“No, I’m not,” David said, as Mrs. Thirsk came in with the next course. “But you’re not a damsel in distress.”
Astrid went very red and glared at David all the time Mrs. Thirsk was handing out plates with dark meat on them covered with dark gravy. The meat was dark because it was burned. It tasted terrible, so terrible that even Uncle Bernard noticed.
“This meat is burned,” he said fretfully. “I don’t think it’s eatable.”
Everyone except David thankfully laid down their knives and forks. David was so hungry after rebuilding the wall that he had practically eaten all his anyway, and it seemed a shame to leave the rest.
“That boy has no discrimination,” said Uncle Bernard, as Mrs. Thirsk came back to see what was the matter.
“Mrs. Thirsk—” began Aunt Dot.
“I can’t think how it happened!” said Mrs. Thirsk. “It was beautiful five minutes ago. And when I came back after taking the soup, there it was, black! And it was on the table. No heat near it.”
“It has been near a very great heat for a considerable time, I should say,” Uncle Bernard said, prodding it. “I can’t find your explanation adequate, Mrs. Thirsk.”
“Adequate or not, it’s the plain truth!” said Mrs. Thirsk. She gave David a malignant look as she said it, as if she would have liked to put the blame on him if she could.
“The soup was burned too,” said Astrid.
“That was right as rain when it left my kitchen,” claimed Mrs. Thirsk. “You may say what you like, but I can’t understand it.” And for five more minutes, at the top of her voice, Mrs. Thirsk went on not being able to understand it, either the soup or the meat.
“Let’s have the pudding anyway,” said Cousin Ronald hungrily, and Mrs. Thirsk went angrily away to get it.
The pudding was burned too, and Mrs. Thirsk could not understand that either. “It was right as rain,” she said. “Good as gold it was. Now look at it!”
“Oh let’s not have all that again,” said Cousin Ronald. “Bring us some bread and cheese, and do try not to burn that if you can.”
Luckily, it was beyond Mrs. Thirsk’s skill to burn bread and cheese, so everyone began hungrily to eat that. David was pleased. It looked as if he might, for once, get enough to eat in this house. The bread was a little stale, but wonderfully filling, and the cheese was the strong orange kind which David particularly liked.
“You know,” Cousin Ronald said, taking nearly half the strong orange cheese, “Mrs. Thirsk is a rotten cook, Mother. Couldn’t we get someone else?”
That was a lovely idea. David’s heart once again warmed toward Cousin Ronald, even though he had taken so much cheese.
“I invite you to try to get someone else, Ronald,” said Aunt Dot, finishing that idea for good and all. “David, please stop that unmannerly stuffing. Even if you can’t find it in your heart to be grateful, you need not pretend that we starve you.”
This was the signal for all four of them to turn on David again. The truth was that David’s announcement over lunch had made them all feel very much ashamed, and they could not forgive him for it. So they told him all over again how ungrateful he was, until David could bear it no longer.
“I don’t know why you think I’m not grateful,” he said. “I was grateful, until you all started going on at me. But I’m not any longer. Nobody could be.”
“Well!” said Aunt Dot.
“Let’s go to Scarborough after all,” said Astrid.
Cousin Ronald pushed his chair back and stalked to the French window. “That settles it,” he said. “I’m going into the garden.” And he went.
The other three stayed where they were. David was wishing heartily that it was actually possible to take back one’s words, when Mrs. Thirsk came in, ready to put herself in the right again at David’s expense, bearing like a flag a white towel with red and black grime all over it.
“Look at this—” she began.
She got no further, because Cousin Ronald shot back into the room, groaning with rage, carrying something like a green sausage someone had stamped on. “My marrows!” he said. “Just look what this brat has done to my marrows!”
David was sent up to bed again. The one bright spot he could see, as he climbed the stairs and slammed the door of his room, was that Cousin Ronald had not noticed anything wrong with the wall. Otherwise, everything was horrible. It was just not fair. He was quite ready to be grateful, if only they left him alone—but that was the last thing they would do.
David sat on his bed and looked longingly at the window. Luke was probably waiting for him at the end of the garden by now. It was a hot, golden evening. Midges circled just outside, and swallows swooped in the distance. David thought of all the things he and Luke might be doing and was miserable. And because he had nothing else to do, he took out the box of matches and fiercely struck one. Serve them right if he burned the house down!
Almost at once, he heard a faint thumping and rustling from outside the window. David was at the window after the first thump. Luke was climbing up the creepers like a monkey.
“Oh, brilliant!” David said, and all his misery vanished.
Luke looked up as David spoke, rather red in the face, and grinned. The movement shifted his weight. “Help!” Luke said. There was a sharp ripping noise, and the creepers began leaning away from the house, carrying Luke with them. David leaned out as far as he dared and seized Luke’s desperately waving arm. After a good deal of heaving, he managed to pull Luke in over the windowsill, both of them laughing rather hysterically—the way you do when you have had a fright. “Thanks,” said Luke.
“Look at the creeper!” David said, and both of them went off into muffled giggles again. The creeper was hanging away from the house in a great bush, and its leaves were turning a scorched and withered brown. David was secretly appalled at the mess, but Luke was not in the least worried.
“More faking necessary,” he said. “Hang on to me while I get hold of it.” So David gripped Luke round the waist and Luke leaned as far out of the window as he could. Somehow, he managed to grab the creeper and hook it back on the nails it had been tied to, where it hung, still limp and brown and withered, it is true, but nothing like so obviously broken.
Then they turned back into the room, and David, to his horror, found the match he had struck lying on the floor still burning. He rushed and stamped it out.
“You see,” said Luke, “you only have to kindle a flame to fetch me. Now, what’s the matter? In trouble again?”
“I’ll say I am!” said David. He gave Luke the history of supper, and Luke laughed. He laughed about the marrows, the towel and the burned food. He lay comfortably on David’s bed, with his dirty shoes on Mrs. Thirsk’s white bedspread, and laughed even when David said passionately: “I’m sick of having to be grateful!”
“Quite right,” he said, scratching at the burn on his face, which seemed to be healing nicely.
“It’s all very well to laugh,” said David. “You don’t have to stand them all going on at you.”
“Oh, I know what that feels like,” Luke said. “My family was just the same. But there’s no sense in being miserable about it. Did you enjoy supper, by the way?”
“The cheese was all right,” said David. “What Cousin Ronald left of it.”
Luke chuckled. “I thought of burning the bread too,” he said, “but I didn’t want you to go hungry.”
“Tell me another,” said David.
“Seriously,” said Luke, although David could see from his face he was joking again. “Mrs. Thirsk deserved it. What shall we do now?”
“I suppose we could play Ludo,” David suggested, looking mournfully at the scanty shelf of amusements by his bed.
“I don’t know how to play Ludo,” said Luke, “and I can see from your face that I shouldn’t like it if I learned. I’ve a better idea. Would you like to see some of my doodles?”
“What are they?” David asked cautiously.
“What I
used to amuse myself with in prison,” said Luke. “Look at that corner, where it’s darker, and if you don’t like them you can always tell me to stop. I can go on for hours.”
Dubiously, David looked at the corner of his room. A tiny bright thing appeared there, coasting gently along, like a spark off a bonfire. It was joined by another, and another, until there were twenty or thirty of them. They clustered gently together, moved softly apart, combined, climbed and spread, and were never still for a moment. It was rather like watching the sparks at the back of a chimney, except that these made real, brief pictures, lacy patterns, letters, numbers and stars.
“Not boring you?” said Luke. David shook his head, almost too fascinated to wonder how Luke made the things. “Let’s have a change of color, though,” Luke said quietly.
The bright things slowly turned green. The shapes they made now were stranger, spreading at the edges like ink on blotting paper. Outside, it was getting dark. Luke’s green doodles showed brighter and brighter. Then they went blue and clear, and made shapes like geometry, all angles.
David had no idea how long he watched. He stared until his eyes ached and he could see shapes even with his eyelids down. Every so often, Luke would make a quiet suggestion and the style of the doodles would change again. “Blood drops,” he would say. “Now some wild shapes.” And the bright things in the corner altered. Luke had just made them purple when David fell asleep.
5
THE FIRE
Luke must have climbed down the creeper while David was asleep. He was not there in the morning, anyway, and David felt very flat without him. The morning was made no livelier by Cousin Ronald’s refusal to let David near a radio. David wanted to hear the Test Match as much as Cousin Ronald, but Cousin Ronald, saying that any radio David went near became covered with compost, took all three radios with him into the study and shut the door in David’s face.
There was nothing for David to do but unpack his trunk, which arrived soon after breakfast. His cricket bat, when he came to it, did not seem as large as he remembered, and all the clothes were rather small.
“That means new everything,” Astrid said, sighing. “We’ll be all afternoon. My head will be splitting in this heat, but I know you won’t care how I feel.”
“Yes I will,” David said truthfully. When Astrid had a headache, she was always more than usually spiteful, so it was natural to hope that her head would not split.
“Thanks for nothing,” Astrid retorted and climbed into her Mini, jangling bracelets and flouncing her handbag. “Don’t rush to get in, will you?”
“You have to unlock the door first,” David said patiently, wondering how he was to get through this shopping expedition without being rude to Astrid.
It was very difficult. Astrid could find nowhere to park her Mini. She drove from place to place, grumbling, while the inside of the car became hotter and hotter. Astrid announced that she felt faint and said she would drive home again. She did not do this, however, because she was almost as much afraid of Aunt Dot as David was. Instead, she drove to a very distant car-park, and they set out to walk back to the shops. Astrid’s feet hurt her.
“There are shooting pains in my insteps,” she said. “Do you think I’ve dislocated my toe?”
“No. It’s because you wear such silly shoes,” David explained.
“I’ve had about enough of your cheek!” Astrid said, and marched on very fast and upright to prove David wrong.
David trotted after her, sweating in the heat and dodging among the crowds on the pavement. He longed to be elsewhere—preferably by the compost heap, meeting Luke. Then he began to wonder if it was really true that he only had to strike a match to bring Luke. He knew it was only Luke’s nonsense really. He could prove it, if he wanted, by striking a match here, in the middle of Ashbury, where Luke could not possibly turn up. David did not want to. He wanted to pretend that Luke was the one extraordinary thing that had happened in this exceptionally miserable holiday. But, by the time Astrid had told him twice not to dawdle and three times more about her feet, David had reached the stage where he wanted to prove that everything was flat and ordinary and horrible, just because everything so obviously was.
While they were waiting to cross a street, David turned aside, fetched out the box, struck a match, and then had to throw it flaring in the gutter, because Astrid told him sharply not to dawdle and he had to walk on across the street.
“Hallo,” said Luke, strolling across beside him with his hands in his pockets. “Why are you looking so hot and bothered?”
David beamed at him. Life was suddenly quite different. “I just hate shopping,” he said. “And she keeps on telling me to walk quicker.”
“Which cat’s mother’s she?” said Luke.
“Astrid,” David said, giggling.
Astrid turned round when she heard her name. “What are you at now?”
“I’ve met a friend,” David said gaily. “Can Luke come with us, Astrid?”
“Well, really!” said Astrid, and she looked Luke over in a most unfriendly way. This, David thought, was unfair, because Luke looked remarkably clean and spruce today. His red hair was tidy, his freckled face was clean, and the burn on his cheek hardly showed at all.
Luke, however, held out his hand to Astrid, smiling most politely. “How do you do, Astrid?” he said, and contrived to sound well-brought-up and dependable saying it.
“Mrs. Price to you,” Astrid said haughtily. But she shook hands with Luke and did not look as haughty as she sounded. “Well, come along if you’re coming,” she said.
When they reached the first shop, Luke stood, looking rather wondering, among the lines of coats and stacks of shirts, while David tried things on. David and Astrid disagreed, as David had known they would, about what to buy. David’s idea of good clothes was loose comfortable things that looked best grubby. He cast longing looks at a rack of jeans, and at cotton sweaters in interesting colors. Astrid’s idea was something Aunt Dot would not disapprove of. She made David try on a suit with tight prickly trousers and asked the assistant for distasteful white shirts, with buttons.
“I don’t like this suit,” David said sadly. “It pricks. And I don’t like those shirts either.”
Astrid took hold of his elbow fiercely and led him out of the assistant’s hearing. “I warn you David,” she told him in a passionate whisper, “I shall do something dreadful if nothing’s going to satisfy Your Majesty except red robes and ermine!”
“I’d be satisfied with jeans,” David said hopefully.
“You ungrateful little—!” Astrid began, but stopped when she realized that Luke was standing just beside David. “I give up!” she said to them both.
“Quite right,” Luke agreed cheerfully. “I don’t think much of that suit either.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Astrid asked angrily.
“He looks like a penguin,” Luke said.
Astrid looked at David, ready to deny it. But, in fact, the tightness and prickliness of the suit did make David stand in an awkward, stiff way, with his arms slightly out, very much like a penguin. “Doh!” said Astrid, and marched back to the assistant. David heard her say that they would leave the suit and just take the shirts, and could hardly believe his luck. He looked at Luke, and Luke gave him a smile of pure mischief.
This episode did not improve Astrid’s temper. After the assistant had packed up the disagreeable shirts and they were leaving the shop, she said: “Now we shall have to go all the way to Trubitt’s and I want no more nonsense. I’ve got one of my heads coming on already.”
As David and Luke followed her, Luke said, out of the corner of his mouth: “How many heads has she got?” David doubled up with laughter. He could not help it. He staggered sideways across the pavement, howling and coughing, with packets of shirt sliding out of his arms in all directions.
Astrid, naturally, turned back, demanding to know what had got into him this time.
“I don’t know,” Luke said
artlessly. Then, very artfully, he added: “You know, Mrs. Price, you look to me as if you’ve got a headache.”
“I do?” said Astrid, forgetting David. “Well, as a matter of fact I have, Luke. Right over my left eye.”
“Terrible,” Luke said sympathetically. “How would it be if we were to go somewhere where you could sit down and rest for a while?”
“Oh, I’d give anything if I could!” said Astrid. “But we haven’t time. I promised David’s Aunt I’d buy him some clothes and—”
“You’ll do it all the quicker for having a rest,” Luke told her, kindly and firmly. “There’s plenty of time. You take my arm and tell me where you’d like to go.”
“You are a nice, considerate boy!” Astrid exclaimed. “But I’m not sure we ought.”
Luke, with a soothing smile, held out his arm to her and winked at David—one small flicker of a wink that Astrid did not see. Astrid hooked her arm through Luke’s and set off for the nearest cafe so quickly and thankfully that David got left behind. When he caught up with them at the door of the cafe, Luke was saying: “I quite thought you were David’s sister. You look so young.”
Astrid beamed at him, and continued to smile while they found a table and sat down. David sat down with them, rather thoughtfully. He was not sure that Luke was behaving quite honestly. Luke knew perfectly well that Astrid was not David’s sister, because David had told him all about her yesterday. He was simply buttering Astrid up. David would have been annoyed, if he had not been pretty certain that Luke was only doing it to give David a more pleasant afternoon than he would have had otherwise.
Whatever his motives, Luke thoroughly enjoyed himself in that cafe. So did David. And, David suspected, so did Astrid too. The odd thing about Astrid was that, when Cousin Ronald was not there to stop her, she loved spending money. She spent lavishly in that cafe. Luke’s appetite was even larger than David’s. He had five milk shakes to David’s three, and four ice creams to David’s two. Astrid ate one out of a plate of cakes, and then Luke and David finished them. David felt pleasantly full for the first time that holiday. Luke must have been nearly bursting.