Peter Dickinson - Shadow of a Hero

4Restaur Vax married Mariu Kori (1799–1893) in 1824. She had been betrothed to Vax’s elder brother until his disappearance at the start of the War of Independence (see Legend: Lash the Golden ). By custom Restaur took the family obligation on himself as soon as he was free to do so. It is to Mariu that we are indebted for the preservation and publication of almost all of the poems.

AUGUST 1990

ONE GOOD THING, nothing to do with Varina, happened. The recession, which had taken Angel away, brought Biddie back. Her parents were feeling the pinch, and decided that in order to pay for their own holiday in Greece, they would have to let their Devon cottage for the priciest part of the season and spend the rest of the summer holidays in Winchester.

Biddie rang at breakfast.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How was Romania? Don’t tell me now. We got back last night. What are you doing this afternoon?’

‘Nothing special.’

‘Shall we choose presents? In time, for once?’

‘Great.’

‘Pick you up at two?’

‘Make it one-thirty. I want to get back and have tea with Grandad. He’s been at a health farm. He’s only just back.’

‘What about Richoux?’

‘Do that first?’

‘Fine.’

They rang off. That was a fairly typical Biddie call. Her parents were extremely tough with her – mediaeval, Angel used to say. They were tough about homework, tough about being out after dark, tough about clothes, tough about dragging her off to Devon all the holidays and most weekends, and fiendishly tough about the telephone. At one point there was trouble with Angel, who didn’t think that anything less than an hour-and-a-half counted as a serious telephone call, but then Biddie’s dad, who was a thoroughgoing gadget-nerd, fixed a timer to the telephone which cut it off after three minutes whether you called her or she called you, unless she used a special key which she had to ask for. What’s more it kept it cut off for another five minutes, so you couldn’t just make a series of three-minute calls. This meant that Letta’s friendship with Biddie had been mostly a school thing, so it was especially pleasing and comforting that Biddie had called pretty well the moment she got back.

Choosing birthday presents was a ritual, much more important than the Christmas present ritual. Because of the way their holiday comings and goings had worked out, they’d usually had to wait for the start of the winter term, and then they’d cruise the gift-shops in the High Street looking for things under five pounds and awarding them points out of ten for idiocy. If they couldn’t find two objects scoring at least eight, they bought each other cards instead. Then they’d finish up having hot chocolate at Richoux.

Letta loved Richoux, even crammed with tourists, as it was in August. It was a bit posh and a bit ye-olde, but nothing like as fake as it might have been. They were lucky and got a table in a niche, where they settled down and looked at each other. Biddie had hardly changed at all, Letta decided. She had a very square face with coarse black hair, black eyebrows, dark brown eyes, whitish freckled skin and a wide mouth. Letta guessed that if she never saw her again till she was sixty, she’d still recognize her at once. In their old school, everyone had known that Biddie was about the cleverest pupil they’d had there, ever, and she was going to get all sorts of scholarships, and finish up famous. It was lovely now to be with her. Theirs wasn’t the sort of friendship you had to work to keep going, like the one with Angel. It was simply there, a fact.

‘You’ve changed,’ said Biddie.

‘I was just thinking you hadn’t.’

‘I have, too. At least I’ve struck. I’ve told Mum and Dad that now we’re going to different schools they’ve got to let me have other ways of getting to hang out with you. We get home for weekends from this school, so I’ve said I won’t always be coming down to Devon with them. I’m going to be staying with you instead, if it’s OK with your mum.’

‘That’s great! I’m sure Momma won’t mind. What did your parents say?’

‘They’re thinking about it. They’ll say OK in the end. They know what matters and what doesn’t. Tell me about Romania. I found your card when I got home.’

‘Not Romania, Varina.’

‘It had a Romanian stamp.’

‘It won’t next year. Don’t you remember, I spent most of last hols helping my sister-in-law in St Albans fix coaches and hotels and things to get to our culture festival?’

‘Oh, yes. How did it go?’

‘The first half was brilliant. Best thing that’s ever happened in my life. I can’t imagine anything as exciting, ever again. I felt as if I’d come home, as if a huge piece of me had always been missing and now I was all joined up again. And Grandad was there – he was our last proper prime minister – and everyone cheered him everywhere he went. He was a total hero. And then, out of the blue, the Romanians arrested him in his pyjamas and took him away. They let Mum and me come along after, to see he was all right, but they practically kept their guns pointing at us all the time until we were on the plane and out of the country.’

‘Wow!’

‘Our people – the Varinians, I mean – were pretty well rioting about it when we left. Burning cars and smashing foreigners’ houses. And after we’d gone the Romanians sent the army along, and the Varinians went and stood in front of them and wouldn’t let them into the city.’

‘It sounds pretty scary.’

‘It is. And there’s a horrible man called—’

‘I mean real armies. That’s big guns and tanks and planes doing rocket attacks if things go wrong . . . What’s up?’

Letta had felt the blood drain from her face. She closed her eyes and bowed her head. It was almost the same words Grandad had used, bringing this sudden lurch into horror, here in the snug, smug, coffee-scented tea-room in a town where there hadn’t been actual fighting – war, blood, bodies, cannon-shattered homes – since heaven knows when. Vivid as a nightmare she saw three war-planes screaming over the shoulder of Mount Athur. She saw St Joseph’s Square, the crowds racing for shelter. One of them was Parvla. She tripped and fell. The crowds milled over her.

‘Are you OK?’ said Biddie.

‘It mustn’t happen,’ whispered Letta. ‘Nothing’s worth that, nothing.’

She shook her head violently, willing the nightmare away, and pulled herself together.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m OK.’

‘Of course it isn’t worth it,’ said Biddie. ‘I wish I knew why anyone thinks it is. We’re all the same underneath, aren’t we?’

‘I am more different than you think,’ said Letta, in Field.

Biddie looked blank. Letta said it again in English.

‘But that’s just language,’ said Biddie.

‘No it isn’t, it’s . . . let me think . . . Yes, listen. Sometimes I dream in English, and sometimes I dream in Field, like I was talking just now. I’ve always done it, but since I came back from Potok – I don’t know – well, it isn’t quite the same me doing the dreaming. I’ve got a sort of overlap. You know, like a wonky TV signal, with a sort of shadow-line because you’re seeing two pictures . . . Anyway, we are different. It isn’t just language. It isn’t just having our own cheeses and legends and dogs and our own kind of Christianity and things like that. It’s something that’s kept us going on being Varinians for hundreds of years, when everyone else was trying to stop us. We aren’t like anyone else, and nobody can make us.’

‘Just now you said it wasn’t worth it. Now you’re sort of saying it is.’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know!’