Mennyms Under Siege Page 13

She did not add that, to her way of thinking, only one person was to blame for all their miseries – the paranoid tyrant in the bed upstairs.

  “How dare you make excuses for me? I am not senile!” said Tulip. “Why don’t we just concentrate on the real culprit? Appleby was about to leave this house, using a stolen key, to post a forged letter to Albert Pond. Hardly the actions of an innocent! What would you have done if you’d caught her, Pilbeam know-it-all? Let her go?”

  “No,” said Pilbeam. “I would have made her give me the letter and the key.”

  “As I did.”

  “Then I would have read the name and address on the envelope. But I would not have opened it. I would have told her in no uncertain terms that writing to Albert Pond was not on. Then I’d have torn the letter, unopened, into little shreds.”

  “You would never have known that she’d forged your name,” said Tulip, “that she’d written stupid drivel and put your name to it.”

  “And what I didn’t know would not have hurt me.”

  Soobie looked her way, knowing suddenly that his twin had been hurt perhaps more deeply than anyone would ever really know. Hurt, and humiliated.

  Tulip had the letter in her hand.

  “I haven’t shown this to Granpa yet,” she said. “When he sees it and hears how his precious Appleby has behaved, he will be livid. He will be outraged.”

  Soobie spoke.

  “You must not show him the letter. You must not tell him anything about it. One mischief is leading to another.”

  Tulip turned on him.

  “So it’s you now! Are you daring to tell me what to do?”

  “Yes,” said Soobie. “I am.”

  Vinetta had listened to them all intently. Now she gave her views, more than her views, her intractable decision.

  “Give me the letter, Tulip,” she said. “I have had enough anguish to last a lifetime. That letter has to be torn up and forgotten.”

  Tulip always felt diminished when her daughter-in-law spoke in that tone of voice. She became what she was, a little old woman, and not what she fancied herself to be — the presiding matriarch.

  “Give me the letter,” said Vinetta again.

  Tulip resentfully handed it over.

  Tiny pieces of paper fluttered into the basket near the hearth.

  “Now,” said Vinetta, “we have a much more difficult problem to tackle. Appleby has shut herself in the attic. I tried to go in there this morning and she has the door jammed shut. She wouldn’t even answer me when I called. How are we going to persuade her to come out?”

  “Don’t bother,” said Soobie. “Granny was wrong about the letter, but that doesn’t make Appleby an angel. Leave her where she is for now. She’ll get bored soon enough.”

  Their voices had become so quiet that the twins in the playroom could be heard arguing.

  “But I won. You know I won. You’re just jealous because I know more words than you do.”

  “You were cheating,” said Poopie. “I don’t believe that ‘poggle’ is a real word. You make them up as you go along. It’s not worth playing with you.”

  The argument was beginning to sound too heated. Vinetta went hastily to calm things down.

  28

  In the Attic

  APPLEBY SAT IN the chair in the attic and rocked herself to sleep. Sleep is a wonderful place to go when life hurts too much. And Appleby, at times so insensitive, at times so vulnerable, was deeply hurt. To be found out and to be made to appear so foolish was terrible. To be mocked by her grandmother was a searing pain. The hurt went deeper than pride. It gouged out her self-respect. She knew the letter sounded feeble. She could have done without hearing it read aloud in Tulip’s waspish voice. And Mother and Wimpey looking down at her over the banister as Granny poured scorn like poison . . . It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair!

  When morning lit up the skylights, Appleby was sleeping sweetly, looking very young and very innocent. She was so exhausted that her first awareness of the new day came when Vinetta tapped at the attic door and tried to open it. The door rattled but the barrier held.

  “Come on, Appleby,” said her mother. “Don’t be silly. Come out and face up to things. Get it over with.”

  Appleby was a little surprised at something in her mother’s tone. It suggested complicity, a willingness to support her daughter without considering whether she merited support. But, no matter what, Appleby was not ready to face the music yet. So she said nothing and Vinetta gave up and went away.

  The day dawdled. By the time the sun had travelled over the ridge of the roof and was pouring its light onto the attic floor, Appleby was wide-awake, angry with everybody, and bored.

  She got up from the rocking-chair and wandered around the room. It had not changed from the last time she had shut herself in there, the time she had hidden from Joshua after her return from Comus House. Books, chests, junk and dust . . . all of them of equal value to the trapped teenager. She had made for herself a prison within a prison. Albeit a fairly large prison. The attic was the width and the depth of the whole house, a massive, floored area under the roof vault. There was another door at the far side, so deep in shadow that it could easily be overlooked.

  Appleby came to this door, idly, without purpose. It was a mirror image of the door at the other side of the room – one side shorter than the other, following the slope of the roof. That’s odd, thought Appleby, there’s no other staircase. This must be a cupboard. I wonder what’s inside. Her right hand went out to grip the door handle.

  “Don’t!” said a voice, and Appleby did not know whether the voice was in her head or in the room. But the hand that was about to turn the doorknob stopped in its tracks.

  “Don’t open that door,” said the voice more clearly.

  Appleby spun round and looked across the room. There at the far end, seated on one of the wicker chests Appleby had used as a barrier, was Aunt Kate.

  “Who on earth are you?” asked Appleby, too amazed to be frightened.

  Kate looked, as always, solidly built and completely unghostly. Just so had she appeared to Albert Pond.

  “I am Kate Penshaw,” she said. Her voice was faint but firm. Appearing like this was breaking a rule that till now she had accepted as inviolable. Well, what do they expect me to do? Her mind threw out a challenge. This is an emergency. How else am I to deal with it?

  Appleby stared at her, open-mouthed, utterly amazed.

  “You’re a ghost,” she said in a voice that was clearly testing the truth of her own statement. “You don’t look like a ghost,” she added.

  “I don’t feel like one either,” said Kate. But she was growing shadowy inside. This unlawful interview was sapping all her strength.

  “What do you want?” Appleby asked, still unsure whether the woman was really a ghost after all. “You don’t look like a burglar.”

  “I should think not,” said Kate. “I’ve been some things in my time, but never a law-breaker, not till now.”

  Appleby took a few steps towards her. She was just as Albert Pond had described her. Her hair grey and wiry, her face firm and sensible, her whole appearance very solid and real.

  “Don’t come any closer,” said Kate. “Before you go too far into what I am, remember what you are.”

  “Well, what do you want?” said Appleby. “You must want something.” There was a sharp impatience in her voice, now that she was not afraid. No one was immune from Appleby’s rudeness, not even the woman who made her.

  “I’ve already told you what I want,” said Kate. “I am breaking one of the fundamental rules of my existence to come and warn you not to open that door.”

  Appleby tossed her head. “Why not?” she demanded. “It’s just a door and it’s in our house. I’ll open it if I want to.”

  “You’ll regret it if you do,” said Kate. “I daren’t tell you more than that. I have said enough already. Just remember, I helped to make you. I care desperately what happens to you.”

  The
love in Kate’s voice echoed round the room.

  Appleby faltered. She looked down at the door handle. When she looked up again the ghost had disappeared.

  For some moments, Appleby stood there like Eve tempted by the apple. She looked at the forbidden door and experienced a turmoil of feelings. To be defiant was second nature, but at the same time, what a tremendous thing had happened! She, Appleby Mennym, whose claims to mystical knowledge had been laughed to scorn, had been privileged to see and hear a real, live ghost. Her right hand reached out to the door handle again but her left hand pulled it away. If Kate thought it important enough to appear, then maybe opening that door really was too dangerous a venture. Besides, the door must have always been there. It always would be there. She could open it some other day.

  There was no question of going back to sit in the rocking-chair again. She could not even think of staying in the attic till darkness came. A ghost is a ghost. The shadows of the evening can strike fear. An imaginary spirit in the ether of the dark attic would be more terrifying than the figure of Aunt Kate had been. Appleby dismantled the barrier and went downstairs.

  “So you’ve decided to show yourself,” said Granny Tulip as Appleby came into the lounge.

  “Come in and sit down,” said Vinetta quietly.

  The only other person in the room was Pilbeam. Appleby, weighing up the situation, sensed that her mother and sister were on her side, if only she said the right thing at that moment. It was not an easy thing to say, and she could not manage to say it graciously.

  “I’m sorry,” she said and looked at all three of them defiantly. “I got bored. People do funny things when they get bored. I hate being locked in. You just don’t know how much I hate it.”

  “We all hate it,” said Pilbeam with an accusing look at her mother.

  “I know,” said Vinetta. “It’s not easy. I’ll talk to Granpa again. I’ll see what we can do about it. Perhaps it won’t be for much longer.”

  Tulip said nothing, but she was far from satisfied. Magnus had accused her of not keeping the family on tight enough a rein. If Vinetta had her way, there would be no rein at all.

  Appleby did not mention the ghost in the attic. That was a bit of knowledge she did not want to share with anyone, not yet.

  29

  Poopie and Wimpey

  NUMBER 5 BROCKLEHURST Grove was right in the middle of the side of the square furthest away from the main road. The rest of the street stretched out to either side of it like two arms bent rigidly at the elbows. People living either side had no need to pass the Mennym house and few of them did.

  Watching for trouble could be very tedious, but Wimpey dutifully took her turn, two full hours three times a week. That was a very long time for a child of her age to sit still doing nothing but look out of the window.

  One afternoon, early in September, Wimpey was sitting in Soobie’s armchair gazing at the empty street. She had been there alone for almost an hour. In that time, Mrs England had passed twice, walking the dog. A boy on a bicycle had ridden past. A car had left the drive at Number 3 and headed away in the opposite direction. Nothing ever happens, thought Wimpey. The only little flutter of excitement came when Anthea Fryer approached from the left and Mrs Jarman came out of the gate of Number 4 and turned to go and visit Wendy England at Number 6. They would meet outside the Mennyms’ front gate, as they had done once before. They might stop and talk again and look towards the house. It would be trembly frightening, but it would be something to report!

  But they didn’t stop to speak. Mrs Jarman and Miss Fryer had had little to say to each other since the day the older woman had put the younger one very firmly in her place. The nosy newcomer, who had lived in the street for only five years, if that, had tried to make insinuations about the Mennyms. In all the time they had been neighbours, Mrs Jarman had never spoken directly to anyone in the Mennym household, was no more than vaguely aware of their existence, but they were harmless, they were rooted in the street, and when they came under attack Mrs Jarman felt called upon to protect them.

  “Good fences,” she said in conclusion, “make good neighbours.”

  After all those years she was suddenly able to throw the words back at someone who clearly needed reminding of the right to privacy.

  Vinetta came into the lounge and looked fondly at the ten-year-old, sitting so still and so obviously concentrating. Mother love is a sort of magic.

  “Tired?” said Vinetta.

  “Not yet,” said Wimpey, determined not to give in. “I’ve still got another hour to go before Soobie takes over.”

  “Seen anything?”

  “Just the usual,” said Wimpey. “Nothing dangerous or exciting.”

  “But that’s good enough,” said Vinetta. “That’s the way we want it to be. The longer it’s like that, the sooner the siege will be over.”

  Vinetta drew up a chair and sat beside Wimpey. They went on watching together for some minutes in silence.

  “It is lonely being a rag doll,” said Wimpey quite out of the blue.

  “I suppose it is,” said Vinetta, “but human beings can be lonely too. Remember Albert.”

  “But they grow up and grow old and they die,” said Wimpey, struggling with ideas she was too young to comprehend. “What happens to us?”

  “I’ve often thought about that,” said Vinetta. She was the sort of mother who never talked down to her children, who took their questions seriously and tried to give serious answers. “I think we are not so very different from the people out there. We are part of some wonderful game, and when the game is over God will carry us safely home in his pocket.”

  The reply was childlike, but not childish. It was a sort of metaphor for what Vinetta truly believed.

  The Mennyms, in their own way, were a Christian family. Wimpey always said her prayers at night, even the scary one – Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  It was all part of the pattern of living. Now, with the hours spent doing nothing but stare out of the window, Wimpey for the first time was trying to grasp at realities. The protection of pretends was growing thin.

  “What does Dad believe in?” she asked.

  Vinetta smiled.

  “His family, his job and Port Vale,” she said.

  “And will God carry him home, too?”

  “I should think so,” said Vinetta. “It has to be a very big pocket!”

  The boy on the bicycle rode past again. Mrs England stood at her door and said goodbye to Mrs Jarman.

  Poopie never took a turn on watch these days. He could not bear to look at the garden growing more and more wild and untidy. For the past three weeks he had not left his room. But he was not sulking and he was not bored. He had turned the whole room into a tropical jungle in which green-clad soldiers fought with the men in brown. It was a harmless war in which combatants died repeatedly, without really dying at all. In many long years of fighting the only real casualty had been the evil Basil who had lost an arm, but still fought on.

  In one corner of the room, the stool supported a high look-out tower occupied by the greens. The browns, led by Hector, had control of a swinging rope bridge, real treasure bought as a Christmas present years before.

  Poopie had no scruples about moving even the heaviest of his furniture round the room. His bed was pushed into the corner near the window. On the bed, Chief of Operations, was Paddy Black, the rabbit. His pink eyes looked as nervous as ever, though he was just an ordinary cloth toy who had never so much as twitched a whisker since Vinetta first made him, no matter what Poopie might like to pretend.

  In normal times, Paddy stayed in the hutch Joshua made for him, polished wood, splinter-free, with a door made of copper wire-mesh. The hutch was needed for the wargames. It was the perfect prison for captured browns. The greens, who were usually on the losing side because their leader was baleful Basil, had to be content with a shoe-box. So the hutch and th
e box were prisons within a prison within a prison. Except that for Poopie his room was not a prison. It was a jungle stretching over miles of territory. Thought, as the poet once said, is free.

  30

  Appleby and Pilbeam

  ON A DULL day at the beginning of September, Appleby and Pilbeam made their way up the attic stairs. It was Appleby’s idea. Pilbeam did not know what it was all about, but she respected the attic as a secret place where secrets could be shared.

  “All right,” she said as they closed the door behind them, “what’s the mystery?”

  She was worried in case Tony had come back on the scene. With Appleby, one was never quite sure. They had seen him a few times from the window in the long, tortured weeks of August. He had passed the house on several occasions, never suspecting that he was being observed from behind the heavy net curtains. The Appleby episode had taken its proper place in his memory, somewhere below last term’s feud with the history master, and a long, long way below the fifty he had made in the match against St Bee’s.

  “You haven’t been doing anything silly, have you?” said Pilbeam as she settled herself into the rocking-chair, leaving Appleby to the less exalted position on the footstool. In the attic, which she still thought of as her attic, Pilbeam was queen. In her romantic view of things, she had slept there under a spell for forty years till her twin Soobie found her, and her mother brought her to life. The truth that she would never know was sadder, but more wonderful. For forty years she had lain unfinished in a wicker chest and Vinetta had done much more than bring her to life, she had made her up out of scattered pieces, fitting her together with loving care.

  Appleby switched on the light because the day was so dreary. The attic was minus the round table, but apart from that it was pretty much as it was after Soobie had tidied it long ago. Even the old white-painted doll’s house was still in the corner. Wimpey had wanted to claim it but Vinetta had said it was too old and too frail to be played with. The packing-case filled with junk, and the two wicker chests which Appleby had used to barricade the door, were back in place, bounding the ‘inhabited’ region. The other half of the attic was bare and dusty.