Eva Ibbotson - The Abominables

Farley Towers

ULLS WHO HAVE NOT BEEN KILLED IN THE RINGare never used again for fights. So the next day, El Magnifico was sent back by special train to the ranch from which he had come: a beautiful place with fresh green grass, chestnut groves, and cool breezes from the mountains of Navarre. And with him traveled his adopted son, an animal that had become famous throughout Spain — the yak called Hubert.

It was this ranch, in the hills above Pamplona, to which, on a moonlit night a couple of days later, the yellow lorry traveled. Perry had found out where the bull had been taken and they had broken their journey to the coast to say good-bye.

When the yetis had woken up to find Hubert gone, their distress had been terrible.

“I didn’t look after him properly,” Ambrose had wailed over and over again. “I didn’t deserve to have a yak of my own.”

“Do you remember his little hooves?” Lucy sobbed. “Just like mother-of-pearl, they were.”

“And the clatter of his knees knocking together. I can hear it now,” Grandma had moaned.

But now they were trying to be brave.

“After all, every growing person needs a father,” said sensible Uncle Otto.

“Look how we miss ours,” said Lucy, choking back a burst of tears.

“That El Magnifico animal will be the making of him, I daresay,” said Grandma.

But Ambrose didn’t say anything. Being brave was beyond him as he faced a yakless world.

About a mile from the ranch, Perry parked the lorry and while Con went ahead to see that the coast was clear, the yetis crept silently across the fields toward the paddock that housed El Magnifico and his new son.

There had been clouds over the moon, but as they came up to the railings, the clouds rolled past and in a shaft of silver light they saw their yak, lying like a shaggy mop-head against the vast flanks of the sleeping bull.

“Hubert!” said Ambrose in a deep and tragic voice. “Are you happy, Hubert? Is this what you wanted?”

Hubert scrambled to his feet and ran to the railings. His boot face quivered with excitement; his knock-knees clattered together like castanets. Here was Ambrose the Abominable! Here were his old friends! He began to butt the railings, making little slivers of sawdust with his crumpled horn.

El Magnifico didn’t move. He just lifted his great head, with the wide and curving horns, and waited.

It was a terrible moment. The yetis could have picked Hubert up with one hand and lifted him over the fence and that would have been that. But Lady Agatha had brought them up well. They knew that people — even very young ones like Hubert — have to make their own choices.

So they waited, while Hubert ran backward and forward, now butting El Magnifico in the stomach, now rushing back to the railings to stick his nose into Ambrose’s outstretched hand.

For a moment it looked as though old loyalties would be the strongest. Hubert even put his head down and started tunneling a path under the railings. Then, with a last bleat of confusion, he stopped, turned, and collapsed against the great bull’s side.

It was over. Fatherhood had won.

After that, no one tried to be brave anymore. Though Con and Ellen traveled in the back to try to console the yetis, there was little they could do. Lucy sat clutching Hubert’s rubber teat while her blond stomach turned dark under a rain of tears. Grandma said they needn’t expect her to get over a grief like that at her age, and Clarence, managing a whole word for once, said, “Gone,” over and over again in a deep and desperate voice. As for Ambrose the Abominable, he lay like a felled log on his bunk, his walleyes fixed blankly on the ceiling, brokenly murmuring Hubert’s name.

After a few miles, Perry stopped the lorry. He needed a short nap before the last leg of the drive, which would take them to the ferry. So he switched off the engine, bent down to pick up his pipe, and settled back in his seat. Dawn was just breaking, a pale streak of light on the horizon.

Perry took a puff at his pipe. Then suddenly he leaned forward and peered into the rearview mirror.

After that he used Bad Language. Then he looked into the mirror again to make sure that he had seen what he thought he had seen.

He had.

For a moment, Perry was tempted. It would have been so easy to start the engine, release the handbrake, let out the clutch, and take off at full speed down the road. Then he sighed, got down, and opened the back of the lorry.

So then they all saw what Perry had seen in the mirror.

Footsore, knock-kneed, tripping over the tufts of hair that hung from his chest, and bleating a frantic “wait for me” bleat — came Hubert.

The yetis being sad had been hard to bear, but the yetis being happy was almost as exhausting. By the time the lorry drove into the bowels of the big white ship that was to take them across to Britain, Con and Ellen were quite worn out.

“I do hope they’ll be quiet during the crossing,” said Con. “I hate to lock them in — it seems so rude — but with the ship so full, I think we’ll have to.”

But Con needn’t have worried. He could have left the door wide open and none of the yetis would have stirred an inch. And the reason for this was simple — they were seasick.

There is always a rough patch of water round the Bay of Biscay, and as the boat began to heave and toss, the yetis, unused as they were to the sea, became hideously, horribly, vilely ill. Grandma lay in her bunk groaning and saying that since the ship was going to sink anyway she hoped it would sink quickly . Lucy swore that she would never again say sorry to so much as a peanut if only her stomach would come down out of her throat and back to where it belonged, and Ambrose, his head in a plastic bucket, was trying to decide who should have his bedsock when he was dead.

There is little you can do for people who are seasick except leave them alone. So while Perry sat in the bar drinking all the beer he hadn’t been able to drink while he was driving, Con and Ellen, who were good sailors, stayed up on deck watching the white spray and the diving gulls and the green wake of their ship in the water. And gradually, as they approached the shores of England, a weight seemed to fall off Con’s shoulders, because it looked as though he had really done what he had promised Lady Agatha, and brought the yetis safely to her home.

They landed at Southampton two days later and while the exhausted yetis dozed in the back, Perry set course for the village of Farlingham, now only a couple of hours’ drive away.

It was a gentle, misty morning and as they drove past quiet fields and bird-busy hedges, past little copses and peaceful villages, they thought — as people do when they come back to the place where they were born — that there was nowhere quite like it in the world.

“Have you ever thought,” said Perry, when they stopped at a transport café for some fish and chips, “that Farley Towers may not be there anymore? That it’s been pulled down to make a motorway or some such thing? Or that the people who own it have sold it to a hotel or a school or something?”

“I’ve thought of it often,” said Con. “But I don’t see what to do except hope for the best.”

All the same, when Perry turned off by a signpost that said FARLINGHAM, 2 MILES, Con could have cried with relief. For there, at the end of a most beautiful avenue of linden trees, was the house Lady Agatha had described to him, weeks and weeks ago, in the secret valley of Nanvi Dar.