes were bright and watery. “But what if the truth is horrible? What if nothing can be right ever again?”
“Then it’s especially important you tell me,” whispered Helena reaching out to take her friend’s hand and giving it a firm squeeze.
The autumn sky was cerulean blue, the reeds at the river’s edge burnished with brown and buzzing with insects, as Florence and her older brother Bertie sat on the small bench in the centre of the rowing boat. Florence was clutching her oar tightly, but as usual Bertie was distracted, leaning across his oar to watch the minnows ducking and diving in the sparkling water, which was swollen with rain from an early autumn storm.
But the storm had passed, the day was beautiful and their mother lay back in the boat, her hands trailing lazily through the water as her children squabbled and rowed.
“Hold the oar tighter, Bertie,” Florence said through gritted teeth.
“I am holding it,” said Bertie, who in fact had loosened his grip even more. Florence was always telling him what to do. He was getting mightily fed up with it. If she had been the eldest he might have understood it, but he was older by ten months and should be the one to dispense advice and guidance to his younger sibling.
“Watch it, we’re jolly close to the reeds,” said Florence.
“And?” Bertie retorted. “Relax, Florrie. There’s no need to be so anxious all the time.”
“Don’t call me Florrie and I’m not anxious all the time. Only when you’re not paying attention…when you’re being all dreamy and silly.”
“Children,” their mother said sleepily. “Do stop squabbling, please. It’s so tiresome.”
“We can picnic right here,” Florence said, turning her oar and heaving with all her might. “I’m not spending another minute in this boat with him.”
Their mother sighed, sat up and straightened her bonnet. She pointed to the riverbank, to the branches of a weeping willow dipping into the water. “Yes, well, maybe we need a short spell out of the boat. There is perfect,” she said.
The children (well, Florence mostly) steered the boat to the bank. Florence leaped out and tied the rope to the tree. Her mother picked up the picnic basket and passed it to her.
“Are you coming?” Florence asked Bertie, who had placed his oar down and was leaning over the side and staring into the silky water.
“Can you imagine what it must be like to be a fish? To dart among the reeds and play among the rocks,” Bertie said.
Florence snorted. Her brother was so impractical. Father wanted him to take over the family printing firm when he was older, but sometimes Bertie would creep into Florence’s room at night and tell her of his plans to study botany and travel to the far reaches of the globe discovering new and exciting species of plant. Father would not be happy with that at all!
Florence helped her mother shake out the picnic blanket, lay out the china and arrange the food under the boughs of the willow, near the fallen trunk of an oak tree. “Bertie never helps,” she grumbled, watching him as he leaned over the side of the boat with his fishing net.
Florence’s mother leaned across and placed her hand on Florence’s. Her gloved palm was cool and calming. “Leave him be. Bertie needs space to dream. It won’t be long before his life is not his own.”
Florence didn’t entirely understand what her mother meant, but she swallowed the words aching in her throat. What about me? Don’t I need space to dream too?
Her mother stroked a strand of Florence’s hair behind her ear, glanced at the boat, which was bobbing at the river’s edge. “I think I might have a little walk along the bank, until Bertie is ready to join us.”
Florence nodded, watched her mother’s parasol puff into the air like a mushroom, and her long skirts trail through the sheep-nibbled grass. She pulled her knees to her chest, rested her head on them and closed her eyes.
A fly buzzed by her ear.
The breeze rustled the leaves.
A splash, a bird diving for fish.
The sound of water lapping against the boat.
Ducks bustling in the reeds.
Then silence as she dozed.
“Florence. Florence!” Her mother’s raised voice was urgent.
Florence opened her eyes. Her mother was running towards her, a gloved finger pointing. Florence watched in fascination as her mother’s parasol lifted into the air and landed upside down in the river and bobbed away like a small boat.
The boat!
Florence turned. The rope mooring the boat to the tree had come untied. She stood up. “Bertie – the rope,” she yelled. She stared at the boat, her eyes widening. Bertie was no longer in it. Florence ran to the edge of the bank. She scanned the river, saw the lip of an oar floating away downstream. Her stomach rolled. “Bertie!” she called, cupping her hands to her mouth, her eyes darting up and down the bank.
Her brother must have sprung out of the boat, gone for a walk like their mother, or fallen asleep in the straggling, end-of-season daisies. At weekends the river was full of boaters and punters, the bank bustling with walkers. But today was Monday. And it was October. The river was swollen with fast-flowing currents and there was no one else around.
“Bertie!” their mother called shrilly. She had waded into the water. Her body racked with shivers as the cold water seeped into her clothes. Letting out a small bird-like cry, she stumbled into the neck-high reeds, which swallowed her whole.
Florence ran after her mother, heard her desperate call for help. With a hot burst of horror, she saw her mother heaving a limp Bertie through the reeds. Florence stumbled down the bank, clasped her brother’s cold hand in hers. She knew then, with absolute certainty, that life as she knew it had disappeared into the swollen river with Bertie and was unlikely to ever return.
Boy pressed her lips together, looked at her knees. She was gripping them so tightly her knuckles flashed white.
Helena’s head was spinning from the story. Except that it wasn’t just a story. “Your name isn’t Boy. You’re Florence.”
Boy gave her a limp nod.
“I thought I heard your father call you Boy…but he wasn’t talking about you. He was talking about your brother, Bertie. His son, his boy.”
Boy nodded again.
Helena’s head spun. “I think I should call you Florence then – it is the name your mother gave you after all,” Helena said softly.
Florence rubbed at an ink mark on her palm, gave Helena a weak nod.
“So after your mother rescued Bertie from the reeds…what happened?” asked Helena.
“We think Bertie dropped an oar and untied the boat to try and retrieve it, but then fell into the river,” Florence said in a dull voice. “He must have swallowed a lot of water which made him very sick…and he died. I was sent to stay with Aunt Katherine in London. When we returned to Cambridge, at the end of October, Mother had gone to the south of France. Father said she was fragile…had caught a chill from the river. The doctors said going overseas would help her recover.”
“Gosh,” Helena said. “How terrible.” She bit hard on her lower lip.
This explained Florence’s fear of crossing the river, the alarm she had seen in her eyes.
“When we returned from my aunt’s, Father wasn’t like Father any more. He hadn’t slept or shaved. The house was in a terrible mess, nothing in its rightful place. All he did was sit in front of Grandmother’s clock and stare at it, hour after hour. Then he began to buy more clocks. The servants tried to put the house back together as it was, but Father got very cross and
in the end they couldn’t bear the upheaval – all the clocks and the chimes and strikes. They all left for other jobs; one by one.” Florence picked at the skin edging a thumbnail. “I think maybe it was all my fault.”
“But…why?” asked Helena.
“If I had been watching Bertie. If I hadn’t been so cross at him for being so dreamy, maybe I would have stayed in the boat, not fallen asleep and he would never have fallen into the river.”
“But it was an accident,” said Helena. “Surely everyone knows that?”
Florence gave a small shrug. “Father refuses to talk about the accident, or Bertie. Sometimes…it feels like he never even existed. So that’s why I…began to dress in my brother’s clothes, so I didn’t forget. But the more I wear Bertie’s clothes, the less real I feel.”
Helena placed a hand on Florence’s arm. She wanted to tell her that she had never met anyone so real in her life before, but did not know how to put it into words. Perhaps for once she didn’t need words. Maybe just sitting quietly next to her friend was enough.
“I don’t know why the clocks stopped, Helena. And I’m sorry my father took the Foxes’s things. I’m sorry he made your father sign a contract too. And I hate how horrid he is to Aunt Katherine. But I think…he’s just so sad about Bertie and Mother being gone and I can’t put any of that right.”
Helena tried to hide the surprise on her face. Florence hadn’t stopped the clocks.
“I just…wish Mother were here. She would know how to mend things. The longer she is away…the worse Father becomes and the less he seems to notice me,” Florence said glumly. “I just wish the house would go back to the way it used to be.”
There was a thought about Mr Westcott’s odd behaviour at the edges of Helena’s brain, like an out-of-reach itch. The thought drifted away.
Florence looked up at Helena. “You said all of our things are in the stables – the furniture too?” Helena nodded. A spark seemed to be growing in Florence, like a newly struck match. “Maybe it would help if Father remembered how it used to be,” she said. Still holding Helena’s hand, she stood up and pulled her through the maze of books to the window which looked over the back garden. She pointed through the inky darkness towards the stables. “All of the things which should be in this house are out there. All of Bertie’s things are out there. Maybe if we get them back, start to make this house look and feel like a house again, Father will remember good things. And remembering good things always makes you feel a little brighter.”
Helena thought of the portrait at home in their small living room in London, of her own mother and father and the memories and comfort it brought when she sat with her father and looked at it. “I think that’s an excellent idea. Perhaps you should also wear Bertie’s clothes in front of your father. It’s important he knows how terribly you are missing your brother and the way things used to be. We could bring in a few objects from the stable at a time, rugs, lamps and move the skeleton clocks and return books back to the library shelves. You deserve to have your things back,” said Helena. She thought of her own mother, how without Orbit the memory of her would be fading even more quickly. She had to help Florence and her father remember Bertie. “There was a card table in the stables. Did you play games at it with your mother and father and Bertie?”
Florence nodded. “Bertie loved snap. He was quite ferocious at slamming his cards on the table.” Her lips tilted at the happy memory.
“The book I found,” Helena said, opening Florence’s desk and pulling out the copy of Five Children and It. “Was this Bertie’s?”
Florence nodded, walked across and took it from her. “He loved to read, always had his nose in a book. Sometimes I stand in the library and squeeze my eyes shut, ignore the ticks of the clocks and imagine I can hear the rustle of pages turning as Bertie reads. I’m going to put that book back in the library where it belongs – along with all of the other books. We can’t let Bertie be forgotten. It isn’t right, living in a house full of clocks while Bertie’s things are outside in a stuffy old stable.”
Helena gave her a firm smile. “You’re right, Florence. We can’t let your father treat you like this. We must take action at once.”
The next evening, Helena’s father was doing his usual pre-inspection round of clock maintenance, checking the pendulums were swinging correctly, that the cogs and dials and springs were all in order. Helena was dismayed to see that his usually steady eyes were skittish, his fingers shaky as he checked the clocks. The pressure in this house was devouring him, in the way a shark swallows a fish. As he and Helena entered the skeleton-clock room, he paused. Florence was sitting on her usual chair by the door. She licked a finger and bent forward to rub at a smudge on her boots, then wiped her hands on her (or rather Bertie’s) blue velvet trousers.
Helena’s father scratched the side of his nose and threw Helena a puzzled glance as he looked into the room. “What…are those?” he asked.
Helena eyed the four clocks, which had been moved along a shelf to make way for a row of leather-bound books. She glanced at the small card table and the blue and cream fabric of the lampshade standing on it. They had placed it to the right of the yawning fireplace near the window. Florence had said that was where it used to stand, when the room had been a place where they sat and talked and played games in front of a roaring fire on chilly evenings.
“Books. A table –” she replied – “oh, and a lamp.”
Her father turned. “Yes, I can see that. But…where…did they come from?”
Helena glanced at Florence, who was now leaning forward and feeding Orbit seeds through the bars of his cage. She returned Helena’s look and raised her eyebrows.
“Is there a…problem, Father?” Helena asked hesitantly.
Her father’s gaze was still fixed on the table and lamp. “No. It is just…yesterday these objects were not here. And now they are.”
Helena scuffed the toe of her right boot on the floorboard. She hated lying to her father, but it was necessary. He would surely put a stop to their plans if he found out about them.
“Is Mr Westcott coming to inspect the clocks today?” Helena asked.
Her words seemed to pull her father from his trance. “Of course.” He pulled his pocket watch from his jacket and glanced at it (although quite why, Helena had no idea, as there were twenty perfectly good clock dials in the room he could have looked at).
What would Mr Westcott say when he saw his daughter dressed in Bertie’s clothes, the objects returned to the room? Would memories bounce into his head, make him realize how oddly he had been behaving? Maybe he would fold Florence into a fierce hug, promise to forget about the clocks and concentrate on finding his absent wife. Helena crossed her fingers behind her back.
Mr Westcott and his sister swept into the room. “Good evening,” Katherine said sweetly. She paused, glanced at Florence, then at the table, lamp and books, then at her brother, a flush creeping onto her cheeks.
Mr Westcott took a step backwards, brought a hand to his mouth.
Helena’s father cleared his throat. “Is…everything to your satisfaction, Sir?”
Mr Westcott appeared not to have heard. He walked slowly to Florence, as if he was being reeled into the room on a piece of string against his will. He stood in front of her, his arms limp by his sides. “Florence…why…why are you wearing those…clothes?” His voice was whisper light.
Florence bit on her bottom lip, as she held her father’s gaze.
Helena looked at Katherine, whose normally smooth-as-silk brow had furrowed into dainty creases. She felt a burn of indigestion and suddenly wished she hadn’t had the second helping of Stanley’s sheep’s kidneys in gravy at supper. Had she and Florence made a terrible mistake?
The clocks filled the silence with ticks and tocks and clunks and clicks and whirs. Helena willed Florence to speak, to tell her father everything that was troubling her. But it was as if the clocks had stolen her voice, buried it deep within their cogs and springs
.
“Go and change into your own clothes immediately,” Mr Westcott said under his breath.
Florence sat mutely on her chair, unmoving, her cheeks waxy.
Mr Westcott rubbed his palms over his own cheeks. He closed his eyes for a second, then flicked them open and stared again at his daughter, as if perhaps hoping he would see something – or someone – different. “Florence Westcott…I…I…”
“Come along, darling,” said Katherine, helping Florence to her feet. She threw her brother a dark and despairing look. But there was something else in her eyes too, something almost like…gratitude. But what could she possibly be grateful for? She swung Florence round, gripped her by the forearms and leaned close until they were almost nose to nose. “You can dress in any clothes you wish…”
“The books…the card table…who put those in here?” interrupted Mr Westcott, his eyes roaming the room.
Helena held her breath, suddenly wanting to hide.
“Was it you?” Mr Westcott asked, turning to Florence, who was white-faced and arching away from her aunt.
Florence twisted from her aunt’s grip, finding her voice at last. “It was me, Father. Me and Helena.”
“Um…right…well…shall I show you the clocks, Sir?” Helena’s father said, throwing Helena an extremely disapproving look. Helena’s skin prickled. Surely if her father knew what had happened to the Fox family he would understand.
Mr Westcott nodded at Helena’s father, swallowed and clasped his hands together. “Yes…yes…the clocks. Show me the clocks,” he said breathlessly.
“Come, Florence. Let’s seek out Stanley and you can both show me what you have been working on,” said Katherine, taking Florence’s hand and steering her to the door.
The small nub of attention Mr Westcott had thrown at Florence might not have been the sort of attention she had wanted, but as she was led from the room, Florence had the same determined look in her eye that Helena had seen after they had returned from the Foxes’s shop. It was the kind of look that made Helena think Florence would do almost anything to get her father’s attention again.