Helen Cresswell - The Bagthorpe Saga - Ordinary Jack

“No one to see, you mean,” returned Mrs Fosdyke. She had not stopped moving since she came in and had already removed her outer clothes to reveal a patterned wrap-round pinafore and exchanged her outdoor shoes for pink fur-edged slippers. (Mrs Fosdyke got cramps in her feet sometimes and the fur was a comfort, she said.)

“Your ma don’t like you frying up,” she observed. She went to the sink and set up a businesslike rattle.

“She likes you to get your vitamings of a morning. Grapefruit and that.”

“I’ll have a grapefruit as well,” Jack offered.

“It’s no good.” Mrs Fosdyke withdrew her hands from the water and wiped them on her front. “I shall have to go and have a look. Never a wink did I have last night. It was as if all my furniture and ornaments was floating round me.”

“I’ve seen it,” he told her. “It’s horrible. I shouldn’t go. It’ll only upset you.”

It was too late. Mrs Fosdyke was halfway across the hall before the words were out. Mrs Fosdyke was a very fast mover. She moved like a hedgehog, Mr Bagthorpe was fond of saying, and was about as much use about the house. This was up to a point true. Mrs Fosdyke had to a fine art the ability to move around fast without actually doing very much. Mr Bagthorpe said a lot of people in the army had this gift, and in the Civil Service, but that it was rare in a Daily.

Mrs Fosdyke was uttering little shrieks and Jack, wiping his plate with a crust, could imagine her in there darting around on the sodden carpet. She came back in.

“Those beautiful chairs,” she said. “Hairlooms. And all my best crystal. I could weep.”

Her voice was actually quite choked and Jack delicately turned his eyes away while she blew into a tissue. A sudden thought struck him. It might be a good idea , he thought, to practise giving a Mysterious Impression on her before any of the others got down . Her eyes were not too good, and she would not be so likely to notice any flaws in his performance.

What I’ll do , he thought, next time she asks me something, I won’t answer. Then she’ll look at me to see what’s the matter and I’ll do the Mysterious Impression. I won’t see bacon and eggs past her left ear, I’ve just had them. I’ll see dinner – roast beef and Yorkshire pud, or treacle tart. Something like that .

He already realised that visions of food were going to produce the required soulful look better than anything else.

“That dog, if it was mine, I’d take a slipper to,” Mrs Fosdyke said. “And that Daisy the same. Little madam her.”

Jack said nothing.

“That mother of hers is only half there,” Mrs Fosdyke went on. “Less than half. There’s no wonder that child’s out of control.”

Still Jack waited. This was not his cue.

“It’ll be months before that room’s set to rights,” continued Mrs Fosdyke. “Months and months. And I suppose you’ll all be eating in the kitchen under my feet till then. Yes. Well, that’ll be nice, I must say. Very nice.”

Jack began to wonder whether Mrs Fosdyke talked like this all the time, whether there was anyone else there or not, asking herself questions and answering them and changing from one subject to another. He began to suspect that his cue never would come up. Another thing was that she was always moving round and half the time he had his back to her. He did not feel that he could create a Mysterious Impression with his back. He got up, and stood waiting around for her to say something else.

“There’s butter gone up again two pence a pound.” Mrs Fosdyke was off on a new tack. She turned from the sink and Jack stepped into her path so that she would have to look at him and notice something faraway about him, but all she did was scoot round him and next minute had her back to him, shaking dusters out of a drawer.

“Mrs Bagthorpe,” soliloquised Mrs Fosdyke, “says there is more actual vitamings in marge than there is in butter. But that’s no comfort, the price marge is.”

Jack was just wondering whether he ought to make a few low moaning noises or something when the telephone rang and Mrs Fosdyke scuttled out to answer it.

“Oh, my good gracious!” he heard her say, followed by a series of disbelieving cries on an ascending scale. Then the telephone was put down.

“Mr Parker!” she poked her head in. “House gone up in flames – oh, would you – oh, I’d best go and tell them!”

She was down again in two minutes and started putting the kettle on and rattling cups and saucers.

“You can’t hardly believe it,” she said. “I thought I should’ve dropped dead when he told me. Sounded cool as a cucumber, mind. ‘Just let ’em know I’ve got my own little blaze going,’ he says, or something like that.”

On she rambled. Jack was by now thoroughly fed up with Mrs Fosdyke. She had refused to look at him and notice that he was doing a Mysterious Impression, and now she was telling Jack a piece of news he already knew – had known over an hour ago. There are few more frustrating things in life than being told something that you already know but cannot admit to knowing.

He decided to go up to his room and practise doing his Mysterious Impression in front of a mirror.

“Come on, Zero.”

He did not want Zero to be lying there looking so comfortable when Mr Bagthorpe came down, because he would probably get irritated by this and start in on Zero again and undo all the good work Jack had been doing on him. As Jack went out he heard Mrs Fosdyke telling herself:

“If I could remember for the life of me whether I turned my gas off under those prunes, I’d feel better. Things always go in threes. There’ll be a third.”

The way Jack felt at that moment about Mrs Fosdyke he rather hoped her prunes would set fire to her house – in a minor way, anyhow.

He met his mother on the landing. Her Yoga did not seem to have worked very well this morning, or else the calmness had worn off already.

“I must get over there and see if Celia’s all right. Have you heard? Oh, it’s dreadful, terrible!”

“It’s Daisy again, I expect,” Jack said. “It didn’t sound all that bad from what Mrs F said.”

“But Celia – you know how highly strung she is.”

“At least no one can say it’s Zero’s fault this time,” Jack said. “Come on, Zero, good boy.”

He went into his room. He sat in front of the mirror and began to practise but soon found it was no good. You couldn’t do it in a mirror. The whole point was that you had to look past somebody, just by their ear, and if you did that to your reflection you couldn’t check up on yourself. It didn’t matter how quickly you flicked your eyes sideways, you couldn’t catch yourself looking past your own ear. You always ended up looking yourself in the eye. Jack gave up.

He took out his notebook and studied it. There wasn’t much in it so far. It didn’t look like a Plan of Campaign at all. He remembered Uncle Parker’s instruction to guard it with his life. He hid it between his comics, where he knew it would be safe. Everybody else in the house despised him for reading them, and said so. They would not, they said, be caught dead looking at them.

By now there was quite a lot of noise downstairs, so Jack decided to go down and have another try at creating a Mysterious Impression. Twice this morning and twice this afternoon, Uncle Parker had said, and he hadn’t done it once yet.

“Stay, Zero.”

The longer Zero lay low the better, Jack thought. He found the whole family in the kitchen with Mrs Fosdyke darting among them distributing orange juice and toast. Everyone was talking loudly about fires. Mr Bagthorpe was moodily weighing up the chances of both himself and Uncle Parker getting their insurance money when it turned out Daisy had started both fires. It would look like conspiracy to defraud, he said.