Diana Jones - The Lives of Christopher Chant

He remembered the night the crisis broke, because that was the night when he went to an Anywhere where a man under a yellow umbrella gave him a sort of candlestick of little bells. It was so beautiful that Christopher was determined to bring it home. He held it in his teeth as he scrambled across the rocks of The Place Between. To his joy, it was in his bed when he woke up. But there was quite a different feeling to the house. The twelfth governess packed and left straight after breakfast.

C hristopher was called to Mama’s dressing-room that afternoon. There was a new governess sitting on the only hard chair, wearing the usual sort of ugly greyish clothes and a hat that was uglier than usual. Her drab cotton gloves were folded on her dull bag and her head hung down as if she were timid or put-upon, or both. Christopher found her of no interest. All the interest in the room was centred on the man standing behind Mama’s chair with his hand on Mama’s shoulder.

“Christopher, this is my brother,” Mama said happily. “Your Uncle Ralph.”

Mama pronounced it Rafe. It was more than a year before Christopher discovered it was the name he read as Ralph.

Uncle Ralph took his fancy completely. To begin with, he was smoking a cigar. The scents of the dressing-room were changed and mixed with the rich incense-like smoke, and Mama was not protesting by even so much as sniffing. That alone was enough to show that Uncle Ralph was in a class by himself. Then he was wearing tweeds, strong and tangy and almost fox-coloured, which were a little baggy here and there, but blended beautifully with the darker foxiness of Uncle Ralph’s hair and the redder foxiness of his moustache. Christopher had seldom seen a man in tweeds or without whiskers. This did even more to assure him that Uncle Ralph was someone special. As a final touch, Uncle Ralph smiled at him like sunlight on an autumn forest. It was such an engaging smile that Christopher’s face broke into a return smile almost of its own accord.

“Hallo, old chap,” said Uncle Ralph, rolling out blue smoke above Mama’s glossy hair. “I know this is not the best way for an uncle to recommend himself to a nephew, but I’ve been sorting the family affairs out, and I’m afraid I’ve had to do one or two quite shocking things, like bringing you a new governess and arranging for you to start school in autumn. Governess over there. Miss Bell. I hope you like one another. Enough to forgive me anyway.”

He smiled at Christopher in a sunny, humorous way which had Christopher rapidly approaching adoration. All the same, Christopher glanced dubiously at Miss Bell. She looked back, and there was an instant when a sort of hidden prettiness in her almost came out into the open. Then she blinked pale eyelashes and murmured, “Pleased to meet you,” in a voice as uninteresting as her clothes.

“She’ll be your last governess, I hope,” said Mama. Because of that, Christopher ever after thought of Miss Bell as the Last Governess. “She’s going to prepare you for school. I wasn’t meaning to send you away yet, but your uncle says—Anyway, a good education is important for your career and, to be blunt with you, Christopher, your papa has made a most vexatious hash of the money – which is mine, not his, as you know – and lost practically all of it. Luckily I had your uncle to turn to and—”

“And once turned to, I don’t let people down,” Uncle Ralph said, with a quick flick of a glance at the governess. Maybe he meant she should not be hearing this. “Fortunately, there’s plenty left to send you to school, and then your mama is going to recoup a bit by living abroad. She’ll like that – eh, Miranda? And Miss Bell is going to be found another post with glowing references. Everyone’s going to be fine.”

His smile went to all of them one by one, full of warmth and confidence. Mama laughed and dabbed scent behind her ears. The Last Governess almost smiled, so that the hidden prettiness half-emerged again. Christopher tried to grin a strong manly grin at Uncle Ralph, because that seemed to be the only way to express the huge, almost hopeless adoration that was growing in him. Uncle Ralph laughed, a golden brown laugh, and completed the conquest of Christopher by fishing in a tweed pocket and tipping his nephew a bright new sixpence.

Christopher would have died rather than spend that sixpence. Whenever he changed clothes, he transferred the sixpence to the new pockets. It was another way of expressing his adoration of Uncle Ralph. It was clear that Uncle Ralph had stepped in to save Mama from ruin, and this made him the first good man that Christopher had met. And on top of that, he was the only person outside the Anywheres who had bothered to speak to Christopher in that friendly man-to-man way.

Christopher tried to treasure the Last Governess too, for Uncle Ralph’s sake, but that was not so easy. She was so very boring. She had a drab, calm way of speaking, and she never raised her voice or showed impatience, even when he was stupid about Mental Arithmetic or Levitation, both of which all the other governesses had somehow missed out on.

“If a herring and a half cost three-ha’pence, Christopher,” she explained drearily, “that’s a penny and a half for a fish and a half. How much for a whole fish?”

“I don’t know,” he said, trying not to yawn.

“Very well,” the Last Governess said calmly. “We’ll think again tomorrow. Now look in this mirror and see if you can’t make it rise in the air just an inch.”

But Christopher could not move the mirror any more than he could understand what a herring cost. The Last Governess put the mirror aside and quietly went on to puzzle him about French. After a few days of this, Christopher tried to make her angry, hoping she would turn more interesting when she shouted. But she just said calmly, “Christopher, you’re getting silly. You may play with your toys now. But remember you only take one out at a time, and you put that back before you get out another. That is our rule.”

Christopher had become rapidly and dismally accustomed to this rule. It reduced the fun a lot. He had also become used to the Last Governess sitting beside him while he played. The other governesses had seized the chance to rest, but this one sat in a hard chair efficiently mending his clothes, which reduced the fun even more. Nevertheless, he got the candlestick of chiming bells out of the cupboard, because that was fascinating in its way. It was so arranged that it played different tunes, depending on which bell you touched first.

When he had finished with it, the Last Governess paused in her darning to say, “That goes in the middle of the top shelf. Put it back before you take that clockwork dragon.” She waited to listen to the chiming that showed Christopher had done what she said. Then, as she drove the needle into the sock again, she asked in her dullest way, “Who gave you the bells, Christopher?”

No one had ever asked Christopher about anything he had brought back from the Anywheres before. He was rather at a loss. “A man under a yellow umbrella,” he answered. “He said they bring luck on my house.”

“What man where?” the Last Governess wanted to know – except that she did not sound as if she cared if she knew or not.

“An Almost Anywhere,” Christopher said. “The hot one with the smells and the snake charmers. The man didn’t say his name.”