ON SATURDAY morning Emily ignored Charlotte pointedly, turning her back on her when they had to be together in their bedroom or at their double classroom desk, and then after lunch, when they set out on the school walk, she partnered Bunty, leaving Bunty’s friend Ruth and Charlotte, both rather disconsolate, to go together.
They went across the river to the great park at the top of the hill. An army training camp lay just inside its gates. Wheels had injured all the smooth turf there. Trucks were ranged in the shade of the trees, their hoods painted tree color as camouflage, green and brown and gray. Indeed everything except the autumn trees was green and brown and gray—the trucks, the huts, the soldiers dressed in khaki, who strolled casually about or marched up and down, much stiffer-limbed than toys. One squad was drilling. The sergeant, his moustache as wide on him as horns, gave indistinguishable bellows, each one so huge that it seemed to contain its own echo. The soldiers were like one block, not individual men. They stopped, wheeled, halted to the bellows, their arms swinging up simultaneously like lengthy flaps or shelves.
Bunty pointed to the sergeant and whispered something to Emily, who began to giggle.
“Tenshun,” roared Bunty in her deep, impressive voice. Emily put her arm out as if it held a rifle and began to march. The teacher, Miss Wilkin, looking like a plump little, well-dressed bird, was far ahead of them, talking to an older girl, and did not turn.
“Tenshun! Left, right. Left, right. Left, right,” shouted Bunty. Left, right marched Emily, exaggeratedly, giggling.
“Bunty—oh, Bunty, don’t, please don’t,” cried Ruth, but hopelessly, for others were imitating Emily now, some self-conscious about it, some not at all, girls called Olive—Peggy—Dorothy—Susan—Joan. They let Bunty drill them, holding themselves upright, sloping imaginary guns, marching stiff as soldiers. More and more joined in. Bunty’s orders grew louder, louder. Emily pranced so exaggeratedly that she might have been a horse, not a soldier any more.
“Oh, Bunty, stop,” cried Ruth.
“Emily, stop it,” Charlotte said, but Emily glanced at her defiantly and carried on more furiously than ever.
Some soldiers near the fence had begun to laugh at them, to shout and point. The noise came to Miss Wilkin’s ears at last, and she hurried back, her hair fluffed out, her hat tipped at an idiotic angle. She was one of the youngest schoolteachers. Charlotte had seen her skip upstairs once when she thought no one was watching, as if she were as young as Emily. She wore an engagement ring, which she glanced at constantly and touched and turned, but she was not touching or looking at it now.
“Olive, Dorothy, Joan,” she was scolding, scarlet in the face. “Bunty, whatever are you doing?” Some of the soldiers whistled and winked at her, which did not help her dignity.
As the crocodile moved off again, Emily was still giggling, but the grin died when she saw Charlotte’s eyes on her. She looked quickly the other way.
It had grown very hot. All the grass had been rubbed from the track, and the earth beneath was cracked and white, its dust soon blurring the shine on polished shoes. Emily began to limp and lag and complain about being too hot. Bunty told her briskly to make less fuss. The trees, though bright, were almost too dry, shabby-looking; the grass was yellow and pale beneath a brilliant sky.
They came to a patch of woodland, oak trees mostly, thickset as old stags, their branches spread like antlers. The children except for Bunty, who was in disgrace, were allowed to wander a little, do as they liked, so Charlotte sat herself down against a tree’s gawky roots and rummaged among its debris of leaves and twigs, odd spots of sunlight swinging about her skirt. She discovered acorns there and took them from their cups, but found when she tried to fit one back that it would not fit so well, though there seemed no difference in either the acorn or its cup.
She glanced up suddenly to find Emily planted in front of her; rather odd-looking, seen from below, her feet appearing huge, her face elongated, small. She was red with heat, her hat crooked, her mouth and fingers purple with blackberry. She thrust some blackberries down toward Charlotte, and for the first time for days she was looking at her directly, so making Charlotte blush and turn her face down, away.
“I want you to tell me what’s happening,” Emily said angrily. “Something’s happening. You’re so odd, not like you at all. As if you were someone different. You’ve got to tell me. I won’t not be told any more. I hate it.”
It would be frightening for Emily, Charlotte thought, quite uncanny and odd. What would she have felt to find a stranger in her sister Emma’s place, yet who was nevertheless supposed to be the real Emma? This was what decided her that Emily must be told; that it would be easier for her to know the truth of it. She remembered, guiltily, what Clare had said, but Emily had not asked her what was happening as she had asked Charlotte now.
She made her voice as gentle and apologetic as she could.
“I’m not Clare. That’s why I’m different. Clare’s changed places with me, she’s me. She’ll be back here tomorrow, honestly.”
“Whatever do you mean? How can you not be Clare? Where is she? Where’s she gone?” asked Emily wildly.
“It’s all right, really, Emily. She’s gone into my time instead of me, and I’ve come back into the past, to you.”
“What do you mean? You’re crazy. What do you mean, back into the past?” said Emily, disguising panic by truculence so effectively and for such a long time that Charlotte found her patience hard to keep. She floundered about in words and sentences, trying to explain it different ways round, twenty times at least, and each time Emily cried, “I don’t believe it. Things like that don’t happen. I don’t believe it.”
“All right, don’t believe it,” cried Charlotte, made angry at last. It did not help to be so hot, to sweat and itch inside her thick school clothes. “All right, don’t believe it. But it’s true, I tell you.”
“Really, really true?” asked Emily, quieter.
“Yes, really true. You can ask Clare tomorrow if you don’t believe me.” Charlotte was ashamed now for being angry and spoke more calmly, too. They remained in silence for a little while. There were girls’ voices and the sound of engines from the army camp. Charlotte found a dried bracken frond on Emily’s stocking and crumbled it between her fingers till its brown teeth fell to tiny prickly pieces, not quite to dust on her skin.
Emily squatted down beside her and played with an acorn and its cup.
“What’s your name then?” she asked.
“My name?” asked Charlotte.
“If you’re not Clare.”
“Charlotte,” said Charlotte.
“Charlotte?” said Emily, giggling. “What a funny old-fashioned name. How funny you’ve got an old-fashioned name.” And suddenly, she might never have shown disbelief at all. She was not frightened any more, or did not appear to be, not truculent, but excited, pestering Charlotte with questions, insisting on partnering her in the crocodile again and whispering to her about it. Charlotte could at last ask questions for herself about things that puzzled her.
“How did you know something was odd. How was I different from Clare?” she asked.
“You were just different. Oh, I don’t know.”
“You must know, a little.”
“I suppose—well, I suppose, you didn’t answer the questions. You didn’t—well, you were less bossy, that’s all. And . . .”
“That can’t be all, it can’t be.”
“Clare’s fearfully holy, sort of, you know, and good, horribly good. You are good in a way, but different.”
“Didn’t you guess at all I was really a different person and not just Clare being different?”
“I don’t know if I did or not,” said Emily, which was not any answer that Charlotte wanted. She had, though, approached the question the wrong way round. What she really wanted to know was why Emily had ever mistaken her for Clare. Were they so very alike? But she hesitated to ask this, for it was the most baffling and in some ways the most worrying question of all.
Much later, while they were getting ready for bed, Emily said, “Your bed’s different from mine. It’s got those funny wheels on it. I wanted it because it was by the window, but Nurse Gregory made Clare have it instead. Do you think it might have something to do with you and Clare changing? Do you think that if I slept there tonight I might end up in your time, too?”
“I don’t suppose so for a minute,” said Charlotte firmly. It was certainly an interesting, not to say startling, idea, but not one, she thought, to be explored with Emily now or at any time.
“Won’t you let me try and see,” pleaded Emily. “Oh, please let me try.”
“Even if you did change, it would be hopeless. No one would think you were me. You’re much too small, and besides you have brown hair.”
“Charlotte, will you really change again? Suppose you couldn’t? What will happen when we go to lodgings again and there isn’t this bed? Suppose you got stuck here, and Clare there in your time. Just suppose you did?”
Emily sounded anxious now. Charlotte wanted to reassure her. “We won’t get stuck,” she said. “Of course we won’t get stuck.”