NATURALLY, NOBODY TOLD Timmie off for telling lies. For one thing, it was Christmas, and for another, as Dot pointed out, there are no such things as lies nowadays, there is only the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. On top of which, Timmie, it seemed, took after her, he was very sensitive really, and this was his way of coming to terms with his grief.
If any. To be honest, he and his grandfather had never really hit it off. Timmie was inclined to spoil Ivor’s most impressive reminiscences by saying things like “Who’s Churchill?” Still, he must feel something about his grandfather’s death; it was a relief, in a way, to see some sign of it at least.
And so, after the first stunned moments, Timmie was treated as a cross between an invalid and an O.B.E., everyone vying with one another to respect his feelings and hoping that someone else would ask the insensitive questions which would get him talking.
Because it was rather mysterious. There had, of course, been a mass surge towards the study right at the beginning, and an uneasy, half-embarrassed search had been undertaken, but naturally nothing was to be found. No Father Christmas costume. Nothing.
“What makes you so sure it was Grandpa?” someone ventured to ask him. “I mean, anyone could dress up as Father Christmas …?”
Timmie seemed, for a moment, to be puzzled by the question.
“He was in his big chair, that no one else may sit in,” he began. “He had his glasses on, and he was reading one of his big books—the Greek book, the very big one. And he was cross,” Timmie added, as if this clinched the identification. “He jumped up and sort of came at me, like I’d done something awful. And I hadn’t, Mummy, I hadn’t touched a thing. And I never meant to interrupt him. I mean, he’s supposed to be dead. It’s not fair!”
Of all this array of evidence, nothing remained for public scrutiny except the Greek Lexicon. There it lay, the large Liddell and Scott, open, and balanced on the arm of Ivor’s big leather chair, just as it always used to be when he was working. But of course that didn’t prove anything, anyone could have put it there. No one had, but obviously they could have. No point in making a drama of it, anyway.
The questions and arguments teetered this way and that. Someone must have been looking up a word for a crossword puzzle? What, in Greek? Well, just looking up a word, then. But none of us knows any Greek….
Suddenly, Imogen could bear no more of it. She slammed the big Lexicon shut, and leaned across the armchair to put it away on the low shelf where it belonged. And now, with the only piece of tangible evidence thus removed, the whole puzzle seemed suddenly to disintegrate. There was nothing more to be explained, no more to be said. Timmie was reassured that it couldn’t possibly have been Grandpa—not that he seemed to be all that bothered—and the subject was dropped, except for Dot saying “I told you so!”
She hadn’t, of course, how could she? But it turned out that she wasn’t referring specifically to Timmie’s recent implausible recital, but to an earlier, and more generalised prediction of hers to the effect that whatever Herbert did, he always managed to make a mess of it. Apparently not dressing up as Father Christmas came into this category; he couldn’t even not do that without making a mess of it.
Well, this seemed to be the gist of it, anyway, as far as Imogen could make out through the open door. Most of the time, she tried to keep out of the way when Herbert and Dot were quarrelling, but it was difficult when they quarrelled on the stairs: which they often did, because it was commonly Herbert’s attempt to escape unobtrusively up to their room that jogged Dot’s memory about whatever it was that he had or hadn’t done.
And that, to all intents and purposes, was the end of the episode. For some reason, Imogen could not bring herself to tell the rest of them about the small additional shock she had received while they weren’t noticing. Leaning over to put the Lexicon back on the shelf, she had caught a whiff of whisky: and on investigating more closely, she discovered a whisky bottle and a recently-used glass standing exactly where Ivor used to stand them—on the floor between the armchair and the bookshelves.
Someone had been sitting in Ivor’s chair this afternoon, drinking whisky and reading Greek, just as he used to drink and read. Downing glass after glass, perhaps, as he had been wont to do while he waited for the bloody visitors to go…. For a moment, leaning heavily over the chair arm, Imogen could have sworn she smelt traces of his pipe as well, and heard him clearing his throat: but that, of course, was fantasy.
Who had it been, sitting here? Obviously, she could have questioned them all, but somehow she knew already that they were all going to say No, and what would be the point of that?
Why look for trouble—Easier by far just to wash up the glass, throw away the empty bottle, and then the whole mystery would cease to exist. Just as the mystery of the Lexicon had ceased to exist the moment she had put it back on the shelf where it belonged. How safe it looked, how settled, big and shabby and solid, next to the Classical Dictionary, just where it had always been.
*
It was nearly a week later when the next peculiar thing happened. “You must have got a poltergeist here, darling,” Cynthia had said, half-laughing, half-scared. But then, Cynthia was by nature given to exaggeration. In actual fact, the whole thing might have been just some silly kind of a muddle. With all these ill-assorted people in the house, brought together by nothing more unifying than a need to get away from somewhere else, there were bound to be misunderstandings.
Once again, it was Timmie who had first stumbled upon the thing, but this time his brother Vernon had been with him. It had been a grey, not-quite-freezing afternoon just before the New Year, and the first Imogen knew of anything being amiss was the sound of shrill, childish voices, furiously protesting, just beneath her window. Then a deeper voice—a man’s voice—interrupting, overriding easily the high, indignant chirping.
For a while, Imogen paid no attention. Lying idly on her bed, half-reading, half-day-dreaming, she felt a vast reluctance to bestir herself. Although it was barely three o’clock, the winter afternoon was already on the wane. For some time now, she had been noticing the shadows gathering in the angles of the ceiling. The sharp rectangle of light from the dormer window was a silvery purple now instead of white; soon it would be too dark to read.
It was the front attic that was “her” room for the time being—the smallest of the three attics that spanned the width of the house under the roof. The adjoining one was Piggy’s; and the third, and largest, was still a lumber-room, as it had been for years.
This attic was Imogen’s room only temporarily, of course. When all this turmoil of comings and goings had subsided (Imogen was still enough of a novice at widowhood to believe that it might), then she would choose one of the rooms down on the first floor for her own. Really her own, furnished according to her own taste, and not to the taste of Ivor’s ghost. She would buy cheap, bright rugs that hadn’t come from Persia or Benares or anywhere. She would fill the shelves with paperback novels and pots of trailing ivy, and hang on the walls pictures which hadn’t been presented by the artist in grateful recognition of this, that or the other.
Her pictures, not Ivor’s. It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn’t fair to be dead and yet to stay around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house…. There ought to be something like a fly-spray, a fly-spray for ghosts, a ghost-spray….
Ivor would have laughed at that, if he’d been in one of his good moods. No, he wouldn’t, he’d have called it whimsy, with that impatient twist of the mouth that he kept for fools….
*
Oh, shut up, you’re dead, who cares what you think? You have no business telling me what’s whimsy and what isn’t, not any longer.
Get out! Get out! Get out!
*
The dispute outside seemed to be escalating. In one of the childish voices she could hear the beginning of tears.
But still she lay there, doing absolutely nothing. Hell, they were Dot’s children, let her sort it out. And Robin—yes, that male voice now rising beyond irritation and into anger was certainly his—Robin was Dot’s brother, not Imogen’s. Nothing to do with Imogen really, none of them. No blood-tie at all. At intervals over the years, whenever Ivor’s family life became more than she could cope with, she had attempted to console herself with these sort of reflections, but it never worked for long. Blood may be thicker than water, but when it comes to family quarrels, it’s being there that puts you in the wrong. It is one’s presence, not one’s genes, that lands one with all the responsibility.
And that was why she was lying so very quietly right now. Let her so much as put her head out of the window into the biting December dusk, and call out “What’s going on?” and she would at once be to blame for the whole thing, and responsible for putting it right. She would be called upon to decide whether something was fair or not; whether Dot was or wasn’t spoiling her brats rotten….
*
It was unusual, though, to hear Robin yelling at the kids like this. He didn’t like children, admittedly, and of course children are very intuitive about this sort of thing, and gather round the child-hater like flies round a honey-pot. Luckily, as well as disliking them, Robin was also very good at not noticing they existed, and so normally there was very little trouble, except when Dot caused it by complaining to her brother that he treated the children as things, not people.
But they were things, Robin would retort, wide-eyed: to think of children as people was sheer anthropomorphism—and a brother-and-sister slanging-match would ensue, to which the boys would listen with the greatest of interest. What sort of complexes it was giving them was hard to tell. They were happy children, and correspondingly difficult to fathom.
They didn’t sound very happy at the moment, though. Not Vernon, anyway.
“We didn’t!” he was shrieking. “We didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t …!”
“And if you say we’re liars”—Timmie took up the grievance even more shrilly—“If you say we’re liars, then you’re just a …”
But before he had selected from his fairly extensive vocabulary exactly the word that would best describe his uncle, a sharp crunching on the gravel told Imogen that Robin was getting out.
Worsted? Triumphant? Bored with the whole thing? Robin was the only man Imogen had ever known who could even be bored by victory.
*
It would have been easier to discover what it had all been about if they hadn’t all told her at once, each with an escalating conviction of the justice of his cause that made the crockery on the tea-table ring. It would have been easier, too, if Dot hadn’t been arguing, in top register, from two somewhat contradictory premises: first, that her sons hadn’t touched a thing and had never been anywhere near Uncle Robin’s room: and second that none of this would have happened if Herbert had taken them out for a Sunday afternoon walk, like other fathers.
The four-poster bed. This, Imogen quickly gathered, was the storm-centre of the dispute. The four-poster bed in the room which had once been hers and Ivor’s, and was now Robin’s. Someone (and here the voices rose to such a pitch of assertion and denial that Piggy, who was apparently unused to family life, murmured “Oh no …!” and hurried from the room)—someone had dragged all those old papers down from the attic again and dumped them all over the bed! Not to mention pulling the pillows about, messing around with the curtains, and generally leaving the place looking like a battle-field.
“Well, of course it was the bloody kids: who else could it be?” Robin demanded.
A good question. But all the same, Dot remained unshaken in her conviction that her sons would never dream of … well, of whatever it was; how could she be expected to make head or tail of it with everyone going on at her like this?
Playing houses? Fighting with pillows? Impossible! And anyway, all normal children play this sort of game, it’s ridiculous to make such a fuss about it. Besides, no one had ever told them not to play in that room. Why, not so long ago it had been the room belonging to their dear grandfather….
The implied suggestion that in his lifetime Ivor would have smilingly allowed the boys to romp on his precious bed and throw his manuscripts about, reduced everyone momentarily to stunned silence; and when, one by one, they took up the threads of the dispute again, it was in an altogether quieter and more coherent manner, so that Imogen was at last able to piece together some sort of a picture of what must have actually happened. It must have been something like this.
Sunday afternoon. The grown-ups all asleep, or sunk in impenetrable lethargy. Boredom stalked the place, hounding the little boys from room to room, up and down the staircases, until presently it brought them to the threshold of the room which had once been Granny’s and Grandpa’s. Some impulse (grief, claimed Dot, when she wasn’t claiming that it hadn’t happened at all) made them open the door and peep in.
To their surprise, the curtains round the bed were closely drawn. They had never seen it like this before—indeed, until that moment they hadn’t realised that the bed had curtains. Intrigued, and a little scared, they had tiptoed nearer; parted the curtains an inch or two; whereupon—
“We saw a wizard!” shrilled Timmie. “He was sitting in the middle of the bed casting spells …!”
Spells? What do you mean, spells?
“Spells. You know. Magic. He was all hunched up and muttering magic words!”
“No, he wasn’t”—Vernon corrected his small brother—“He was only—”
“Yes, he was …”
“No, he wasn’t …”
Darlings, darlings. Don’t shout so. One at a time. Who was …? Why do you say it was a wizard….!
“Because it was a wizard …!”
“He was certainly wearing a wizard’s hat,” confirmed Vernon judicially, “I suppose he might have just put it on for fun, but he did look very wizard-y. And he was writing funny signs …”
“Magic signs, all triangles and things”—Timmie filled in the picture gleefully—“just like the wizard in Ali the Donkey….”
*
And so the story escalated, the adults chipping in here and there as best they might with deflating questions of fact. Well, but what did he look like? Old or young?
This drew a blank, because of course wizards aren’t old or young, are they, they are just wizards.
Well, was his hair grey? Or what colour?
“Grey,” said Timmie at once; and, “Black,” simultaneously asserted Vernon.
“Silly, it was his hat that was black….”
“No, it wasn’t….”
“Yes, it was, and anyway, you couldn’t have seen, you were behind me….”
“No, I wasn’t….”
“Yes, you were…. Besides, wizards always have grey hair….”
“No, they don’t….”
“Yes, they do. In Ali the Donkey …”
Hush, darlings, hush, not so much shouting! Tell us what happened next? What did he do when he saw you? Well, he didn’t see us, not actually; we sort of tiptoed away…. Well, why didn’t you come straight and tell someone …?
“We did, Granny! We were just looking for Mummy when Uncle Robin …”
*
“It’s all lies!”
Robin’s voice cut across the discussion with sudden vehemence, and everyone looked up, startled.
“It’s all lies. They’ve made up the whole thing from start to finish. First they wreck my room, and then they try to lie their way out of it. Bloody little vandals! They’ll both end up in Borstal….”
Here, Timmie burst diplomatically into tears, and Dot turned on her brother like a tigress, accusing him of being a bully, a hypocrite, and a sadist.
This cheered him up at once, and he listened with interest to the rest of her accusations. He had done a terrible thing, she told him, the worst thing you can possibly do to a child: he had been unjust.
“They’ll never trust you again,” she concluded tearfully, “Never!”
“Oh, rubbish. They never have trusted me. I’m their Wicked Uncle, aren’t I, kids?”
The shrieks of delighted assent which this evoked made Dot wince. And later, after tea, she stood watching while her brother settled down to his crossword puzzle with a nephew leaning rapturously over each arm of his chair.
“Why did the fly fly, Uncle Robin?”
“Uncle Robin, have you ever heard of a cat that lived to be thirty-one?”
He didn’t answer, he never did, but they didn’t seem to mind at all.
“… Because the spider spied ’er, Uncle Robin!” they shrieked, in an ecstasy of one-way rapport. “Uncle Robin, it says in the Guinness Book of Records …”
*
Dot looked on sourly. She was wondering, as she had wondered all her life long, why it was that love could be earned so easily. In almost any way, it seemed, except by deserving it.
*
Imogen, too, was watching the little tableau.
He knows something, she was thinking; he knows something that he’s not telling us. He may not know who the “wizard” was, or what he was doing; but he knows something.