by Joan Aiken
‘Umn. Was telling some story about bumping into a kangaroo in the dark. Didn’t sound true.’
‘Wonder why he comes now, in the middle of term,’ somebody yawned.
‘I bags the first bath.’
‘Don’t be too long then, you stinker.’
At last the lights were out. And at last, clutching under his pillow the diary, in which he had written, ‘First day at school. Vile place’, Cosmo went to sleep. As soon as he slept, he began to dream about the brook at Courtoys Mill. He and Mark were wading up it, searching, searching, and calling, calling, for the boy called Len or Ken. And the water was coming in over the tops of his boots.
By the end of the week Cosmo had a kind of skeleton idea of school life. He knew, for instance, that Mademoiselle, who taught French, was not taken seriously; nor was Miss Gracie, who taught singing; in fact everybody gave her a hellish time. On the other hand Mr Kelly, who taught Latin, was received with the deepest silence and respect, because he had a waspish habit of pulling people’s hair if he considered they were being impertinent or inattentive. Mrs Robinson was kind and sensible; so was Miss Nivven, who taught English, and who had told Cosmo about the library, which was a useful refuge after supper; though he had now fallen into the habit of sliding with Tim and Frances for a while every evening. It was dull, but better than staying in his own form room, where he felt under constant silent criticism. If Charley did not like you, then nobody could display too much friendship, and Charley was in no hurry to be welcoming. Nor was Mr Cheevy, the form master, who tended to scowl when his bloodshot eye fell on Cosmo. One day, arriving early and finding Cosmo the only one there, getting out his maths books, he said abruptly,
‘Your father was Richard Curtoys, wasn’t he?’ – giving the name its correct pronunciation.
‘Yes. He’s still alive,’ Cosmo said.
‘You should call me sir.’
‘Sir.’
‘Why did he leave England? He was doing useful work in cancer research. Why did he choose to give it all up and go and bury himself in the bush?’
‘I don’t know,’ Cosmo said. ‘Sir.’
For the first time he consciously wondered why the family had moved to Australia. He had been only six at the time and had accepted the move matter-of-factly. Before that they had lived in London. He could dimly remember a house in Hampstead, sailing boats on the ponds. He might ask Cousin Eunice about it.
‘Perhaps he thought it would be healthier,’ he said. ‘Sir.’
‘That sounds to me like rubbish.’
Mr Cheevy seemed personally annoyed about it; his watery eyes glared, his damp skin sweated with irritation.
‘What was he doing out there, anyway? In the bush?’
‘Practising as a doctor. Only there weren’t many patients. He used to have to drive hundreds of miles, sometimes, to get to sick people. And he wrote articles for magazines. And I think a book, too. Anyway, he’s going to come back,’ Cosmo added.
‘Oh? He is, is he? And do what?’
‘I don’t know. Something here, in Oxford,’ Cosmo said. ‘Sir.’
Then the rest of the form came into the room, and Mr Cheevy stopped catechizing Cosmo. But after that he was just a little more friendly in his tone.
‘Well, how did it go?’ Cousin Eunice said in the Rolls on Friday.
Cosmo could hardly put into words that she seemed what a hovering helicopter might to a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island. Even the smell of Lob, sitting up to give Cosmo a dignified welcome in the back of the car, was homely and comforting, compared with that of blackboard chalk and furniture polish.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘All right, I suppose.’
She glanced at him sideways.
‘Cheer up! It really does take a while to get used to. Anyway it’s going to be a fine weekend, and Mrs Tydings has got a chicken for supper.’
‘Cousin Eunice,’ he said. ‘Why did Father decide to move to Australia?’
‘Oh,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I wondered if you’d ask me that.’
‘Is it so important?’
‘Dick never talked to you about it? After – after they went?’
‘No, never.’
She reflected for a while, and then said, ‘Well, Dick told me to use my discretion about what I told you. I personally think everyone should be told everything. Because, for a start, you can’t keep things from people for ever – something always leaks out sooner or later – and then you’re in worse trouble. People are sore at not being told in the first place; and bad news always gets worse with keeping.’
All this made Cosmo anxious. He wondered what it was leading up to. Something horrible?
‘Is it to do with Mother and Mark too?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is. But, look, here we are nearly home, and I want to sow some runner beans before supper. I’ll tell you this evening after supper, okay?’
‘Okay, Cousin Eunice,’ he said, getting out to open the gate.
‘You can call me Eunice if you want,’ she shouted through the driver’s window. ‘Cousin is such a mouthful.’
Already, coming back to the mill house seemed like returning home. The trees had rather more leaves than they had last week, and he remembered the quadruple notes of a blackbird’s shout, in the lilac by the flagged path.
Mrs Tydings was there to greet them.
‘Now you get those school clothes off, Cosmo, directly, or I know how it’ll be, you’ll be over on the island or up in the woods and they’ll be covered with mud and filth. I’ve your jeans washed and ironed and all your sweaters darned …’
Up in his bedroom he found that, during the week, Cousin Eunice had had a desk built for him along the window wall, with drawers and cupboards underneath, and a table lamp, so that he could do his homework there. He had quite a lot of it, as a matter of fact: maths, geography, and an essay about Roman Britain. He decided to do it all first thing tomorrow morning and get it out of the way. But in the meantime he was going out: he had an idea for building a tree house in the huge old walnut tree that grew in the lawn to the side of the house.
He went out and inspected it thoughtfully. The trunk was massive, as big as an elm or chestnut, and the first branches didn’t start till seventeen or eighteen feet up. What he would need was either a rope ladder or some of those things like big steel staples that linesmen stick in the sides of telegraph poles to climb up them. He wondered where he could get those. Mr Marvell would know. Then there was a big flattish fork where three, four, five branches stuck out in different directions; he would need some planks to fit across there; a hammer, nails …
‘Have you got a fairly high ladder?’ he asked Eunice, over the chicken.
‘There’s an apple-picking ladder in the barn – would that do?’
‘Don’t you go breaking your neck, now,’ warned Mrs Tydings. ‘Boys – dear, dear! Once you have one in the house, there’s never an easy moment.’
After the chicken there was a very good black-currant pudding (their own currants, bottled from last year, Mrs Tydings said) but by now Cosmo’s stomach felt nervous, he could only eat a small helping.
‘Were there Romans in these parts, Cousin Eunice?’ he asked, trying to distract himself, thinking of his homework.
‘Certainly there were; right here, as a matter of fact. We had archaeologists one summer digging about in the garden and the field. There was a dye factory here.’
‘A dye factory?’ He thought of factory chimneys and noisy machinery. ‘Doesn’t sound like Romans.’
‘No, they would have had big vats of dyes and people chopping up woad and madder, making them into powders to dye blue and red, and burning sulphur to bleach cloth white. No pollution laws in those days. All the land round about was probably forest then.’ She sighed. ‘Finished? Let’s sit by the fire. We’ll wash up later.’
Mrs Tydings came and sat with them, vigorously knitting something from thick blue wool, scowling over it in concentration, pursing and unpursi
ng her lips.
Cousin Eunice said,
‘You know our family is very old – it goes a tremendously long way back. Well, of course, everybody’s family is old, obviously we’re all descended from somebody – but we happen to know a good deal about our ancestors.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well, there was an abbey at Dorchester, you know, where the monks used to keep chronicles – records; monasteries were a bit like public libraries in the Middle Ages, they were where all the documents and information tended to be kept, because the monks knew how to read and write when most people didn’t. And monasteries were a bit safer from attack than other places. Records were kept in Dorchester Abbey from the seventh century on – maybe earlier – because the Bishops of Mercia had their headquarters there – Mercia was the largest diocese in England. Dorchester is a much older town than Oxford. And anyway, in the monks’ chronicles at Dorchester Abbey there was this record of the Curtoys family. You’ve certainly got both Roman and British ancestry – the name probably comes from the Latin curtus, meaning short – although later, when the Normans got involved, it was thought that it might derive from Old French words, corteis or cortois, meaning polite, courtly, educated. So you can take your choice about that.’
‘What about the Dooms?’
‘Oh, the Dooms came over with the Danes; Doom really means judgement, and a Doomsman was a kind of judge; there have always been a lot of lawyers in the Doom family, like my father. And a lot of intermarriages between Dooms and Curtoyses from way back.’
‘So what has all this got to do with Father deciding to go to Australia?’
‘I’m coming to that. It was your mother really,’ said Cousin Eunice. ‘You see – it just sounds too fanciful for words, but there’s no way of putting it except the flat truth – there’s a hereditary curse on the Curtoys family. I daresay if you hadn’t been in Australia, you would have been bound to find out about it sooner. I don’t see how Dick could have gone on keeping it dark –’
‘A curse? You’re kidding?’
‘No, a bona fide curse.’
Mrs Tydings sighed, jabbed her needles into her knitting, and started winding a new ball of wool off the skein. Cousin Eunice dropped another log on the fire, which sputtered and crackled and sent out a puff of aromatic blue smoke.
‘There was an ancient British temple in the woods somewhere round here,’ Eunice went on, ‘and the Romans came bustling along, tidying things up the way the Romans tended to do, and closed it down, said it would be better if the people worshipped Mithras or Jupiter instead of their forest gods. Well, I daresay they didn’t mean to be rough about it, but there was a boy working in the temple then, a kind of acolyte or altar boy, I suppose, and he went bolting out and defied the Romans, and there was a bit of a scuffle, and one of the Roman soldiers ran the boy through with his sword. Killed him – very likely he didn’t mean to. The boy was the son of the priestess, so then she went and stabbed herself, on the altar. And that left only the old, old priestess, who was the boy’s grandmother, and she put a curse on the Roman soldier.’
‘What was the curse?’ Cosmo was immensely interested in the story, though he found it hard to believe in the curse. He imagined the temple – a big wooden building, with pillars, maybe, and smoke coiling between them from the sacred fires, rather dim inside, and the priestess in a blue robe, looking like Cousin Eunice, and the old, old priestess like Mrs Tydings. And what would the boy look like?
‘Oh, the priestess said, “I curse you by Toutatus, the god of war, and Vaun, the god of the forest. May your firstborn son die in battle at an early age, and may his mother die of grief at his loss, and may this go on from generation to generation.” That was the gist of it.’
‘And did it happen?’
‘Well, we don’t know so much about the early ancestors, the Romans and Saxons. People generally did die at an early age in those days, whether in battle or just because life was tough. But it’s certainly quite noticeable later. There was a fourteen-year-old Curtoys who died at the battle of Crécy, and his mother fell down dead of heart failure when she heard the news. Eustace Curtoys died at Agincourt – he was fifteen; his mother died of grief. Thomas Curtoys died at Bosworth – he was on King Richard’s side – he was sixteen; his mother died a month later. Oh, and there was one at Blenheim and one at Salamanca and one on the north-west frontier – and your uncle Frank in the Battle of Britain –’
‘I never even knew I had an uncle Frank,’ Cosmo said. He had begun to shiver.
‘Well, you didn’t. He died before you were born. Your father had a miserable childhood because his mother died when he was ten. He had been eight years younger than his brother Frank –’
‘The younger brothers are all right – they don’t die?’ Now Cosmo was shivering even more. He reached over and poked the fire, as an excuse to get closer to the warmth.
A bright flame broke out, illuminating Eunice’s face. She looked sad, but resolute, as if she were lancing a boil on someone’s foot.
‘The younger brothers don’t die. They carry on the line. But their eldest sons die.’
‘So that was why Mother and M-M-Mark –’
‘Your father hadn’t told your mother about this. Not at first, I mean. He said it was all a pack of rubbish, he wouldn’t believe it. He shut his eyes to it,’ Eunice said angrily and violently. ‘So she married him, not knowing –’
‘He shouldn’t have done that.’
Cosmo loved his father – who was clever, funny, sympathetic, tremendously learned, knew about all kinds of things, but seemed to have terrible difficulty, sometimes, in making up his mind when faced with a problem or a decision that had to be taken. At this moment Cosmo began to see why. Fancy growing up with a thing like that hanging over you, he thought. And then: now it’s hanging over me. He wrapped his arms tightly round his knees.
‘No,’ Eunice agreed. ‘He should have told your mother before he married her. Given her the chance to cry off.’
‘Did she find out? In the end?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘I told her,’ Cousin Eunice said, still with that undertone of violence. ‘There were Mark and you growing up – I thought she ought to know.’
‘I see.’ Cosmo did not, in fact, wholly see; he guessed there had been anger, a quarrel, bitterness. ‘Did you like my mother?’ he asked timidly.
‘She was my greatest friend in the world. We were at college together. That was how she came to meet Dick – your father.’
There was silence for a while. They both gazed at the fire. Mrs Tydings’s needles clicked. Then Cosmo said,
‘Did it always –? I mean: sometimes there must have been Curtoyses who didn’t marry, or didn’t have sons –?’
‘Oh yes, sometimes. Sometimes, perhaps, people chose not to have children. But there was always a younger brother somewhere – anyway, that was why, when your mother heard what she was very likely in for – first she persuaded your father to move to Australia – she said that was a good long way off from any war that was likely to break out.’
‘They always die in battle?’
‘Yes, in battle, fighting. And then something must have made your mother realize that running away wasn’t going to solve the problem –’
‘She talked to an aborigine sorcerer,’ Cosmo said absently. He remembered the impressive old man who had come past their house, one dry spring day, and Ma had offered him a drink of iced tea and some fruit, and they had started talking. She had never been the same after that …
‘I suppose he must have told her that you can’t get away from your ancestors,’ Cousin Eunice said thoughtfully. ‘Did he tell you anything, Cosmo?’
‘Yes, he told me that I would have three friends.’ Rather a boring prediction, tossed off as if the old fellow wanted to be kind to the younger brother, but couldn’t think of anything more interesting to say. He had told Mark – what had he told Mark? – something about battles, that
was it – that there were many different kinds.
‘What do you think happened to Mother and Mark?’ Cosmo said to Cousin Eunice.
‘My dear, I doubt if we shall ever know.’
‘You don’t think they could – could still be alive?’
‘In the middle of that desert? When they had left their car and walked – no, my dear. It’s just not possible. You mustn’t waste yourself hoping for a miracle. I’m afraid you – we – just have to accept that they chose to opt out. They were very, very fond of each other. I think it was very tough on you – and on Richard. But I can’t judge them. All I can say is, I wouldn’t have done it like that.’
‘Nor you wouldn’t have gone to Australia,’ Mrs Tydings observed, twining two ends of wool together.
‘No. Well. People are different. So – so now you know what your problem is, Cosmo. And you’ve got time to decide how to deal with it. You could decide not to marry – or not to have children.’
‘That might be best. But I could adopt some, I suppose – they wouldn’t be under the curse?’
‘Not a bad idea. I don’t see why they should.’
‘Does the curse go on for ever?’
‘I don’t know enough about curses to answer that.’
‘Do you believe in curses, Cousin Eunice?’
‘Well, we must, mustn’t we? In view of the evidence. I expect,’ she said, frowning thoughtfully, ‘that it was a case of vibrations. Something we don’t understand much about yet, like radiation. Think what a fearfully powerful force that is – one little piece of plutonium can change whole landscapes and generations. Well, this must be something similar. And it has really affected the genes of the Curtoys family. Maybe it takes something equally drastic to get it out – a kind of mutation. If you know what that is.’
‘A variation from your ancestral type.’
‘Hey – those bush correspondence courses must have been pretty good.’
Suddenly Cosmo felt exceedingly tired. He wanted to get away and think over all that he had been told.
‘Let’s wash up,’ he said, ‘and then I reckon I’ll go to bed.’
‘Never mind about the washing up, my lamb,’ Mrs Tydings said. ‘That’ll wait over till the morning. You take yourself off and have a nice hot bath – get the smell of school off you.’