Beswitched (15 page)

A
few days after half-term, there came a morning when Dulcie and Pogo could not get out of bed. They shivered and moaned, and Dulcie said plaintively, “I hurt in every single bit of me!”

Pogo muttered, “Go AWAY!” and buried her head in the bedclothes.

“This is serious,” Pete said. “We’d better fetch Matron.”

Flora, the first to be dressed, ran upstairs to the sanatorium.

“Don’t tell me!” sighed Matron. “It never rains but it pours.” She clamped a hand across Flora’s forehead. “Have you had measles, dear?”

Flora nearly said she’d had the MMR injection when she was a baby, but remembered it hadn’t been invented yet, and dipped hastily into the memories of the other Flora. “Yes, Matron, when I was four.”

“Good girl, you’re one less to worry about. Now, let’s have a look at your chums.”

Matron came back to the bedroom with Flora, and there was something very comforting about her short, round, starchy presence.

Kind and brisk, she felt the foreheads of Pogo and Dulcie. “Yes, it’s measles, all right—you’re as hot as a pair of little furnaces! We’ll put you both to bed in the san, and you’ll feel ever so much better when the spots come out. Dear me, we haven’t had an outbreak like this for years. Daphne, you’ve had measles, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Matron. I’m as fit as a fiddle.”

“In that case, dear, shouldn’t you get dressed? Or do you plan to go down to breakfast like that?”

Pete suddenly realized that she was in her vest and knickers, and her squeak of alarm was so funny that even Dulcie giggled weakly.

“Measles is beastly,” Pete told Flora, once she had flung on the rest of her clothes, and the two of them were hurrying downstairs. “I had it when I was six. Daddy bought me a doll’s house—but I’d rather not have had the measles in the first place. You come out in bright red spots.”

“Gross!” Flora said, feeling very sorry for Dulcie and Pogo.

They were late for breakfast, but nobody took any notice.
Their long table was emptier than usual, and Flora tried to work out who was missing.

“Jill’s got it,” Bunty Hardwick told them. “And Peggy Waterman, and both the Scarborough twins. And Virginia Denning—which is jolly bad luck on her, because she’s seventeen, and it’s worse when you’re old.”

“And I don’t see Consuela Carver,” Pete said cheerfully. “How sad, to think of that perfect face ruined by hideous spots!”

“My big brother had measles frightfully badly,” someone piped up. “He had to wear blue glasses and stay off school for a whole term. It can make you blind and deaf, and all sorts of things.”

Bunty said, “One of my aunts died of it.”

“Well, the teachers all seem to be in good health, worse luck,” said Pete. “I was hoping we’d get some time off lessons.”

Flora couldn’t take it so lightly. Mum had told her how dangerous measles could be. She’d told her that Roald Dahl—the man who wrote
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—
had had a little daughter who died of measles. The idea of Dulcie or Pogo dying was too terrifying to think about.

The school was in a state of emergency. In assembly, Miss Powers-Prout announced that eleven girls were ill, and said a prayer for them. The healthy girls were told to wear their bedroom slippers, keep the school as quiet as possible, and tell someone immediately if they felt ill because measles was highly infectious.

The next three days were hushed and serious. They spoke in soft voices and crept about in their slippers. The teachers taught lessons in their slippers, and it wasn’t even funny. Three professional nurses arrived. The local doctor, a youngish man in a brown tweed suit, came twice a day. A very important doctor arrived, with a black coat and pointed gray beard, and a whisper went round that he was a “specialist” who had come to see Virginia.

People’s parents began to appear. The girls watched them being led through the hall, anxious and flustered, carrying flowers and bunches of grapes. Dulcie’s granny came, with such a heavy basket of treats that Ethel had to help her carry it up to the san. Neville came on his motorbike, with a pile of books and comics for Pogo.

Virginia’s parents were in Vienna, but a cousin came to see her. This cousin was a young woman rumored to be a real actress on the London stage, and her glamorous appearance created a sensation—the entire lower school lined the windows to stare at her. She wore lipstick and furs, and left behind her a delicious smell of perfume. Flora thought her dark hair was weird and shiny and looked like a wig, but Pete said shut up, it was divine.

Consuela’s mother created another sensation, by sending a tower of pink hothouse roses, as tall as a person. It stood in the hall in a white basket tied with pink ribbon, and the girls clustered round it, sighing with awe and admiration.

“She didn’t come herself, though,” Flora said. “Consuela’s the only one who hasn’t had a visitor.”

“She’s too nasty to visit,” said Pete. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry for her!”

Flora didn’t say any more because boredom was making Pete argumentative, and she didn’t want to argue. But she was sorry for the Carver. She couldn’t help remembering the odd, stilted conversation they’d had in the box room. In that second, she had seen Consuela’s sadness, and she couldn’t get it out of her mind.

On the fifth day, Matron said the infectious stage was over, and Pete and Flora could visit their friends.

“But please remember that this is a sickroom and not a bear garden. You may stay for exactly ten minutes, and I don’t want to hear any loud voices.”

They found Dulcie and Pogo in a small, bare, white-painted room on the top floor, both a little weak and groggy but (to Flora’s great relief) obviously not dying.

“Keep the curtains closed,” Matron said, on her way out. “I know it’s gloomy, but they mustn’t strain their eyes. Measles can leave the eyes very weak.”

“You can’t imagine how bored we are!” Pogo sighed. “I could just about bear it if we were allowed to read—but Matron says we have to rest our eyes for a whole week. If Bradley didn’t read to us, I think I’d throw myself out of the window.”

“We’re not allowed to eat anything but mush,” Dulcie told them solemnly. “I didn’t care at first, because I wasn’t hungry. But I’m jolly hungry today, and all I can think about
is the Chelsea buns Granny brought me. You two are so lucky to be well!”

“That’s what you think,” Pete said. “As a matter of fact, all us healthy types are having a pretty hard time—aren’t we, Flora? For one thing, the food’s horrid because the kitchens are too busy making grub for you precious little invalids. And we’re not allowed to make the smallest noise. It’s actually frightful.”

“Poor you,” Pogo said, “how you’ve suffered.”

This made Flora laugh. She strongly suspected that Pete was jealous of the sick girls for hogging all the attention, and she was getting tired of her self-centered complaints. “Don’t listen to her,” she told Pogo. “It’s not that bad. We’re supposed to be cheering you up.”

Pete wandered over to the window, to peep through the crack in the curtains. “You both look cheerful enough, I must say. And why wouldn’t you be? You lie in bed all day and you don’t have any lessons.”

Flora and Pogo rolled their eyes at each other, and smiled. Flora had missed Pogo’s wry sending-up of Pete. She asked, “Are you really feeling better?”

“Oh yes,” Pogo said. “I think we got off lightly. Poor old Virginia’s still pretty seedy, but the rest of us are over the worst now.”

“I felt heaps better the minute I smelled the buns,” said Dulcie. “It’s so incredibly mean that I’m not allowed to eat one.”

Flora was anxious. “Was Virginia very ill?”

“Yes,” Pogo said. “Matron had to sit up all night with her,
and they were all set to send a telegram to summon her parents—but don’t worry, I heard one of the nurses saying she’d turned the corner.”

“Poor thing!” Flora liked Virginia, and was glad she was recovering.

“You two are absolutely covered with spots,” Pete observed. “I’ve only just noticed because it’s so dark in here. Are they just on your faces, or all over?”

“That’s quite enough, young lady.” Matron came back into the room in time to hear this. “I’m sure you had spots in all kinds of places when you had the measles. Now, it’s time you left Cecilia and Dulcie to rest.”

“But I don’t need any more rest!” groaned Pogo. “Please, Matron—couldn’t we have just five more minutes?”

“Not today, dear. If you’re feeling better tomorrow, they can stay for a whole half hour.”

“Couldn’t I read something? Anything?”

Matron smiled, and tucked in Pogo’s bedclothes. “What a one you are for your books! But I’m afraid you really do need to rest your eyes, dear—you’ll thank me for it one day.”

“We’ll read to you tomorrow,” Flora said, feeling sorry for her—poor old Pogo was a book addict, and she must be in agony. “Won’t we, Pete?”

“I s’pose,” Pete said grudgingly. “As long as it’s not something too dull, or in Latin.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Flora.” Matron’s round face beamed approval. “I must say, you and Daphne have perked up my invalids no end. You can come again tomorrow, at the same time.”

And that was that, because not even teachers dared to argue with Matron. In her sanatorium she ruled with a rod of iron, and her patients were forced to live like invalids long after they started feeling better. At home in the future, people weren’t allowed to be ill for more than a couple of days. When Dad was getting over pneumonia, the doctors and nurses had nagged him to “keep moving.” In the past, they had to behave as if they were made of glass.

As the days passed, Pete and Flora fell into a routine of visiting their friends every afternoon. Matron was now making them sit up in a long room with a glass roof. In dressing gowns and slippers, they played board games and stared out of the window at the rainy countryside, until it was time to eat mushy food and go back to bed. Pogo said she was so desperately bored, she knew the fire-drill instructions pinned to the wall off by heart. Flora tried to read to her, but the sunroom was too noisy—at visiting hour it was packed. Everyone’s friends looked in, including (to Pete’s annoyance) the Carver’s gang of cronies.

Consuela was still Pete’s foe, and Pete still had to put up with her mean remarks. But she had stopped picking on Flora. It wasn’t that she was nice to her. She had simply decided not to notice Flora anymore. When Flora and Pete visited their friends in the sunroom, they had to walk past Consuela—glamorous, despite her spots, in a pink satin dressing gown sent by her mother—but Pete was the only victim of the Carver tongue.

“Oh, look—a scarecrow! How did it get out of the kitchen
garden? Goodness, it’s Pete—her poor family can’t even afford a comb!”

By the time the state of emergency had lasted a fortnight, Pete was seething with frustration. “I could get back at her, if it wasn’t for Matron breathing down my neck.”

“Oh, Pete, can’t you just forget about Consuela?”

“WHAT is all this being sweetness and light to the Carver? Why do you care about her?”

Flora sighed. “I don’t like her any more than you do. It’s getting boring, that’s all.”

“Oh, I DO beg your pardon!” Pete furiously charged ahead of Flora into the sanatorium’s sunroom, almost banging the swing door in her face. “But I refuse to be nice to her—even her own mother keeps away from her!”

Consuela, in her armchair near the door, raised her head sharply. Had she heard? Her pretty face was a cold mask.

“I don’t believe you sometimes,” Flora hissed at Pete. “That was really mean!”

“Oh, go away, Goody Two-shoes!” snapped Pete. “You’re just being a coward because she’s been ill. It hasn’t turned her into a saint, you know. You get punished for NOT being ill in this school. The ill girls have all the nice things!”

Pogo and Dulcie, waiting at their table, heard the end of this.

“Greetings, healthy animals,” Pogo said, grinning. “You’re about to get your fair share of something very nice indeed. You tell them, Dulcie.”

For the first time since measles, Dulcie’s cheeks were pink.
“It’s dreadfully exciting: Old Peepy’s shutting the school, because it’s being—what was the word?”

“Fumigated,” Pogo said. “To remove the germs.”

“Yes, and that means the Easter hols will be three whole weeks—and Granny’s invited you all to spend them with us! Oh, I can’t WAIT to show you everything!”

Pete and Flora, their argument forgotten, stared at each other. This sounded too good to be true. Dulcie’s granny—Lady Badger—lived in a big old farmhouse beside the sea, and Dulcie described it as a paradise of delicious food and adorable animals.

Pogo said, “Isn’t it ripping? My brothers and I usually spend our holidays in Birmingham, with our uncle and aunt. It’s very nice and all that—and I’ll certainly miss seeing my dear old brothers this hols—but it’s almost worth having measles for three whole weeks by the sea. It’s awfully decent of Lady Badger, Dulcie.”

Dulcie and Pogo were still in the san these days, though they wore school uniform and came downstairs for meals. Dulcie’s cheeks had lost their roundness, and her legs were long and spidery, as if they had stretched. Skinny Pogo was a little skeleton.

“The doctor says sea air is important after measles,” Dulcie said. “And that makes our house perfect. Virginia’s coming too.”

“Good for her—the more the merrier!” Pete’s bad mood had melted away. “Won’t it be spiffing?”

Pete and Flora passed Virginia’s room on their way downstairs, and the door was open. Flora looked inside.

Virginia sat in an armchair beside the window, with an eiderdown over her knees. She was very thin and white-faced, but she smiled when she saw the two girls.

“Hello, Flora—hello, Pete. Do come in.”

They both took a few steps into the room.

Flora asked, “How are you?”

“Fine, thank you—well enough to be bored.”

“We heard about you coming to Dulcie’s,” Pete said.

Virginia smiled. “It’s a lark, isn’t it? I was petrified my mother would make me come home to Vienna—she wants me to leave St. Win’s and go to a finishing school. But my good old dad says he’d like me to have the benefit of sea air, and that means I’m safe for another term.”