Eva Ibbotson - Not Just a Witch

Then the starter came and it was shrimps in mayonnaise.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ asked Mr Knacksap. ‘They look nice and pink to me.’

‘Yes,’ said Heckie faintly. ‘But you see, shrimps aren’t meant to be pink. They’re meant to be a sort of grey. If they’re pink they’re dead.’

‘Well, we could hardly eat them if they weren’t,’ said Mr Knacksap, but he had to keep on the right side of Heckie so he sent them back and ordered vegetable soup.

After the shrimps came some meat in a brown sauce and when Heckie saw it, she turned quite pale.

‘ Now what’s the matter?’ asked Mr Knacksap. ‘Those are pheasant breasts done in wine.’

‘I know they’re pheasant breasts,’ said Heckie faintly. ‘But you see eating them would be… well, like eating a friend.’ And as Mr Knacksap frowned at her: ‘You must know what I mean. Think of a friend of yours. Any friend.’

Mr Knacksap tried to think of a friend he had had. ‘There was a boy called Marvin Minor at my prep school. He used to lend me his roller skates.’

‘Well, now you see,’ said Heckie. ‘Imagine you were served slices of Marvin Minor’s chest in wine sauce. How would you feel?’

But even now, Mr Knacksap kept his temper. The pheasant breasts were taken away and Heckie was given a mushroom omelette instead. And there was no fuss over the pudding. Even Heckie didn’t think that caramel custard was like swallowing a friend.

By now they had drunk quite a lot of wine and Mr Knacksap was ready to come to the point.

‘I have a favour to ask you,’ he said, leaning across the table and fixing Heckie with his piercing eyes. ‘A great favour!’

Heckie looked down at the tablecloth and tried to flutter her eyelashes like she had seen Madame Rosalia do. ‘Yes?’ she said shyly.

‘I want you to make a tiger for me. I want you to change the next wicked person you see into a tiger. A male tiger — and large.’

‘Well, I will if you like, Lionel,’ said Heckie (because she had been told to use his Christian name). ‘But are you sure you can manage it? They’re tricky things to look after, the big cats.’

‘It’s not for me personally — I wouldn’t ask you anything for myself,’ said Mr Knacksap soupily. ‘It’s for a friend of mine. An aristocrat. A lord.’

‘Oh, really?’

Everyone is a bit impressed by lords, and Heckie was no exception.

‘Yes. The poor man was left a great castle… I don’t like to talk about him because he’s very shy, but you’d know the name if I told you. But it’s in a very bad state — loose tiles on the roof, dry rot, all that kind of thing. So he’s started a safari park to bring in the trippers and help him get enough money to do repairs. But what the safari park really needs is a tiger.’

‘Well, if you’re sure he’d care for it properly.’

‘It would live like a prince,’ said Mr Knacksap. ‘A heated house, a huge enclosure, children to come and photograph it. And my friend would be so happy.’

Heckie stirred her coffee. ‘All right, then. Mind you, one can’t be absolutely certain with this kind of magic. Sometimes things sort of happen by themselves. There was an animal witch in Germany who kept being overcome by hippopotamuses. Whatever she tried to turn people into, they always came out as hippos.’

Mr Knacksap didn’t like the sound of that. No one wore coats made of hippopotamus skins. ‘I’m sure that wouldn’t happen to you, dear Heckie,’ he said. ‘You’re such a powerful witch. I knew the moment I saw you.’

As soon as he got back to his shop that evening, Mr Knacksap telephoned a man he knew in Manchester. ‘Is that you, Ferguson?’

‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘Well, listen; I’ve got you your tiger skin. A full-grown male.’

‘Go on. You’re kidding.’

‘No, I’m not. I take it the Arkle woman still wants one?’

‘You bet she does. She’s upped the price to two and a half thousand.’

Gertrude Arkle was married to a chain-store millionaire and had set her heart on a tiger skin to put on her bedroom floor. She wanted to lie on it in silk pyjamas like she had seen film stars do in pictures of the olden days. And the more Mr Arkle told her that she couldn’t have one because it was illegal to import them, the more she wanted one.

‘All right, then,’ said Mr Knacksap. ‘I’ll give you a call when it’s ready.’

For nearly three weeks after Heckie had dinner with Mr Knacksap at the Trocadero, life went on much as usual. Heckie was still trying to get the dragworm to speak. She told him stories and repeated simple words to him, but though he was always polite and listened to everything she said, it didn’t seem as though he was ever going to talk. In other ways, though, he was learning all the time. He could turn the bath tap on now with his front claws, and put in the plug, and he didn’t have to think nearly so long about which of his feet was which. Heckie had worried, as the days grew warmer, that he might become unsettled. Chinese dragons usually fly up to heaven in the spring and she would have missed him horribly if he had done so, but he stayed where he was.

Still, things were not quite the same as before and this was because of Mr Knacksap. The furrier never came to the flat because of the dragworm, but the children had seen him in the street and they didn’t like what they saw. They thought he looked thoroughly creepy and unreliable and they couldn’t understand why Heckie went out with him.

The children weren’t the only ones to be worried. The cheese wizard’s shop was next door to the furrier’s and he knew quite a lot about Mr Knacksap. Daniel had met him in the street and been asked in to see a Stilton that could walk at least half a metre.

‘And it’s not maggots, either; it’s magic,’ said Mr Gurgle, beaming at the cheese as it struggled across the floor. But afterwards he became serious. ‘I don’t like the way that fellow’s paying court to Heckie,’ he said. ‘He’s got a bad name in the trade. Up to his eyebrows in debt — and the way he treated those sewing women who worked for him was a scandal. If she marries him, she’ll—’

‘Oh, but she couldn’t! She couldn’t !’ cried Daniel, looking completely stricken.

‘Well, I don’t suppose she will. But she’s all heart and no head, that witch. Just you keep an eye on her.’

But this was easier said than done. Mr Knacksap was careful always to see Heckie away from the shop. Since he hated spending money, he took her on picnics. Heckie brought the food so it didn’t cost him anything, and all he brought was a towel to sit on because he didn’t like nature and was fussy about his trousers.

Mr Knacksap realized that it was no good pretending that he wasn’t a furrier — after all, his shop was in Market Square for everyone to see. So he told Heckie a lot of lies about the coats he sold.

‘That beaver cape in my window was made by a tribe of North American Indians who worship beavers. They sing to them and feed them on pine nuts and take them to sleep with them in their wigwams so that they live for years and years and years. And then when they pass on — the beavers, I mean — the Indians make them into coats so that they won’t be forgotten.’

‘Oh, Li-Li, that’s wonderful,’ said Heckie, feasting her eyes on Mr Knacksap as they sat on a rock high above the Wellbridge gas works.

‘And the stoats I use come from an organic stoat farm in Sweden. They shave the animals and sew the fur on to canvas so that it looks like a pelt, but it isn’t. Only when it’s warm, they shave them; no stoat is ever allowed to get chilled.’

So Heckie’s last doubts were gone. Not only was Mr Knacksap the handsomest man she had ever seen, but he was kind to animals. But inside, Mr Knacksap was seething. Three weeks and not a sign of a tiger! How long was he supposed to go on buttering up this ridiculous witch?