The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories (10 page)

"Maybe, if he knew her, he'd know what it is she worries about,” said Harriet hopefully. “You know, I believe if we could find out what's on her mind and help her, she'd vanish. That's the sort of thing ghosts do."

"Well, I'm not sure I'd be sorry,” said Mark, puffing out a deep breath. “I'd like a night's sleep for once. Remember when we didn't wake up, how cross she was next night? And I've had just about enough Latin verbs.
And
the Kings of England."

Harriet agreed. “And the parents are beginning to think that there's something funny going on. Father started whistling ‘
Lieber Augustin
’ the other day, and then he turned and gave me an
awfully
queer look."

Admiral Lecacheur turned out to be a pleasant man, large, jovial, gray-haired. It was not difficult for the children to get an invitation from him to go and look at his cottage.

As he showed them the stuffed shark and the model ships in bottles, Harriet summoned up the courage to speak.

"Admiral,” she finally said timidly, “did you ever know a Miss Georgiana Lucy Allison?"

"God bless my soul, yes,” he said, turning round and smiling at her. “She was our family governess. Is there some stuff of hers still knocking about in the house?"

"Yes, there are some books of hers. And a Bible."

"Old Allie,” he said reminiscently. “She was a wonderful old girl. Must have been with our family for fifty years. She taught three generations of us. I was the last."

"Did she teach you?"

"I remember her very well,” he went on, without noticing the interruption, “though she died, I suppose, when I was about five. That would be around 1890. But she'd already taught me to read, and some of the multiplication table, and the kings of England. She was great on learning things by heart. Not like the modern education you get now, I daresay. ‘Cedric,’ she used to say, ‘how will you ever get on in life if you don't know these things?’ Ah, well. Here I am an admiral, and I daresay if she'd taught me longer, I should have been Admiral of the Fleet. But there! She must have died more than fifty years ago."

He smiled at their serious faces and said, “Now here's a thing you ought to like. Just look at the size of that!” And he handed Harriet a shell the size of a dinner plate.

"Well, we still don't know what's on her mind,” said Mark, as they walked homewards.

"No, but we couldn't ask him all at once. Another time we'll jolly well pump him."

But as things turned out they didn't need to. That night when Mark was reciting the dates of the kings of England, he absentmindedly followed William and Mary with “Queen Anne, 1700."

There was an ominous pause, and Miss Allison suddenly burst into tears.

"Cedric, you wicked boy,” she sobbed, “will you
never
get it right? How can you expect to be a success in life, if you don't know your dates? And you going into the Navy, too.” She hid her face in her hands, but through them they could hear her say, “I'm getting so old. How can I die happy if that boy doesn't know the date of Queen Anne? All the others learned it."

"Please don't cry,” said Mark awkwardly, patting her shoulder. “It was only a mistake. I do know it. Really I do. It's 1702, isn't it?"

But she went on sobbing “Cedric! Cedric!” and after a minute Harriet touched his arm and pulled him softly out of the room.

"Let's go to bed,” she whispered. “We can't do anything about her. And I've got a brilliant idea. Tell you in the morning."

Next day she dragged him down to Dolphin Cottage. The admiral was surprised to see them. “What, you again so early? You're just in time to help me syringe my greenfly."

"Admiral,” said Harriet, fixing her eyes on him earnestly, “will you tell me something terribly important?"

"What is it,” he said, very much astonished.

"Tell me when Queen Anne came to the throne."

He burst into a great roar of laughter, slapping his knees. “Well, I'm blessed; do you know, it's funny you should ask me that, because it's the one date I never have been able to remember. Miss Allison used to get wild about it. ‘I shan't die happy till you know that date, Cedric,’ she used to say. But she did die, poor old soul, and I don't know it to this day."

"Come and sit down,” said Harriet, dragging him to a garden seat. One on each side, she and Mark told him the whole story. When he heard how Miss Allison made their nights a burden, he shouted with laughter.

"That's just like her, bless her,” he exclaimed.

"So you see, it really has got to stop,” Harriet explained. “We're getting worn out, and I'm sure she is too—after all, she must be about a hundred and twenty, far too old to be teaching. And she's so miserable, poor dear. I think you can help us."

She told him their plan, and after some hesitation the admiral agreed. “But if you're pulling my leg,” he threatened, “you'll never forget it, the pair of you."

"Now you've got to learn it,” said Harriet. “Write it on a bit of paper somewhere—here, I'll do it for you. Now stick it up where you'll be able to see it all day. And we'll meet you at the garden gate tonight at midnight."

"What your parents would say if they caught us—” he exclaimed, but he agreed. The children went home very hopeful.

The meeting came off as arranged. They let him in by the garden door and took him quietly up the back stairs into the schoolroom, where Miss Allison was pacing up and down looking very impatient.

"What time,” she began, and then suddenly she saw who was with them. “Why,
Cedric!
"

"Allie!” he exclaimed.

"You wicked boy! Where have you been all this time?"

"I'm sorry,” he said meekly, looking more like a small boy than a gray-haired man of sixty.

"Just you tell me one thing,” she said, drawing herself up and giving him a piercing look. “When did Queen Anne come to the throne?"

The children gazed at him anxiously, but they need not have worried. He had learned his lesson this time.

"Seventeen-two,” he said promptly, and they sighed with relief.

Miss Allison burst into tears of joy.

"I might have known it,” she sobbed. “My good boy. Why, now you know that, you might even become an admiral, and I can die happy."

And as they watched her, suddenly, flick! like a candle, she went out, and there was no one in the room but their three selves.

"Well, I'm blessed,” said the admiral, not for the first time. “Old Allie.” He walked quietly from the room. Mark saw him down to the garden gate. When he came back, he found Harriet dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

"You know, I'm going to miss her,” she said. “Oh, well, let's got to bed."

They never saw Miss Allison again.

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I've been sent home early,” Harriet wrote, “because they've all got German measles at school, and they don't want any more of us to get them. Isn't it a joke?"

Mark envied her for two days until his mother wrote in some annoyance to say that the first thing Harriet had done when she got home was develop that short but tiresome disease. This meant that Mark would have to stay on at school for four days after term to let her get out of quarantine. He was in the middle of an indignant letter asking her how she could have been so careless when the wire came from his Aunt Hal in London.

"Come here till quarantine over key under flowerpot as usual,” it said.

So Mark tore up his letter, thanked his stars that he had not yet begun to search the small town of Warrington for Harriet's birthday present, and packed himself on the school train with the rest of his friends on Friday morning.

His Aunt Hal's flat was over a garage, which was in itself delightful. Also you climbed up to it by a flight of steps outside, and there was a balcony, and a marmalade cat called Tomsk.

Hal was in the process of distempering the walls of the three rooms, and they spent an energetic weekend dropping brushfuls of paint over each other and the carpet, only breaking off for large mixed meals and a cinema.

"I've got tickets for
Robin Hood
on Monday evening,” she told him. “Of course I'm working on Monday. Will you be able to amuse yourself all day?"

"I want to get some lino-cutting tools,” said Mark, “and there's Harriet's birthday present to shop for. Mother doesn't want me to go down until Tuesday afternoon because of choir practice and the sheets and the fumigating."

"O.K.,” said Hal, “I'll leave you your lunch, if you like, and meet you at the theatre."

She had already gone off to work when he got up on Monday morning. He ate his breakfast lying on the floor on his stomach with Tomsk sitting gravely beside him. Aunt Hal had two wonderful books which he always looked at when he came to see her. One of them was about Louis the Eleventh, whom he knew from
Quentin Durward
, and the other was about Napoleon's Moscow campaign. Unfortunately, they were in French, and not very easy, but it was the pictures he looked at them for. These were very strange and exciting. There were three that he always remembered particularly. One of them showed the siege of a castle. The besiegers had put up an enormously tall ladder against the walls and a lot of men had climbed up it. But just when the first ones were getting near the top, the defenders had managed to push the ladder over, and the picture showed it slowly falling backwards, and the horrified faces of the men on it. Another picture was of a man falling through a trap door into an oubliette, and the third was Louis being haunted by all the people he had hanged. Mark spent a lot of time on this book, and then stacked his breakfast things in the kitchen, took the sandwiches that his Aunt Hal had made him, saw that Tomsk had enough milk, and went out.

By lunch time he had bought his tools, but had not yet decided on Harriet's present. He did not know what he wanted to give her, and felt rather worried. Nothing he saw seemed exactly the thing she would like. He ate his sandwiches in the park, thinking deeply all the time, and then made up his mind to go back to the flat and leave his tools there, as they were heavy and inconvenient. Then he would have a proper hunt for Harriet's present, and if he could still find nothing, there was always next morning.

Tomsk had finished all his milk and wanted some more, so it was just as well he had gone back. He dropped the tools, ate a piece of cake, and went out again into the hazy March sunshine. There was a smell of smoke, and it was very cold, but felt like spring.

This time Mark did not try to go anywhere definite, but just wandered, looking into shop windows, going down streets that looked as if they might lead somewhere interesting, getting on buses and off again (sometimes without paying his fare), and talking to odd people when he felt like it.

He was standing with his hands in his pockets outside the window of a large toyshop when he heard a voice at his elbow.

"Buying geefts, yes?” the voice said softly. “Here I haf geefts that will nefer break, nefer wear out, recipients nefer tire of heem, yes no?"

Mark looked round and saw a little man sitting on a stool on the pavement with a large box beside him.

"Magic,” the man nodded, “nefer break, nefer wear out—see?” He held up a very ordinary looking white picnic cup. “Throw heem on the floor—he never break. Nefer get lost if you watch heem. Water in heem never spilt. Useful—yes no?"

Mark was not very impressed. “Haven't you anything more exciting than that?” he asked. “I can get one of these at Woolworth's for sixpence."

The little man looked hurt, but produced a book whose red and gold cover was splashed all over with horses and dragons and volcanoes.

"Fine book—nefer get tired of heem, nefer lost,” he said.

Mark took the book and opened it.

"But there's nothing inside,” he said disappointedly. The pages were blank.

"Nefer get tired of heem so,” the little man explained. Mark handed it back, shaking his head.

"Magic elastic—very stretchy,” the man suggested. “For catapult, yes? Always hit your sparrow, yes no?"

"Where is it?” said Mark, looking about.

"Here,” the little man answered with a broad smile of triumph. He held out his hands, moving them out and in. “See how stretchy?"

"I can't see it."

"Invisible—very fine so,” the man pleaded, but Mark thought that invisible elastic, however stretchy, was not exciting enough for Harriet's birthday present.

"Haven't you anything else?"

The man produced very rapidly a magic lizard which ran about all over the pavement, a bag of invisible (and intangible) toffee, a magic pencil for arithmetic, and a bottle of red mixture guaranteed to turn you into a fox. No antidote was supplied.

"No, thank you,” said Mark politely to all of these.

"Ach,” the little man exclaimed crossly at last, “fussy you are, yes no? You get on that bus there, he take you where you get a fine present, a lovely present, very classy aha, yes no?"

Mark thought he might as well get on the bus and escape the little man, so he swung himself onto the step, vaguely noticing that it said, “Kew—extraordinary service."