Diana Jones - The Lives of Christopher Chant

Some evenings, Mama was on the stairs to meet Papa, blocking Christopher’s view with wide silk skirts and a multitude of frills and draperies. “Remind your master,” she would say icily to the footman, “that there is a Reception in this house tonight and that he is required, for once in his life, to act as host.”

Papa, hidden behind Mama’s wide clothing, would reply in a deep gloomy voice, “Tell Madam I have a great deal of work brought home from the office tonight. Tell her she should have warned me in advance.”

“Inform your master,” Mama would reply to the footman, “that if I’d warned him, he would have found an excuse not to be here. Point out to him that it is my money that finances his business and that I shall remove it if he does not do this small thing for me.”

Then Papa would sigh. “Tell Madam I am going up to dress,” he would say. “Under protest. Ask her to stand aside from the stairs.”

Mama never did stand aside, to Christopher’s disappointment. She always gathered up her skirts and sailed upstairs ahead of Papa, to make sure Papa did as she wanted. Mama had huge lustrous eyes, a perfect figure and piles of glossy brown curls. The nursery maids told Christopher Mama was a Beauty. At this stage in his life Christopher thought everyone’s parents were like this; but he did wish Mama would give him a view of Papa just once.

He thought everyone had the kind of dreams he had, too. He did not think they were worth mentioning. The dreams always began the same way. Christopher got out of bed and walked round the corner of the night-nursery wall – the part with the fireplace, which jutted out – on to a rocky path high on the side of a valley. The valley was green and steep, with a stream rushing from waterfall to waterfall down the middle, but Christopher never felt there was much point in following the stream down the valley. Instead he went up the path, round a large rock, into the part he always thought of as The Place Between. Christopher thought it was probably a left-over piece of the world, from before somebody came along and made the world properly.

Formless slopes of rock towered and slanted in all directions. Some of it was hard and steep, some of it piled and rubbly, and none of it had much shape. Nor did it have much colour – most of it was the ugly brown you get from mixing every colour in a paintbox. There was always a formless wet mist hanging round this place, adding to the vagueness of everything. You could never see the sky. In fact, Christopher sometimes thought there might not be a sky: he had an idea the formless rock went on and on in a great arch overhead – but when he thought about it, that did not seem possible.

Christopher always knew in his dream that you could get to Almost Anywhere from The Place Between. He called it Almost Anywhere, because there was one place that did not want you to go to it. It was quite near, but he always found himself avoiding it. He set off sliding, scrambling, edging across bulging wet rock, and climbing up or down, until he found another valley and another path. There were hundreds of them. He called them the Anywheres.

The Anywheres were mostly quite different from London. They were hotter or colder, with strange trees and stranger houses. Sometimes the people in them looked ordinary, sometimes their skin was bluish or reddish and their eyes were peculiar, but they were always very kind to Christopher. He had a new adventure every time he went on a dream. In the active adventures people helped him escape through cellars of odd buildings, or he helped them in wars, or in rounding up dangerous animals. In the calm adventures, he got new things to eat and people gave him toys. He lost most of the toys as he was scrambling back home over the rocks, but he did manage to bring back the shiny shell necklace the silly ladies gave him, because he could hang it round his neck.

He went to the Anywhere with the silly ladies several times. It had blue sea and white sand, perfect for digging and building in. There were ordinary people in it, but Christopher only saw them in the distance. The silly ladies came and sat on rocks out of the sea and giggled at him while he made sand-castles.

“Oh clistoffer!” they would coo, in lisping voices. “Tell uth what make you a clistoffer.” And they would all burst into screams of high laughter.

They were the only ladies he had seen without clothes on. Their skins were greenish and so was their hair. He was fascinated by the way the ends of them were big silvery tails that could curl and flip almost like a fish, and send powerful sprays of water over him from their big finned feet. He never could persuade them that he was not a strange animal called a clistoffer.

Every time he went to that Anywhere, the latest nursery maid complained about all the sand in his bed. He had learnt very early on that they complained even louder when they found his pyjamas muddy, wet and torn from climbing through The Place Between. He took a set of clothes out on to the rocky path and left them there to change into. He had to put new clothes there every year or so, when he grew out of the latest torn and muddy suit, but the nursery maids changed so often that none of them noticed. Nor did they notice the strange toys he brought back over the years. There was a clockwork dragon, a horse that was really a flute, and the necklace from the silly ladies which, when you looked closely, was a string of tiny pearl skulls.

Christopher thought about the silly ladies. He looked at his latest nursemaid’s feet, and he thought that her shoes were about big enough to hide flippers. But you could never see any more of any lady because of her skirts. He kept wondering how Mama and the nursery maid walked about on nothing but a big limber tail instead of legs.

His chance to find out came one afternoon when the nursery maid put him into an unpleasant sailor-suit and led him downstairs to the drawing room. Mama and some other ladies were there with someone called Lady Badgett, who was a kind of cousin of Papa’s. She had asked to see Christopher. Christopher stared at her long nose and her wrinkles. “Is she a witch, Mama?” he asked loudly.

Everyone except Lady Badgett – who went more wrinkled than ever – said, “Hush, dear!” After that, Christopher was glad to find they seemed to have forgotten him. He quietly lay down on his back on the carpet, and rolled from lady to lady. When they caught him, he was under the sofa gazing up Lady Badgett’s petticoats. He was dragged out of the room in disgrace, very disappointed to discover that all the ladies had big thick legs, except Lady Badgett: her legs were thin and yellow like a chicken’s.

Mama sent for him in her dressing-room later that day. “Oh, Christopher, how could you!” she said. “I’d just got Lady Badgett to the point of calling on me, and she’ll never come again. You’ve undone the work of years!”

It was very hard work, Christopher realised, being a Beauty. Mama was very busy in front of her mirror with all sorts of little cut glass bottles and jars. Behind her, a maid was even busier, far busier than the nursery maids ever were, working on Mama’s glossy curls. Christopher was so ashamed to have wasted all this work that he picked up a glass jar to hide his confusion.

Mama told him sharply to put it down. “Money isn’t everything, you see, Christopher,” she explained. “A good place in Society is worth far more. Lady Badgett could have helped us both. Why do you think I married your papa?”

Since Christopher had simply no idea what could have brought Mama and Papa together, he put out his hand to pick up the jar again. But he remembered in time that he was not supposed to touch it, and picked up a big pad of false hair instead. He turned it round in his hands while Mama talked.