The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories (21 page)

Harriet watched him go with regret. There were so many things she had wanted to ask him.

"There!” Nursie clucked in triumph at breakfast, giving a saucerful of bacon rinds to the tabby cat. “Didn't I say a night's rest would finish the spell?"

"No,” said Harriet, but she yawned as she said it, and the clatter of knives and forks drowned her voice anyway. Mark, the postman, and the butcher's boy were eating an enormous breakfast. In the middle of it Dr. Groves stumped in and heard their tale with interest and envy.

"Did ye now? Do they now?” he exclaimed at intervals as they all compared notes about the land, and Mark told Harriet how he had been chariot-racing with Phoebus and Boadicea. “Well, something has cured your cough, lad, whether the sleep or the change of air."

It had. Mark had not coughed once since he had awakened, though Harriet still had a fit of coughing from time to time.

"It is unfair!” she exclaimed. “When I had all the trouble of fetching him back."

They had been arguing about this for some time when they noticed that the doctor and the postman had left the room, and, glancing out of the window, Harriet saw them cross the lawn to the laurel tree. Harriet's clothesline was still dangling from the branches and now, helped by the postman, the doctor hauled himself up by his arms with surprising agility and disappeared into the branches. In a moment the postman followed him. So did the cat, yawning and stretching as it lazily hauled itself up the trunk.

"Hey!” Harriet shouted, leaning from the window. “You mustn't do that! It still isn't safe...."

But they were gone, and when the children ran out and stood under the tree they could hear only contented snores coming from the upper branches.

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Oh, Mother,” Harriet said, as she did every year, “can't I open my birthday presents at breakfast?"

"Certainly not! You know perfectly well that you weren't born till half past four. You get your birthday presents at tea-time, not before."

"We could change the custom now that we're in our teens,” Harriet suggested cunningly. “You know you hate having to get up at half past two in the morning for Mark's presents."

But Mark objected strongly to any change, and Mrs. Armitage added, “In any case, don't forget that as it's your thirteenth birthday, you have to be shown into the Closed Room; there'd never be time to do that before school. Go and collect your schoolbooks now, and, Mark, wash the soot from behind your ears; if you must hunt for Lady Anne's pearls in the chimney, I wish you'd clean up before coming to breakfast."

"You'd be as pleased as anyone else if I found them,” Mark answered.

Later, as he and Harriet walked to the school bus, Mark said, “I think it's a rotten swindle that only girls in the family are allowed to go inside the Closed Room when they get to be thirteen. Suppose there's a monster like at Glamis, what'll you do?"

"Tame it,” Harriet said promptly. “I shall feed it on bread-and-milk and lettuce."

"That's hedgehogs, dope! Suppose it has huge teeth and tentacles and a poisonous sting three yards long?"

"Shut up! Anyway I don't suppose it is a monster. It would have starved long ago. It's probably just some moldering old great aunt in her coffin or something boring like that."

Still, it was nice to have a Closed Room in the family, Harriet reflected, and she sat in the bus happily speculating about what it might contain—jewels, perhaps, rubies as big as tomatoes; or King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, left with the Armitage family for safekeeping when he went off to Avalon; or the Welsh bard, Taliesin, fallen asleep in the middle of a poem; or a cockatrice; or the vanished crew of the
Marie Celeste
, playing cards and singing shanties....

Harriet was still in a dreamy state when school began. The first lesson was Geography with old Mr. Gubbins, so there was no need to pay attention; she sat trying to think of suitable pet names for cockatrices until she heard a muffled sobbing on her left.

"...is of course the Cathay of the ancients,” Mr. Gubbins was rambling on. “Marco Polo in his travels..."

Harriet looked cautiously around and saw that her best friend and left-hand neighbor, Desiree, or Dizzry as everyone called her, was crying bitterly, hunched over the inkwell on her desk so that the tears ran into it.

Dizzry was the daughter of Ernie Perrow, the village chimney-sweep; the peculiarity of the Perrow family was that none of them ever grew to be more than six inches high. Instead of sitting at her desk in the usual way, Dizzry sat on top of it, at a small table and chair that Mark had obligingly made for her out of matchboxes.

"What's the matter?” whispered Harriet. “Here, don't cry into the ink—you'll make it weaker than it is already. Haven't you a handkerchief?"

She pulled sewing things out of her own desk, snipped a shred off the corner of a tablecloth she was embroidering, and passed it to Dizzry, who gulped, nodded, took a deep breath, and wiped her eyes on it.

"What's the matter?” Harriet asked again.

"It was what Mr. Gubbins said that started me off,” Dizzry muttered. “Talking about Cathay. Our Min always used to say she'd a fancy to go to Cathay. She'd got it muddled up with
café
. She thought she'd get cake and raspberryade and ice cream there."

"Well, so what?” said Harriet, who saw nothing to cry about in that.

"Haven't you heard? We've lost her—we've lost our Min!"

"Oh, my goodness! You mean she's died?"

"No, not
died
. Just lost. Nobody's seen her since yesterday breakfast time!"

Harriet privately thought this ought to have been rather a relief for the family but was too polite to say so. Min, the youngest of the Perrow children, was a perfect little fiend, always in trouble of one kind or another. When not engaged in entering sweet jars in the village shop and stealing Butter Kernels or Quince Drops, she was probably worming her way through keyholes and listening to people's secrets, or hitching a free lift round the houses in the postman's pocket and jabbing him with a darning needle as a reward for the ride, or sculling about the pond on Farmer Beezeley's ducks and driving them frantic by tickling them under their wings, or galloping down the street on somebody's furious collie, or climbing into the vicar's TV and frightening him half to death by shouting, “Time is short!” through the screen. She frequently ran fearful risks but seemed to have a charmed life. Everybody in the village heartily detested Min Perrow, but her older brothers and sisters were devoted to her and rather proud of her exploits.

Poor Dizzry continued to cry, on and off, for the rest of the day. Harriet tried to console her but it seemed horridly probably that Min had at last gone too far and been swallowed by a cow or drowned in a sump or rolled into a Swiss roll at the bakery while stealing jam—so many ill fates might easily have befallen her that it was hard to guess the likeliest.

"I'll help you hunt for her this evening,” Harriet promised, however, “and so will Mark. As soon as my birthday tea's finished."

Dizzry came home with Harriet for the birthday tea and was a little cheered by the cake, made in the shape of a penguin with black-currant icing and an orange beak, and by Harriet's presents, which included a do-it-yourself water-divining kit from Mark (a hazel twig and a bucket of water), an electronic guitar that could sing as well as play, a little pocket computer for working out sums, and from the children's fairy godmother a tube of endless toothpaste. Harriet was not particularly grateful for this last; the thought of toothpaste supplied for the rest of her life left her unmoved.

"I'd rather have an endless supply of licorice,” she said crossly. “Probably I won't have any teeth left by the time I'm ninety; what use will toothpaste be then?"

Her presents from Dizzry were by far the nicest: a pink-and-orange necklace of spindleberries, beautifully carved, and a starling named Alastair whom Dizzry had trained to take messages, answer the telephone or the front door, and carry home small quantities of shopping. (At first Harriet was a little anxious about Walrus the cat's reactions to this new member of the household, and indeed Walrus was somewhat aggressive, but Harriet found she had no need to worry: Alastair had also been trained to defend himself against cats, and Walrus soon learned to keep his paws to himself.)

"Now,” said Mrs. Armitage rather nervously when the presents had been admired, “I'd better show Harriet the Closed Room."

Mr. Armitage hurriedly retired to his study while Mark, controlling some natural feelings of envy, kindly said he would help Dizzry hunt for Min, and carried her off to inspect all the reapers and binders in Mr. Beezeley's farmyard.

Harriet and Mrs. Armitage went up to the attic, and Mrs. Armitage paused before a cobweb-shrouded door and pulled a rusty key out of her pocket.

"Now you must say, ‘I, Harriet Armitage, solemnly swear not to reveal the secret of this room to any other soul in the world.’”

"But when I grow up and have a daughter,” objected Harriet, “won't I have to tell her, just as Great Aunt Charlotte told you and you're telling me?"

"Well, yes, I suppose so,” Mrs. Armitage said uncertainly. “I'd rather forgotten how the oath went, to tell you the truth."

"Why do we have to promise not to tell?"

"To be honest, I haven't the faintest idea."

"Let's skip that bit—there doesn't seem much point to it—and just go in,” Harriet suggested. So they opened the door (it was very stiff, for it had been shut at least fifteen years) and went in.

The attic was dim, lit only through a patch of green glass tiles in the roof; it was quite empty except for a small, dusty loom, made of black wood with a stool to match.

"A loom?” said Harriet, very disappointed. “Is
that
all?"

"It isn't an ordinary loom,” her mother corrected her. “It's a hairloom. For weaving human hair."

"Who wants to weave human hair? What can you make?"

"I suppose you make a human hair mat. You must only use hair that's never been cut since birth."

"Haven't you tried?"

"Oh, my dear, I never seemed to get a chance. By the time your father's Aunt Charlotte showed me the loom everyone was wearing their hair short; you couldn't get a piece long enough to weave for love or money. And then you children came along—somehow I never found time."

"Well,
I
jolly well shall,” Harriet said. “I'll try and get hold of some hair. I wonder if Miss Pring would let me have hers? I bet it's never been cut—she must have yards. Maybe you can make a cloak of invisibility, or the sort that turns swans into humans."

Harriet was so pleased with this notion that only as they went downstairs did she think to ask, “How did the loom get into the family?"

"I'm a bit vague about that,” Mrs. Armitage admitted. “I believe it belonged to a Greek ancestress that one of the crusading Armitages married and brought back to England. She's the one your middle name Penelope is after."

Without paying much attention, Harriet went off to find Mark and Dizzry. Her father said they had gone along to the church, so she followed, pausing at the post office to ask elderly Miss Pring, the postmistress, if she would sell her long gray hair to be woven into a rug.

"It would look so pretty,” Harriet coaxed. “I could dye some of it pink or blue."

Miss Pring was not keen.

"Sell my hair? Cut it off? The idea!
Dye
it? What impertinence! Get along with you, saucebox!"

So Harriet had to abandon that scheme, but she stuck a postcard on the notice board: HUMAN HAIR REQUIRED, UNCUT; BEST PRICES PAID, and posted another to the local paper. Then she joined Mark and Dizzry, who were searching the church organ pipes for Min, but without success.

Harriet had met several other members of the Perrow family on her way: Ernie, Min's father, driving an old doll's pushchair that he had fitted with an engine and turned into a convertible like a Model T Ford; old Gran Perrow, stomping along and gloomily shouting “Min!” down all the drainholes; and Sid, one of the boys, riding a bike made from cocoa tins and poking out nests from the hedges with a bamboo stick in case Min had been abducted.

When it was too dark to go on searching, Harriet and Mark left Dizzry at Rose Cottage, where the Perrows lived.

"We'll go looking tomorrow!” they called. And Harriet said, “Don't worry too much."

"I expect she'll be all right wherever she is,” Mark said. “I'd back Min against a mad bull any day."

As they walked home he asked Harriet, “What about the Closed Room, then? Any monsters?"

"No, very dull, just a hairloom."

"I say, you shouldn't tell me, should you?"

"It's all right—we agreed to skip the promise to keep it secret."

"What a letdown,” Mark said. “Who wants an old loom?” They arrived home to trouble. Their father was complaining, as he did every day, about soot on the carpets and black tidemarks on the bathroom basin and towels. “Well, if you don't
want
me to find Lady Anne's necklace—” Mark said aggrievedly. “If it was worth a thousand pounds when she lost it in 1660, think what it would fetch now."