AFTER a long pause Charlotte said, “Why, Emily?”
“They didn’t say why. They just said we were going on Saturday after all, not Friday. They just said it.”
“Did Clare . . .?”
“Clare tried to sleep in another bed, to stop her changing with you. But Nurse Gregory caught her. Clare had a fearful wigging. She hates rows, and she said she’d better wait a bit before trying again. I suppose she must have just gone to sleep. You and she have been very sleepy, haven’t you, all this week.?”
“Perhaps we’ll go on changing, lodgings or no lodgings . . .?”
“I don’t believe that. I don’t. It’s silly.”
“I should have slept on the floor or something, just to make sure,” said Charlotte desperately.
“Oh, don’t be silly.”
“Perhaps they’ll hold us up again—and we’ll—you’ll stay here till tomorrow.”
“Of course we’ll go today. They said we would.”
“Oh, Emily, please don’t cry.”
“Leave me alone, oh, leave me alone. I don’t want you to talk to me.”
After breakfast the trunks were brought out. Clare’s was an old black tin one with brass studs round the edge, its paint chipped, its tin dented. Emily’s was brown with a wooden frame and looked as if dust had settled on it years ago and stuck. Nurse Gregory stood over them while they packed, her arms folded in like steel rods, not seeming pleased to have her sickroom empty after all, for almost the only thing she said apart from telling them how badly they packed was what a pity it was they were going because they badly needed the discipline only she could give.
The school pony trap came for them sharp at eleven o’clock. Nurse Gregory stood in the portico to see Charlotte and Emily go, granting each a ration of her steely smile.
•
In almost any other circumstances, Charlotte would have enjoyed the drive to Flintlock Lodge, watching the swaying shiny quarters of the pony, catching the wind’s small bite upon her face while the trap creaked and jiggled under her. But she was much too worried to enjoy anything now. She was worried about Emily, who sat white and fixed looking, staring ahead, and who, since they first awoke, had scarcely said a word. It seemed wrong that a girl of ten should be so coldly and silently controlled. But she was worried, too, about her own predicament, increasingly desolated, wondering if she would ever see her sister Emma again, or her Grandfather Elijah, or her home, Aviary Hall. If she stayed in this time as Clare and grew up as her, she would be a woman of nearly sixty when Emma was still only twelve. Emma would never recognize her grown so old, might not want to recognize her, thought Charlotte miserably.
Somehow they would have to change places again, she and Clare. She would have to sleep at school in the bed with the little wheels. But how? But how? She looked at Emily, still staring rigidly ahead, and tried to will the idea into her that all would be well eventually, that Clare would return to her. But Charlotte did not at this moment feel much hope herself. Emily’s face never stirred. And Clare, Charlotte wondered, what about Clare? Whatever was she feeling now?
Flintlock Lodge was not a house to make anyone feel more cheerful. Tall and thin and gray, it had a pointed gable to one side of it, a big bay window jutting out below. It needed paint like all the other houses around, and its garden needed pruning like the other gardens and like the trees that stood along the road. At the back stood a monkey puzzle tree, taller even than the house.
Inside, the house was less shabby than outside, but very dark because of the trees and creepers crowded outside and because the furniture was all so dark, blackish even, but with a dim shine on it like treacle. It was huge, too, chests and cupboards and cabinets for giants, a clock like a church tower, ticking like a drum. In the dining room the chairs were so huge and cold and slippery that Charlotte felt like Goldilocks on Father Bear’s outsize chair. She needed to wriggle to make herself comfortable but did not dare. A great black dresser stood opposite her place, angled and bracketed all over, with more black things standing on the brackets and some green and pink and turquoise vases of glass with fluted edges. Between two of these she saw a photograph of a boy, slightly tinted and in an ebony frame.
She wondered who the boy was. Indeed, she stared at him during most of the meal, for there was nowhere else for her to look. Emily just turned her face away from eyes. The shiny cat and little hairy dog lay hidden beneath the table, breathing wheezily, and it seemed rude to stare at Mr. and Mrs. Chisel-Brown or their daughter Miss Agnes Chisel-Brown.
Mrs. Chisel-Brown, however, had stared at Charlotte and Emily. She stared without saying a word until the food came in, when she stared at that instead, craning round to see Miss Agnes dish it out, and then pursuing the plate with her eyes from the sideboard to her place. She ate so quickly that Charlotte had barely touched her plate before Mrs. Chisel-Brown’s was empty, showing a crack across it, glued, also clamped with little metal claws.
“Too much salt, Aggie,” she said in a fat white voice, wiping a napkin across her mouth. She wore a black dress with a shine on it almost like the furniture’s. “Poor mutton, too.”
“It’s the war, you see, Mother. Meat is very scarce, you know, and the butcher did save this particularly.”
“The war, the war. What will they do afterwards to excuse poor mutton?”
“Up at the hospital yesterday,” ventured Miss Agnes, “they were saying I told you, the news is quite hopeful now of peace.”
“Damned peace talk, damned conchies, hun-lovers, should all be hanged, I say,” said Mr. Chisel-Brown. He had white hair, white brows, and a white moustache struck across his bright red face, like a Christmas parcel with white ribbon around. He looked and sounded a military man, more colonel or major than plain Mr. Chisel-Brown. He did not speak to Charlotte and Emily at all, conveyed messages merely through his daughter, Miss Agnes.
“Hope Misses Moby know there’s war on, use gas, water, patriotically.”
“You will remember not to use too much hot water, to light the gas in your room only when necessary, won’t you, dears,” explained Miss Agnes anxiously.
“Yes,” said Charlotte, and “Yes,” muttered Emily.
“Mean, yes, Miss Agnes Chisel-Brown,” boomed Mr. Chisel-Brown.
“Yes, Miss Agnes Chisel-Brown, you ought to say,” Miss Agnes whispered across to them.
“Yes, Miss Agnes Chisel-Brown,” whispered Charlotte back, but Emily said no more.
“Young ladies these days, hunnish manners seemingly,” observed Mr. Chisel-Brown, wiping his moustache. “Arthur, a lad, behaved quite differently.”
•
In Charlotte and Emily’s bedroom hung a picture called “Mark of the German Beast,” which showed a huge, glowering face drawn in brown pencil. But the eyes were gun holes for shooting at unarmed men; the ears were crouched women with murdered babies in their arms; the nose, mouth, and chin each had similar horrors. This was what Charlotte saw first when she opened her eyes the next day. Therefore, she was not surprised to see, next, the perverse, irritating shape of the monkey puzzle tree outside the window and not, as she had hoped, the blaring brick of the new school annex in her own time, which would have looked to her quite beautiful today.
“Oh, you’re still here, are you?” said Emily casually, leaning over her. “I told you you would be, didn’t I? I said it was that bed that made you change with Clare. I told you so.”
She leaped back onto her own bed, which was very high but deep, like a sofa, with no room for even a child to crawl between it and the floor beneath.
“It’s much comfier than school beds,” she cried, bouncing vigorously. She might not have been gloomy yesterday at all, to Charlotte’s surprise and also her relief.
“Mind, Emily, don’t bust the springs,” she said.
It was raining today. But the rain had stopped by lunchtime, and after lunch Charlotte and Emily were ordered by Mr. Chisel-Brown through Miss Agnes to take the dog out into the garden, where dead brown flowers still stood on rhododendron bushes, which must have first flowered in June, and where they could scarcely move without banging into some dripping shrub, so showering themselves uncomfortably. The dog seemed to dislike it quite as much as Charlotte and Emily, lifting his feet disconsolately from the muddy paths. He looked like a millipede, Emily said. The mat of hair hanging down on either side of him was like little myriad legs.
Before them the monkey puzzle tree sprang up and out.
“I bet I could climb it,” said Emily. Charlotte surveyed it doubtfully.
“Well, if you could get up the first part where there aren’t any branches.”
“Oh, you’d need a ladder, of course. After that it’s like stairs. I bet it’s awfully easy if you’re good at climbing trees.”
“If the leaves or whatever you call those spiky green things are as prickly as they look, they’d hurt your hands like anything.”
“Yes, but some of the branches haven’t any at all; they’re bare, you see. You could miss the prickly ones, couldn’t you?”
It was odd the way the dark green spikes seemed to spring straight out from the wood. The trunk, too, had its own curious construction, small horizontal ridges at uneven intervals that would be rough, Charlotte thought, on knees and shins.
“I will climb it one day. I will anyway, you’ll see,” said Emily. She was bored now. She kicked the path or threw a stick for the dog to chase, but he continued as droopy at their heels.
“He’s such a boring dog. It’s all boring. I think it’s the most boring place I’ve ever known. The Chisel-Browns are the most boring people.”
“They’re just old. That’s all, I think,” said Charlotte.
“Aunt Dolly says it isn’t polite to talk about the food and stare at it like Mrs. Chisel-Brown does all the time,” said Emily righteously. “She calls it pig talk, pig behavior.”
“Well, you and Bunty talk about the food all the time at school.”
“That’s different, we’re children. Mrs. Chisel-Brown’s a grown-up lady.”
“It’s no different. If you know better, you shouldn’t do it.”
“Well, Mrs. Chisel-Brown must know better, and she still does it. That silly Miss Agnes should tell her not to. Don’t you think Miss Agnes is silly?”
“Not especially,” said Charlotte primly.
“Well, I do. I think she’s one of the silliest people I’ve ever met. And she’s ugly, too, uglier even than Elsie Brand.”
“I think you’re being horrid, Emily,” said Charlotte.
“I think I shall call her Ugly Aggie. Yes, Ugly Aggie, that’s a good name.”
Emily laughed loudly and for a long time. Afterwards came a long silence. She was looking at Charlotte. Eventually she said, “Clare would say it wasn’t good or Christian to talk like that. She’d say I ought to say sorry in my prayers.”
“I said you were horrid, didn’t I? Anyway, I’m not Clare. You know I’m not.” Charlotte picked up a dried rhododendron leaf, brown and tough looking and curled at the edges, like a boat she thought, balancing it across her hand.
“I know you’re not Clare,” said Emily loudly. “But you’ve got to be her anyway, haven’t you? You should just try harder, that’s all.”
“Emily, you’re being horrid.”
“I feel horrid. I feel horrid. I wish . . . I wish . . .” Emily stopped; scowled; as suddenly laughed and ran away across the lawn and back again.
“We were just talking about your monkey puzzle tree,” Charlotte said, for Miss Agnes came out then to call them in.
“Isn’t it funny, dear? You can see it would puzzle monkeys,” cried Miss Agnes with a bright giggle. She had large teeth and giggling, showed them all.
Charlotte did not dare look at Emily, saying rather hurriedly, “Emily thought you could climb it if you had a ladder first.”
“My brother climbed it once as a lad. He borrowed a ladder from the gardener.”
“Didn’t you climb it, too?” asked Emily.
“Oh no, dear, that would have been most unladylike.”
“I don’t care about being ladylike. Is that your brother in the photograph in the dining room?”
“Yes, that is Arthur,” replied Miss Agnes.
“Is he younger than you?”
“Oh yes, by several years. Was younger, I should say.”
“Why, is he dead then?” asked Emily, though Charlotte was hinting with a little kick that she should ask no more questions. It was rude.
“He was killed, dear, in this terrible war in France.”
“My father’s in France, too,” said Emily, more subdued again. The dog shook itself and sniffed. The trees and bushes dripped quite noisily.
Charlotte was looking at the ground, at the wet scattered leaves, but after a moment she felt Miss Agnes seem to shake herself, saw her unwind her knitted fingers. She heard her say quickly, almost defiantly, as she turned to lead them indoors again, “We had such a nice letter from the colonel to say how bravely dear Arthur had died. Of course we knew he had been brave—we’d never doubted it—but it was very kind of him to write and tell us so.”
They went to the dining room, where Charlotte and Emily had been told they might sit each day. Rather awkward seeming and embarrassed still, Miss Agnes knelt on the floor beside the big black cupboard and opened the lower doors. Out fell, tumbling, some books and boxes, some packages wrapped in tissue paper, out onto the shadowy floor.
“These were ours,” she said. “Mine and Arthur’s. You may play with them, if you like. There’s no one else to play with them now.” Then she went away at once, quite hurriedly.