The Summer Book (10 page)

The Robe

S
OPHIA’S FATHER HAD A SPECIAL BATHROBE
that he loved. It reached all the way to his feet and was made of very thick, stiff flannel that salt water, soil and time had rendered even stiffer. The robe was probably German, originally, and had once been green. On its front, it still bore the remains of an intricate system of laces, along with a couple of large dark amber buttons. Thrown wide open, the robe was as broad as a tent.

In the beginning, when Papa was a young man, he used to sit out on the point in his bathrobe whenever it stormed, and watch the waves. Later, it was nice to put on when he wanted to work or get warm, or simply hide.

The robe had survived various threats to its existence. There was the time some well-meaning relatives came out and, as a surprise, gave the island a good cleaning. They threw out a lot of things the family wanted, but, worst of all, they carried the bathrobe down to the water and let it float away. They claimed later that it smelled. Of course it smelled – that was part of its charm.

Smell is important. It reminds a person of all the things he’s been through; it is a sheath of memories and security. The robe smelled of good things, too – of smoke and the sea – but maybe they never noticed that. In any case, the robe came back. The wind blew, shifted and reversed, the waves beat against the island, and one fine day they brought it home. After that, it smelled of seaweed, and Papa wore virtually nothing else that whole summer. Then there was the spring when they discovered a family of mice had been living in the robe. The collar was edged with a soft, downy material that the mice had nibbled off and used for bedclothes, along with some finely chewed handkerchiefs. And then one time Papa slept too close to the fire and the robe was scorched.

When Papa got a little older, he put the bathrobe up in the attic. He would go up there to think sometimes, and the others always took it for granted that he did his thinking in the robe. It lay under one of the little attic windows, long and dark and mysterious.

Sophia went through a rebellious phase one cold, rainy summer when being unhappy outdoors was a lot of trouble. So she would go up in the attic to be alone. She would sit in a cardboard box and stare at the robe, and she would say dreadful, crushing things, and it was hard for the robe to talk back.

In between times, she played cards with her grandmother. They both cheated shamelessly, and their card-playing afternoons always ended in a quarrel. This had never happened before. Grandmother tried to recall her own rebellious periods in order to try and understand, but all she could remember was an unusually well-behaved little girl. Wise as she was, she realised that people can postpone their rebellious phases until they’re eighty-five years old, and she decided to keep an eye on herself. It rained constantly, and Papa worked from morning to night with his back to the room. They never knew if he was listening to them or not.

“Jesus,” Sophia said. “There you sit with the King and you don’t say anything!”

“Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain,” Grandmother said.

“I didn’t say ‘God,’ I said ‘Jesus’.”

“He’s just as important as God is.”

“He isn’t either!”

“Of course he is!”

Sophia threw her cards on the floor and yelled, “I don’t care about His old family! I hate families!” She clambered up the attic stairs and slammed the trapdoor behind her.

The attic was so low that there was only room to crawl. And if you didn’t crawl carefully, you would hit your head on the rafters. It was also very crowded – just one narrow path through all the things being kept and saved and forgotten, all the things that had always been there and that not even the well-meaning relatives had found. The path led from the south window to the north window, and the roof between the rafters was painted blue. Sophia had no torch, and it was dark. The path was an endless, empty street in the moonlight between shaggy houses. At the end of the street was the window with its moon-white sky, and beneath the window lay the robe, a pile of stiff folds, coal-black in its own shadow. Sophia had slammed the trapdoor with such a bang that she couldn’t retreat. And so she crept over and sat down in her cardboard box. The bathrobe lay with one sleeve thrown forwards across its gaping neck. She stared at it, and as she stared the sleeve rose just a trifle, and a tiny movement crept in under the robe and down towards the foot end. The folds altered imperceptibly, and the robe was still again. But she had seen it. There, inside the robe, there was something alive – or else the whole robe was alive.

Sophia resorted to the simplest means of flight available in cases of great distress: she fell asleep. She was still asleep when they put her to bed, but in the morning she knew that there was danger in the robe. No one else must know. She kept the amazing truth to herself, and for several days she was almost elated. The rain had stopped. She drew pictures with shaggy shadows and made the moon very tiny, forgotten in a huge dark sky. She showed these pictures to no one. The danger dwelt in a fold deep down inside. It moved about at times and then crept back. When frightened, it showed its teeth, and it was far more dangerous than death.

Every day when the sun went down, Sophia would climb up the ladder, poke her nose through the trapdoor, and peer into the attic. She could see one little corner of the bathrobe if she craned her neck.

“What are you doing?” Grandmother asked.

“None of your business, nosey!” Sophia whined in her most irritating voice.

“Close the trapdoor. There’s a draft,” Grandmother said. “Go and do something outside.” She turned towards the wall and went on with her book. They had both become impossible and couldn’t get along at all. They quarrelled the wrong way. The days were cloudy, with rising winds, and Papa just sat at his desk and worked.

Sophia thought about the bathrobe more and more. The thing living in it was as quick as lightning but could lie in wait for days without moving. It could make itself thin and slide through a crack in the door, and then roll itself up again and crawl under the bed like a shadow. It didn’t eat and never slept and hated everyone, most of all its own family. Sophia didn’t eat either – that is, nothing but sandwiches.

It may not really have been her fault, but one day they ran out of bread and butter, and Papa took the boat in to the shop to get supplies. He put the water jug in the boat, and the cans for kerosene and petrol, and he took the shopping list from the wall and left. There was a southwest wind when he set out, and in a couple of hours it had risen so that the waves were riding right across the point. Grandmother tried to get the weather report on the radio, but she couldn’t find the right button. She couldn’t keep from going back to the north window every few minutes to look for him, and she didn’t understand a word she read.

Sophia went down to the shore, and came back and sat down at the table. “And all you can do is just read,” she said. She raised her voice and screamed, “You just read and read and read!” Then she threw herself down on the table and wept.

Grandmother sat up and said, “He’ll make it all right.” She was feeling a little ill and felt for the
Lupatro
behind the curtain. Sophia went on crying, but she kept an eye on Grandmother under her arm. “I don’t feel good either,” she screamed, and jumped up and vomited on the rug. Then she was quiet and pale and sat down on the bed.

“Lie down,” Grandmother said, and she lay down. They both lay down and listened to the wind outside as it attacked in short, violent bursts.

“Once you get to the village,” Grandmother said, “it always takes a long time at the shop. There’s always a queue, and no one’s in a hurry. And then the boy has to go down to the dock and fill you up with petrol and kerosene. And you have to go and pick up the mail, and sort through it to find what’s for you. And if there’s a money order you have to go in and get it stamped, and that means a cup of coffee. And then he has to pay the bills. It can take a long time.”

“Go on,” Sophia said.

“Well, then he has to take everything down to the boat,” Grandmother said. “He has to pack it all in and cover it so it won’t get wet. And on the way down he remembers to pick some flowers, and give some bread to the horse. And the bread’s way down at the bottom of a bag somewhere …”

“I shouldn’t have eaten so many sandwiches!” Sophia wailed and started to cry again. “I’m cold!”

Grandmother tried to cover her with a blanket, but the child kicked it off and flailed her legs and screamed that she hated all of them.

“Quiet!” Grandmother yelled. “Quiet down! Or I’ll end up being sick – and probably all over you.” Sophia stopped screaming immediately. There was a moment’s silence, and then she said, “I want the bathrobe.”

“But it’s up in the attic,” Grandmother said.

“I want it,” her grandchild said.

And so Grandmother climbed the attic ladder. It went fine. She crawled over to the window for the robe and dragged it back to the trapdoor. Then she dropped it down into the room and sat and rested for a while, dangling her feet over the edge. She hadn’t been up there for a very long time, and she read the labels on the boxes. String. Tackle. Bottles. All kinds of things. Rags and old trousers. She had printed the labels herself. They had painted the ceiling blue, but they hadn’t put enough glue in the paint; it was flaking.

“What are you doing?” Sophia yelled. “Are you okay?”

“It’s okay,” Grandmother answered through the trap. “I feel better.” She lowered one leg very cautiously and found the step. Then she turned slowly over on her stomach and brought down the other leg.

“Take it easy!” Sophia called from down below. She saw Grandmother’s stiff old legs move from one step to the next and finally reach the floor. Grandmother picked up the robe and came over to the bed.

“You have to shake it first,” Sophia said. “And make it come out.”

Grandmother didn’t understand, but she shook the robe. Something came slinking out of one sleeve and disappeared under the door. The robe smelled the same as before. It was very heavy, and became a warm, dark cave. Sophia fell asleep right away, and Grandmother sat down in the north window to wait. It was blowing hard, and the sun was setting. She was far-sighted and saw the boat half an hour before it reached the island – a moustache of white foam that would appear at irregular intervals and sometimes vanish entirely.

When the boat reached the shelter of the island, she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. A few minutes later, Sophia’s father came into the room. He was wet through. He put down the bags and lit his pipe. Then he took the lamp and went out to fill it with kerosene.

The Enormous
Plastic Sausage

S
OPHIA KNEW THAT VERY SMALL ISLANDS
in the sea have turf instead of soil. The turf is mixed with seaweed and sand and invaluable bird droppings, which is why everything grows so well among the rocks. For a few weeks every year, there are flowers in every crack in the granite, and their colours are brighter than anywhere else in the whole country. But the poor people who live on the green islands in towards the mainland have to make do with ordinary gardens, where they put their children to work pulling weeds and carrying water until they are bent with toil. A small island, on the other hand, takes care of itself. It drinks melting snow and spring rain and, finally, dew, and if there is a drought, the island waits for the next summer and grows its flowers then instead. The flowers are used to it, and wait quietly in their roots. There’s no need to feel sorry for the flowers, Grandmother said.

The first to come up was the scurvywort, only an inch high, but vital to seamen who live on ship’s biscuit. The second came up about ten days later in the lee of the channel marker, and it was called stepmother, or love-in-idleness. Sophia and Grandmother used to walk out to see it. Sometimes it blossomed at the end of May and sometimes at the beginning of June. It had to be viewed at length. Sophia wondered why it was so important, and Grandmother said, “Because it’s the first.”

“No, it’s the second,” Sophia said.

“But it always comes up in the same place,” Grandmother said. It occurred to Sophia that all of the others did, too, more or less, but she didn’t say anything.

Every day, Grandmother would walk around the island in order to keep track of what was coming up. If she found a piece of uprooted moss, she would poke it back where it belonged. Since she had a hard time getting on her feet again whenever she sat down, Grandmother had become very skilful with her stick. She looked like an immense sandpiper as she walked slowly along on her stiff legs, stopping often to turn her head this way and that and have a look at everything before she moved on.

Grandmother was not always completely logical. Even though she knew there was no need to feel sorry for small islands, which can take care of themselves, she was very uneasy whenever there was a dry spell. In the evening she would make some excuse to go down to the marsh pond, where she had hidden a watering can under the alders, and she would scoop up the last dregs of water with a coffee cup. Then she would go around and splash a little water here and there on the plants she liked best, and then hide the can again. Every autumn, she collected wild seeds in a matchbox, and the last day on the island she would go around and plant them, no one knew where.

The great change began with some flower catalogues that came for Sophia’s father in the mail. For a while, he read nothing but flower catalogues, and finally he wrote to Holland and they sent him a box full of bags, and in each bag there was a brown-and-white bulb in a bed of light, protective down. Papa wrote for another box, and this time they sent him special gifts from Amsterdam: a porcelain wooden shoe that was really a vase, and several of the house bulbs, which were called something like
Houet van Moujk
. Late that autumn, Papa went back out to the island alone and planted his bulbs. And all winter he went on reading about plants and shrubs and trees in order to learn as much about them as he could. They were all of them delicate and pampered and had to be handled scientifically and with great care. They could not survive without real soil and water at specific times. They had to be covered in the autumn so they wouldn’t freeze, and uncovered in the spring so they wouldn’t rot, and they had to be protected from field mice and storms and heat and frost – and the sea, of course. Papa knew all that, and perhaps that was why he was interested.