Diana Jones: Conrad’s Fate

“I took an exam,” Anthea said, “and I won a scholarship. That gives me enough money if I’m careful.”

“But you can’t !” they both said together. Mum added, “Who’s going to look after Conrad?” and Uncle Alfred said, “Look here, my girl, I was relying on you for the shop.”

“Working for nothing. I know,” Anthea said. “Well, I’m sorry to spoil your plans for me, but I do have a life of my own, you know, and I’ve made arrangements for myself because I knew you’d both stop me if I told you. I’ve looked after all three of you for years. But now Conrad’s old enough to look after himself, I’m going to go and get a life.”

And she went, leaving us all staring. She didn’t come back. She knew Uncle Alfred, you see. Uncle Alfred spent a lot of time in his workroom setting up spells to make sure that when Anthea came home at the end of the University semester she would find herself having to stay with us for good. Anthea guessed he would. She simply sent a postcard to say she was staying with friends and never came near us. She sent me cards and presents for my birthdays, but she never came back to Stallchester for years.

Anthea’s going made a dreadful difference, far worse than any change made by Count Rudolf up at Stallery. Mum was in a bad mood for weeks. I’m not sure she ever forgave Anthea.

“So sly!” she kept saying. “So mean and secretive. Don’t you ever be like that, Conrad, and it’s no use expecting me to run after you. I have my work to do.”

Uncle Alfred was tetchy and grumpy for a long time too, but he cheered up after he had set the spells that were supposed to fix Anthea at home once she came back. He took to patting me on the shoulder and saying, “ You’re not going to let me down like that, are you, Con?”

Sometimes I answered, “No fear!” but mostly I wriggled a bit and didn’t answer. I missed Anthea horribly for ages. She had been the person I could go to when I had a question to ask, or to get cheered up. If I fell down or cut myself, she had been the one with sticking plaster and soothing words. She used to suggest things for me to do if I was bored. I felt quite lost now she was gone.

I hadn’t realised how many things Anthea did in the house. Luckily, I knew how to work the washing machine, but I was always forgetting to run it and finding I’d no clothes to go to school in. I got into trouble for wearing dirty clothes until I got used to remembering. Mum just went on piling her clothes into the laundry basket as she always had, but Uncle Alfred was particular about his shirts. He had to pay Mrs Potts to iron them for him and he grumbled a lot about how much she charged.

“The ingredients for my experiments cost the earth these days,” he kept saying. “Where do I find the money ?”

Anthea had done all the shopping and cooking too, and this was where we all suffered most. For the week after she left we lived on cornflakes, until they ran out. Then Mum tried to solve the problem by ordering two hundred frozen quiches and cramming these into the freezer. You can’t believe how quickly you get tired of eating quiche. And none of us remembered to fetch the next quiche out to thaw. Uncle Alfred was always having to unfreeze them by magic, and this made them soggy and seemed to affect the taste.

“Is there anything else we can eat that might be less squishy and more satisfying?” he asked pathetically. “Think, Fran. You used to cook once.”

“That was when I was being exploited as a female,” Mum retorted. “The quiche people do frozen pizzas too, but you have to order them by the thousand.”

Uncle Alfred shuddered. “I’d rather eat bacon and eggs,” he said sadly.

“Then go out and buy some,” said my mother.

In the end, we settled that Uncle Alfred would do the shopping and I would try to cook what he bought. I fetched books called Simple Cookery and Easy Eating up out of the shop and did my best to do what they told me. I was never very good at it. The food always seemed to turn black and stick to the bottom of the pan, but I usually had enough on top to get by with. We ate a lot of bread, though only Mum got noticeably fatter. Uncle Alfred was naturally skinny and I kept growing. Mum had to take me shopping for new clothes several times a year from then on. It always seemed to happen when she was very busy finishing a book and this made her so unhappy that I tried to make my clothes last as long as I could. I got into trouble at school once or twice for looking like a scarecrow.

We got used to coping by next summer. I suppose that was when it finally became obvious that Anthea was not coming back. I had worked out by Christmas that she had left for good, but it took Mum and Uncle Alfred most of a year.

“She’ll have to come home this summer,” Mum was still saying hopefully in May. “All the Universities shut for months over the summer.”

“Not she,” said Uncle Alfred. “She’s shaken the dust of Stallchester off her feet. And to be brutally frank with you, Fran, I’m not sure I want her back now. Someone that ungrateful would only be a disturbing factor.”

He sighed, dismantled his spell to keep Anthea at home and hired a girl called Daisy Bolger to help in the shop. After that, he was always worrying about how much he had to pay Daisy in order to stop her going to work at the china shop by the cathedral instead. Daisy knew how to get money out of Uncle Alfred much better than I did. Talk about sly! And Daisy always seemed to think I was going to mess up the books when I was in the shop. Once or twice, Count Rudolf up at Stallery worked another big change, and each time Daisy was sure it was me messing the books about. Luckily, Uncle Alfred never believed her.

Uncle Alfred was sorry for me. He would look at me over his glasses in his most worried way and shake his head sadly. “I reckon Anthea going has hit you hardest of all, Con,” he took to saying sadly. “To be brutally frank, I suspect it was your bad karma that caused her to leave.”

“What did I do in my past life?” I asked anxiously.

Uncle Alfred always shook his head at that. “I don’t know what you did, Con. The Lords of Karma alone know that. You could have been a crooked policeman, or a judge that took bribes, or a soldier that ran away, or maybe a traitor to the country – anything! All I know is that you either didn’t do something you should have done, or you did something you shouldn’t . And because of that, a bad Fate is going to keep dogging you.” Then he would hurry away muttering, “Unless we find a way you could expiate your misdeed, I suppose.”

I always felt horrible after these conversations. Something bad almost always happened to me just afterwards. Once I slipped when I was quite high up climbing Stall Crag and scraped the whole front of me raw. Another time I fell downstairs and twisted my ankle, and one other time I cut myself quite badly in the kitchen – blood all over the onions – but the truly nasty part was that, each time, I thought, I deserve this! This is because of my crime in my past life. And I felt horribly guilty and sinful until the scrapes or the ankle or the cut had healed. Then I remembered Anthea saying she didn’t believe people had more than one life, and after that I would feel better.

“Can’t you find out who I was and what I did?” I asked Uncle Alfred, one time after I had been told off by the Headmistress because my clothes were too small. She sent a note home with me about it, but I threw it away because Mum had just started a new book and, anyway, I knew I deserved to be in trouble. “If I knew, I could do something about it.”