“Feathers!” said Cart, and began laughing again.
“Off the black hen,” said Fenella. “She keeps picking them up.”
“Oh, Monigan, I suppose,” said Cart, and dug beneath the feathers. Her hand came up holding the old sock. She held it in the air, laughing helplessly. After a bit she managed to speak, in weak, squeaky jerks. “Look—guess what?—think whose?”
Her sisters rolled about, screaming with mirth. “Julian Addiman’s!”
Sally watched, perplexed and embarrassed. She could not think why she should want to keep a sock belonging to Julian Addiman, and she was exceedingly hurt that her sisters should think it so funny. She was also a little outraged at the way Cart was going through her private drawer—but not as annoyed as she might have been. After all, if you lived close up against three sisters, this kind of thing was only to be expected. She had done it herself that afternoon. But she hoped Phyllis would come in and catch Cart at it.
However, nothing happened to stop Cart, who delved and dug and heaved at the numbers of things in the drawer and finally came up triumphantly with two neatly rolled skipping ropes. “Here we are! I knew she still had them!”
“Oh, good.” Imogen jumped up and stood on her bed, majestic in her withered loopy pajamas, and took command. “Tie them together. Tightly.” Cart did so. “Now you and Fenella pull on the knot,” Imogen ordered. “Hard. I don’t want to plunge to my death.”
“You would fly through the air with the greatest of ease,” said Cart.
“I intend to,” Imogen assured her gravely, hitching the wide green trousers up with an air of greatness. “All my life,” she said, “I have dreamed of being a pantomime fairy. I’ve yearned to swoop across the stage in a spangled dress, and now I shall have an inkling of what it will be like. My dreams are about to come true. Now throw one end over the beam.”
“Would you like us to stick silver paper on your pajamas first?” Fenella asked kindly.
“No,” said Imogen. “This is an imaginative experience.”
Gloomily Sally watched Cart sling the wooden handle of a skipping rope over the beam and Imogen reach up and pull it down level with her waist. Now she knew what was going on, and it was as idiotic as she had feared. She hoped Phyllis would not come yet. She watched Cart help Imogen to knot the rope round her waist and Fenella taking a firm grip on the wooden handle of the longer end. Cart took a grip on the rope farther up.
“Ready?”
“Get on with it,” said Imogen.
Fenella heaved. Cart threw her head back, braced her great feet, and heaved, too. Slowly, with a lot of creaking, the skipping rope slid over the beam. Imogen’s feet rose from the bed and vanished inside the loopy green legs of her trousers. It seemed that, as Imogen went up, her trousers were going down. Fenella and Cart puffed and staggered. Imogen’s sturdy body went creaking upward again and, quite suddenly and surprisingly, bent in two. Her red, irritated face was now dangling level with the descending gray lace of her trousers. “Ow!” she said.
“You don’t look very graceful,” Fenella panted.
“Stand up in the air,” puffed Cart.
“I can’t!” snapped Imogen. Her legs kicked, in an irritated swirl of green nylon. “Let me down. The rope’s tied too low.”
Cart and Fenella obediently let go. Imogen descended to her bed in a creaking rush, where she floundered about, imprisoned in loopy trousers. “Help me!” she said. “I want it untied and tied round under my arms instead.”
No! said Sally. Stop! As Imogen plunged down, it had looked unpleasant, rather like a hanging. She knew what Phyllis would think if she had happened to come in at that moment.
Of course no one heard. Cart moved the skipping rope up Imogen, taking quantities of flowing green nylon with it, until it was under her arms. There was a bright red crease round Imogen’s square waist where the rope had been. “Are you sure you want to try again?” said Cart. “That looks painful.”
“Naturally,” Imogen said haughtily. “One is bound to suffer in the cause of Art.” She pulled her trousers almost up to her armpits and stood waiting. “Pull.”
Obediently Fenella leaned backward, pulling on the wooden handle. In front of her, Cart leaned backward, too, almost on top of Fenella, and heaved on the rope. Creak-creak-creak. The rope traveled over the beam until Imogen was raised on tiptoe. Then it stuck.
“What are you doing?” raved Imogen, swaying this way and that on her toe tips. “Pull me up, you great weak things!”
“We’re trying!” gasped Fenella.
“Your center of gravity’s different or something,” Cart said breathlessly.
“Then use your huge weight,” commanded Imogen. “You’re twice as heavy as I am.”
This was true. Cart nodded and tried to brace herself with one foot against the bed. The bed promptly shot away from under Imogen, sending Cart backward into Fenella. Since Cart and Fenella both hung on to the rope in order not to fall in a heap, the result was that Imogen rose in a rapid set of creaking jerks, until she was hanging about a foot under the beam. There, for some reason, she started to twiddle round and round. Her feet rotated, mauve and dropping, almost in Cart’s face. Her hands clutched at the green nylon trousers to stop them coming down. Her face, every time it twirled into view, looked less and less happy.
Let her down! shouted Sally. It looked exactly like a hanging now.
But Imogen’s sisters hung on to the skipping ropes and stared critically upward.
“You still don’t look graceful,” Fenella said. “Stretch your arms out.”
Imogen, whose blue eyes now had a curious wide, bulging look, spared first one hand, then the other, from her trousers. The trousers at once fell down. Imogen held her arms out stiff and straight and swung slowly round and round like a rather unhappy scarecrow.
Cart shook her head. “Smile,” she suggested.
After a moment when she seemed to have forgotten what smiling meant, Imogen succeeded in baring her teeth. Her head twiddled like a Halloween lantern. Her face was beginning to look a curious color.
“You still don’t look pretty,” Fenella said discontentedly. “Try doing something graceful with your legs.”
Imogen tried. Probably she intended to stretch one leg backward like a ballerina. But what happened was that both her legs spread stiffly apart and bent at the knees, causing a great green web of stretched nylon to form between them. She twirled like a grinning wrestler frozen in mid-leap, and the dangling end of her trousers hanging from her feet made her look as if she had an extra pair of knees. Her face was a muddy mauve.
Sally was suddenly sure Imogen was not breathing. She shot into the air to see. For a moment she was twiddling dizzily with Imogen under the beam, with sickening glimpses of unmade beds and childish drawings whirling round her and, beyond the taut, creaking rope, the wide, interested balloon face of Cart, with Fenella’s insect legs and skinny white feet sticking out behind. She could see the skipping rope cutting into Imogen’s chest under her arms.
Help! Sally bawled. Mother! They’re hanging Imogen and Imogen hasn’t noticed!
“She still doesn’t look nice,” Fenella said.
Imogen tried to improve matters by stretching her grin to a sort of leering simper. But Sally was right. She had given up breathing.
Sally wondered frantically what she could do, when even Imogen herself did not seem to see she was strangling. And Phyllis was not going to come. Sally suddenly knew that. Phyllis never did come to see them these days. She was too tired after a day in school. Sally had been thinking of the far-off days, when they were all four little, when Phyllis had managed to come in most nights to tuck them up. So what was she to do? Imogen was still stiff and twirling, and her face was an odder color than ever. I know! Sally found herself whizzing through the room toward that bell push labeled “FOR EMERGENCY ONLY.” Because, she said as she whizzed, if this isn’t an emergency, I’d like to know what is! Oh, the idiots! She flung herself on the chilly
little white button with even more force than she had used on the wastepaper basket.
Downstairs her worry had somehow communicated itself to Oliver. After a few rumbling, questioning growls, he burst out barking, each bark like a clap of thunder. And at almost the same time Imogen reached the end of her endurance. With what was probably the last breath in her body, she managed to make her grinning mouth utter a long, grating squeak. “Ee-ee-eeeh!”
“I think she’s dying,” Fenella said, hushed with shock.
“Get her down—quick!” said Cart.
Sally turned from hurling herself at the bell push to find them hurriedly lowering Imogen. They tried to do it too quickly and burned their hands. Fenella let go and fell over backward. Cart let out a roar. Imogen flopped to the floor and folded there in a green nylon heap, with her face a dense mauve, breathing in small, shallow shrieks.
“Christ!” said Cart, with her fingers on the knot in the skipping ropes. “This rope is practically embedded in her! Scissors, quickly!”
Fenella leaped up and thudded on knobby feet to Sally’s drawer again. Feathers came out in a black cloud to join the wastepaper on the Rude Rug. And to Sally’s relief, the scissors toppled out with them. Fenella scudded back with them and hung anxiously over Cart while Cart hacked at the rope round Imogen. All the while, from below, Oliver kept up a thunderous, howling bark.
“Oh, do go and shut him up, Fenella!” said Cart.
The rope came apart. Sally saw Imogen’s chest enlarge. She made a great noise like “Hoom” and began breathing properly again. Her face turned a more normal color almost at once. Tenderly and gently Cart and Fenella heaved her into bed, where she lay gasping.
“I don’t think I shall be a pantomime fairy,” she said tearfully. “Their life must be perfect hell.”
“I think they may wear some kind of harness, you know,” Cart said.
“All the same,” Imogen gasped dolefully, “I think I shall have to stick to my music. I’m … not fitted … for a strenuous … stage career.”
Downstairs Oliver’s barking turned abruptly to shamed whining. Impatient, angry feet in high heels clattered on the stairs. Imogen, Cart, and Fenella exchanged looks of horror. Fenella kicked the skipping ropes and the scissors under Imogen’s bed and dived for her own. Cart dithered and finally decided to sit on Imogen’s bed in the attitude of a sister exchanging confidences. There was no point in putting the light out, Sally knew. Phyllis would have seen it shining from the stairs.
The next second Phyllis burst into the room. She looked like an avenging angel that has done too much avenging for that day. Tired, so tired, Sally thought. There were deep lines under the angel eyes and even deeper ones beside the angel mouth. The electric light seemed to bleach her pale face and hair to tired white. Sally took one look at that face and found herself up on the beam over Imogen’s bed, out of harm’s way.
“What is going on?” Phyllis inquired. It was her terrible flat, tired voice. “Is this a practical joke? Is your father to have no peace in the evenings?”
“I—I’m sorry, Mother,” Cart said in a subdued, childish whisper. “Oliver just started barking for no reason at all.”
“I didn’t mean Oliver,” said Phyllis. “How many times have you been told that the alarm bell is only to be pressed in a real emergency? And here am I, dragged away from the one peaceful time I get in the whole day, and your father thoroughly startled in his quiet time, thinking there was a fire or one of you was ill. And when I get here, I can see at once you’ve just been larking around again. Which of you was it that pressed that bell?”
Nobody answered. Cart turned her head so that Phyllis could not see her face and gave Fenella a wrinkle of the nose and eyebrows, meaning “Eh?” Fenella, whom Phyllis could see, looked blank and stupid in reply.
Me, said Sally from her perch on the beam. And I had to, Mother.
Nobody heard. Phyllis turned the tired majesty of her anger on Fenella. “Was it you?”
“Of course not!” Fenella said.
Phyllis turned to Cart. “You?”
“No, it was not!” said Cart. She sounded as if she was lying in her anxiety. “Honestly,” she added.
The beam of Phyllis’s tired anger moved on to Imogen. “Imogen?”
Imogen had reached the second stage of suffering, when you feel it worse. Her face was now white, making her hair look green—a different green from her pajamas. She had trouble speaking at all. “Not me,” she managed to say huskily.
And then, suddenly, the room was full of tension. Fenella, Cart, and Imogen were all waiting for the beam of Phyllis’s anger to move on to the other empty, tumbled bed where Sally should have been. They were all avoiding looking at it. Cart’s neck was trembling with the strain of not looking.
“Very well,” said Phyllis. She turned wearily back to the door. “I shall expect one of you to confess to me tomorrow,” she said, leaving.
She had not come very far into the room. She would be gone in a second. Mother! shouted Sally, and swooped down to the papers and feathers on the Rude Rug. Fenella and Cart shot looks at one another, meaning, “You!” “No—you do it!”
“Mother,” said Cart.
Phyllis turned back in the doorway, plainly anxious to be gone. She was almost too tired to look at Cart. “What is it?”
“Well—actually,” said Cart, “Imogen isn’t very happy at the moment. I expect you’ve noticed.”
Evidently the Plan meant that nobody should directly mention Sally. Fenella jerked her face at Cart in an approving nod. Phyllis turned her weary beam of attention toward Imogen. “But that isn’t an emergency, Charlotte.”
“Oh, yes, but—” Cart began rather desperately. It was important to keep Phyllis here since the longer she was in the room, the more likely she was to notice Sally’s empty bed. “But it is an emergency that her mark for music was so low this term,” Cart said. She was evidently relieved to have thought of this to say. “We don’t think it’s only because she’s always being turned out of the music rooms here, Mother. We think she’s genuinely not as good as she used to be. We think she ought to choose another career. Don’t you?”
Phyllis turned to Imogen in mild astonishment. Imogen managed to give a sick and rather self-conscious smile. The smile evidently meant more to Phyllis than the paleness of Imogen’s face. Sally saw her muster herself and then smile in return, a weary, warm, comforting smile. Sally relaxed. Mother was really trying now. “Nonsense,” said Phyllis, and she had mustered a warm, comforting voice, too. “Imogen’s artistic temperament means she always builds things up. Every career has its ups and downs. Of course Imogen is going to go on with music. She has enormous talent. Every time I see her seated at the keyboard—”
“About once a year,” muttered Fenella.
Phyllis shut her eyes in order not to hear this. It was one of Fenella’s stupid remarks. “Every time,” she repeated, “I’m impressed by the serenity and passion of her profile. It reminds me of Myra Hess. I know Imogen is cut out to be a concert pianist. Your father would be so disappointed if she gave up.”
At this Imogen turned her weak smile on Cart. She seemed comforted.
Phyllis noticed Cart and seemed to feel Cart might feel left out. “Just as,” she said kindly, “Charlotte has all the brains and none of the looks in the family, so Imogen has both the looks and the musical talent. Charlotte must go to university. She’s cut out to be a teacher.”
“What about me?” said Fenella.
Phyllis turned her golden gaze on Fenella. “Well—” she said. She was rather at a loss.
“I shall be an acrobat,” Fenella said earnestly.
Phyllis ignored this. It was another of Fenella’s silly remarks. “It will be something quaint and unusual, that I do know.”
Cart, meanwhile, had been considering, in a slow, puzzled way. “You know, I don’t think I am cut out to be a teacher,” she said. “People don’t listen to what I say.”
Phyllis ignored th
is, too. It was one of Cart’s silly remarks. She gave them all a tired smile and turned to leave.
Sally jumped—or rather hovered—up and down on the Rude Rug. What about me? Such was her anxiety to be noticed that she actually caused one or two feathers to drift up from the floor, but if anyone noticed them, they must have thought they were blown in the draft from the door as Phyllis held it open.
It was Imogen who, typically, broke the rules of the Plan. “What about Sally?” she asked. She still could only speak in a husky gasp.
“Sally?” Phyllis paused in the doorway. She did glance at Sally’s bed. She seemed surprised—but only mildly surprised—to find it empty. “Well, people who are not brainy are usually very good at art, you know. I think Sally has a great career as an artist.” By now she was nearly through the door.
A great black feather whirled halfway to the ceiling as Sally called out despairingly, But I’m NOT HERE!
“Mother,” Fenella said abruptly, in the deep, commanding voice she used on Mrs. Gill. “Mother, don’t you think we are all rather neglected?” Phyllis turned and frowned at Fenella over her shoulder. Fenella twisted her beaky face somehow into an improbably enchanting smile. “We suffer from lack of attention,” she said. She took up one of the knots her hair was tied into and twiddled it meaningly. “You look after the boys, but you don’t look after us,” she explained, twiddling.
Cart and Imogen were aghast at Fenella’s daring, but Phyllis was merely wearily amused. It was another of Fenella’s silly remarks. “Oh, Fenella! The boys are all away from home and they need attention. Besides, boys are helpless and girls know very well how to look after themselves. Now be a good girl and go to sleep.”
She went away downstairs as she said it, leaving them all speechless. Downstairs they heard her golden voice murmuring to Oliver in the way which always made Oliver try to lick her face. Then they heard the green door shut behind her.
“I made sure she was going to notice my knots,” Fenella said, mortified.
Imogen husked, “At least we didn’t get into trouble.”