Elidor (Essential Modern Classics) Page 7

  Mrs Watson’s scream interrupted him. They rushed through into the kitchen, and found her staring at the electric food mixer, which was spinning at top speed.

  “Switch it off!” cried Mrs Watson.

  “It is switched off, Mum,” said Nicholas, and he took the plug out of the socket, to be certain. The mixer did not falter.

  “It – started,” said Mrs Watson. “I was nowhere near it.”

  “Now will you believe me?” said David.

  As if to back him up, the drum of the washing machine slowly began to turn behind its glass door.

  “It’s all right, dear,” said Mr Watson. “There’ll be a fault in the supply. David, go and switch off the mains, and we’ll see.”

  David pressed a lever on the electricity meter and all the lights in the house went out. But the mixer and the washing machine threshed away in the darkness.

  “Very well,” said Mr Watson. “Put the lights on.”

  They ate a poor supper. Mrs Watson was upset, but Mr Watson said that nothing could be done at the moment, and that they should try to have a good night’s sleep. It would all be put right in the morning. It was not a fault at the mains, so there was no danger. Nevertheless, he gave himself away by setting up a camp bed for Helen in his room. Now no one would be alone.

  At first the boys tried to talk when they were in bed, but their father called to them to go to sleep. So they lay awake through that night, listening to the machinery. At two o’clock in the morning the food mixer burned itself out. But the washing machine rumbled on. The children and their parents stared clear-eyed at the dark.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE LAST SPADEFUL

  “W hat was that you were chuntering about last night, Roland, before Dad told you to shut up?” said Nicholas.

  “I know what’s causing all this,” said Roland. “It’s the Treasures.”

  Mrs Watson was in bed suffering from a headache. She had put cotton wool in her ears to keep out the noise of the washing machine. Mr Watson was having trouble over finding an electrician: either the numbers were engaged, or he became involved in long arguments.

  “I don’t know how they’re doing it,” said Roland, “but they are. Malebron said they’d still give light in Elidor even when they’re here, so they must be generating something.”

  “Generators!” said David. “Yes! They could! Roland, you’ve hit it! If Malebron said that, the Treasures must be giving off energy. And if it’s generated over a wide enough range of frequencies it’ll spoil TV and radio reception – and it’ll turn electric motors!”

  “Does that mean that as long as I’m looking after a stone I’ll not be able to use my transistor?” said Nicholas.

  “It depends what the range is,” said David. “But probably you won’t.”

  “It fits what happened when I went to collect them,” said Roland. “The GPO van, and all that static.”

  “The van makes sense,” said David. “But generators don’t generate static electricity. And if the Treasures are generators—”

  “There’s a lot of ‘if’ in this,” said Nicholas.

  “But we’ll have to do something quickly,” said Roland. “We can’t hide the Treasures for long. They’ll be found, and taken away from us. There’ll be another van looking for them this morning, I bet, unless we can stop the interference they’re causing.”

  “The only thing to do is to try and screen them,” said David. “If we put them in a metal box and bury them it should block out most of the interference, if the energy is anything like electricity – and it must be, even in Elidor.”

  “That’s what I said we should do at the start,” said Nicholas. “Dig a hole and bury ’em. Well, it’s a bit thick if I can’t listen to the radio. And anyway, we look so daft carting these things round – you and Roland playing soldiers with bits of iron and wood, and Helen at a doll’s tea party, and me – well, what am I doing looking after a lump of stone as if it was the crown jewels?”

  “But Malebron trusted us to look after them,” said Roland. “We can’t let him down. And Elidor—”

  “You give me the pip sometimes,” said Nicholas. “You really do. All right: I was as excited as you when it happened. But what is it once you’ve got used to the idea? Is it any better than our world? It’s all mud and dust and rock. It’s dead, finished. Malebron said so. And you should think about him a bit more, too. Did he care how we made out as long as he found his Treasures? He sent us trotting off into that Mound one after the other, but he didn’t go in himself. What right has he to expect us to spend the rest of our lives like – like broody hens?”

  “But you saw him,” said Roland. “How can you forget him if you’ve seen him?”

  Nicholas shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well,” he said. “Well. Well, I didn’t say anything was wrong with him: he was just self-centred.”

  “Do stop arguing,” said Helen. “Honest, Roland, if David’s right, then what Nick wants to do is best even if you don’t like why he’s doing it.”

  “Now what’s all this noise?” said Mr Watson. The washing machine had covered his approach. “You know your mother’s got a bad head.”

  “Sorry, Dad,” said David. “Any luck?”

  “It’s very strange,” said Mr Watson, “but every single electrician says he’s been having calls all night, and no one can promise to come before this afternoon.”

  “So it wasn’t just us,” said David.

  “It’s intolerable,” said Mr Watson. “Your poor mother didn’t sleep a wink. I’m going round to the electricity office now to insist that they do something immediately. It can’t go on.”

  “Can we dig in the garden, please?” said Helen.

  “Yes: yes: anything you like,” said Mr Watson, “as long as you don’t disturb your mother. She’s dropped off.”

  “We’ll have to bury the Treasures,” said David as soon as their father had gone. “If they’ve been causing all this trouble, the electricity people or the post office will find them. It’s the only way, Roland.”

  “David and I’ll take first go at the digging,” said Nicholas. “We’ll have to make it deep, and Dad won’t think much of it if he comes back before we’ve finished.”

  Helen and Roland went upstairs and brought down four polythene bags to hold the Treasures. It was hard to squash all the air out of the bags so that they would take up as little space as possible. Helen fastened the necks with rubber bands, and covered this seal with a lashing of twine. Roland found an old dustbin among the rubbish that had been cleared out of the cottage and was waiting to be removed from the bottom of the garden.

  The Treasures looked no different: a stone, a piece of railing, two laths, and a cup. Roland put them into the dustbin and tied the lid down with a length of flex from David’s radio spares.

  When Helen and Roland climbed into the hole it was up to their chests. The sides were mottled layers of earth, darkest at the top, growing lighter and sandier towards the bottom, and veined brown with dead roots. Shards of pottery winked blue and white in the soil.

  “Have you noticed?” said Helen. “Wherever you dig there’s always millions of broken plates. It was the same at the other house. People must have been throwing them away for years.”

  They were head-deep in almost pure sand, and they could barely lift the spade loads to clear the pile at the edge of the hole.

  “You’ll do at that,” said David. “It’s the best we can manage in the time. Give us your hand and I’ll pull you out.”

  “Right,” said Helen. “Last spadeful coming up – oh!”

  She drove the spade into the sand, and it hit something which cracked. Helen knelt and picked out several fragments of earthenware.

  “Oh, I think it was a whole jug!” she said. “And I’ve smashed it. Look, Roland. Oh, isn’t it lovely!”

  She wiped a piece with her hand. It was a creamy brown colour, with a blue tinge of lead in the glaze, and there were the head and forelegs of a unicorn li
ned in dark red.

  “Gosh, it must be centuries old,” said Roland.

  “I’m going to mend it,” said Helen. “Oh, what a pity! If only I hadn’t broken it! I’d give anything not to have broken it!”

  “We’ll be copped if you don’t hurry up,” said Nicholas.

  Helen and Roland were pulled out of the hole, and the dustbin was lowered in. They kicked and shovelled the earth back, and stamped it down.

  “There,” said Nicholas.

  When they went into the kitchen to clean their hands the washing machine had stopped.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE LETTERBOX

  E lectricians checked the house, and went away again. Mr Watson made a flower bed on the heap of soil where the Treasures were buried. A year passed.

  And all this time Roland avoided using the front door. He felt that he could never trust the door to be the way out of and into the cottage. It became a compulsion, like walking on kerbstones.

  Helen mended the jug she had found in the hole. It was a large pitcher, and it had broken into five pieces. She spent hours glueing them together, almost in tears when she thought of what she had done. The pitcher had lain in the ground such a long time, and such a little care would have saved it. Now she was too late, and nothing could make it whole again.

  The unicorn reared below the lip, poised at the height and stillness of movement. An instant later, Helen thought, and it would have been gone.

  There was no other decoration except for two lines of thick black lettering under the unicorn,

  Save mayde that is makeles

  Noe man with me mell.

  “What does it mean, Dad?” said Nicholas.

  “I’m not sure,” said Mr Watson. “It’s some sort of verse – perhaps it’s a family motto, something like, you know, that Scottish one, ‘He gets hurt who meddles with me’.”

  “What’s a makeless maid?” said Roland.

  “Well, it’s hard to say exactly. I suppose you could find it in the dictionary.”

  “You’ve made a very good job of mending that, Helen,” said Mrs Watson. “You can’t really see the cracks.”

  “But I know they’re there,” said Helen.

  The year passed. It was a dark Sunday afternoon. Helen and Nicholas had gone for a ride on their bicycles: David and Roland were sitting at the table in the middle room, revising the work they had done at school that term. Through the window they could see their mother and father in the garden. Mr Watson was planting some rose bushes.

  Roland tried to concentrate on his history book. He had to read twenty pages, and he found that he was more aware of the number of a page than of what was printed on it. Eventually the words became a procession, and his mind drifted from them, first to the tablecloth, and then to the window. He saw that David was drawing patterns in the margin of his notebook.

  “Revision’s the worst part of the term, isn’t it?” said Roland. “You think you know the stuff, but you don’t: and you can’t take it in because you’ve heard it all before and it’s gone stale.”

  “I can’t get used to not having a front garden,” said David. “Every time someone goes past the house I think they’re coming here. And that front door’s driving me round the bend.”

  “Oh?” said Roland. “Why?”

  “It keeps buzzing,” said David. “Haven’t you noticed? It must be traffic that makes it vibrate. Anyway, what with that, and the footpath right next to the house, you can’t think straight, even in here.”

  “I’ve never liked the porch,” said Roland. “I used it to open the Mound, and ever since it’s felt wrong.”

  “What?” said David. “Open what?”

  “The Mound,” said Roland. “In Elidor.”

  “Oh, that,” said David.

  “What do you mean, ‘Oh, that’?” said Roland. “Elidor! Elidor! Elidor! Have you forgotten?”

  “OK,” said David. “We don’t want the whole road to hear.”

  “Elidor,” said Roland. “So why can’t we talk about it? You and Nick always change the subject.”

  “I think you ought to cool down a bit on this Elidor business,” said David.

  “You’re mad!” said Roland.

  “All right,” said David, “we have been talking about it.”

  “I don’t remember,” said Roland.

  “Nick said you’d only start getting worked up and we’d have a row, so we didn’t tell you.”

  “Good old Nick!” said Roland. “He would! Thanks very much!”

  “You see?” said David. “You’re shouting already.”

  “But you’re pretending it doesn’t matter,” said Roland. “Didn’t it mean anything to you – Malebron and the Treasures, and that golden castle, and, and – everything.”

  “Listen,” said David, “Nick’s not all that dim, although you think he is. A lot of what he says makes sense, even if I don’t agree with everything myself.”

  “What does he say, then? That there’s no such place as Elidor, and we dreamed it?”

  “In a way,” said David.

  “He’s off his head.”

  “No, he’s gone into it more than any of us,” said David. “And he’s been reading books. He says it could all have been what he calls ‘mass hallucination’, perhaps something to do with shock after the church nearly fell on us. He says it does happen.”

  “And I suppose the mud we scraped off was a mass hallucination,” said Roland.

  “Yes, I know,” said David. “But I think he may be right about the Treasures. Try and remember. When the church was shaking all round us we couldn’t see what we were doing, and we were falling all over the place, and everything jarred so much we didn’t know where we were. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Well,” said David, “even if we were holding the real Treasures they could have been knocked out of our hands and we could have grabbed hold of the other things without noticing.”

  “I didn’t,” said Roland.

  “But it is possible,” said David.

  “If you can believe that, you can believe in the Treasures,” said Roland. “And what about the things that happened next? The television, and Dad’s razor, and your theory about generators?”

  “Yes, it was a bit rum,” said David. “But it could have been a coincidence. And anyway it was a long time ago. And nothing’s happened since.”

  “That’s the whole point!” said Roland. “That’s why we buried them! If we dug them up it’d start all over again.”

  “There’s not much chance of that,” said David. “Now that Dad’s made his prize flower bed there, it’d be more than anyone’s life’s worth to touch it.”

  David and Roland looked out of the window into the garden. Roland was about to go on with the argument, but what he saw stopped him.

  Mr Watson was crouching a few feet away from a rose bush that he had just planted. Others lay nearby, their roots in bags. Very gingerly, and rather like a boxer, Mr Watson sidled towards the flower bed. He stretched out his hand, flinching: nearer: and nearer; then he jumped back as if the bush had bitten him. The children watched him do this twice before they left their work and ran into the garden.

  “What’s up, Dad?” said David.

  By this time Mrs Watson had joined her husband and was peering at the bush.

  “It’s this Mrs A. R. Barraclough,” said Mr Watson. “I keep getting a shock from it.”

  “A shock?”

  “No, not quite, but there’s a distinct sound when I try to touch it, and I can feel a tingling in my hand.”

  “Your hair’s all frizzy, too, Frank,” said Mrs Watson. “How very interesting: look, David and Roland. There must be thunder about somewhere.” She put her hand near the bush, and they all heard a sharp crack.

  “Be careful, dear,” said Mr Watson.

  “It’s all right, Dad,” said David. “That’s static electricity.”

  Roland hurried to different parts of
the garden, touching shrubs, trees, walls, fences.

  “There’s nothing here,” he called. He came back to the flower bed and put out his hand. Crack. “It’s only this place.” He looked hard at David.

  “Run and see if the glass is dropping, Roland,” said Mrs Watson. “I do hope Helen and Nick aren’t going to be caught in a storm.”

  Roland went into the house. His face was flushed, and he was breathing quickly.

  The barometer hung on the sitting room wall. The needle was slightly higher than it had been the previous day.

  “Coincidence!” said Roland. “Huh!”

  While he was reading the barometer the front door vibrated – a short, resonant buzz, not very loud, but noticeable. He had heard it before on several occasions, but it was only now since David had complained about it that the sound grated on him.

  The door buzzed again, a longer note. Roland turned from the barometer, and as he passed the door he heard someone step into the porch. There was no mistaking this. The footpath had its own sound, and so had the porch. The flagstone gave a hard echo between the brick walls. Someone had stepped into the porch.

  Without waiting for the knock, Roland drew back the curtain. The upright letterbox in the top of the door was open, and pressed close against it Roland saw an eye.

  He snatched the curtain across and held it tightly in place. He heard a slight movement, and the door knob was turned both ways, and the door shifted against the Yale lock. He could hear breathing, too.

  “Who is it?” said Roland.

  No one answered. The door still buzzed.

  Roland dashed out into the garden. “There’s someone trying to get in through the front door!” he shouted.

  It was so obvious that Roland was frightened that Mr Watson dropped his spade and hurried round the side of the house to the footpath. Helen and Nicholas were wheeling their bicycles on to the kerb.

  “Who’s in the porch?” said Mr Watson.

  “I didn’t notice anybody,” said Nicholas.

  The porch was empty, and so was the road.

  “Why? What’s the matter?”