Thank you as ever for the reviews. I'm glad to think somewhere there are readers who have or will come to love these characters as I do -it means more than it usually would for their being mostly my own.
Unpacking later in the evening was severely hampered by the Harris children, who came and sat on the bed and chatted to her while she did so, reluctantly migrating from the bed to the floor while she made it up and covered it with a log cabin quilt.
'Did you make that,' they asked in chorus and Di told them no, the last blanket she had quilted had been for the children displaced by the war in Europe.
'Oh. But you do quilt, like mummy?' that was Laura Lee.
'Yes, not all the time, not so much here, I should think.'
'Why not?' Paul asked curiously.
'Because silly, mummy asked her to come for us,' his sister said unflappably.
'Did she say that?' asked Di from the recesses of a wardrobe. As she said it, St Christopher came streaking in and sought sanctity there, and Di fell on her knees to route him out. Aggrieved, he settled grimly on the windowsill, where grey and sinister he resembled nothing so much as a witch's familiar.
'And what's your latest grievance,' Di demanded of him, closing the wardrobe door and sitting down on the bed. The children took this as a sign they could do likewise and clambered up beside her.
'That means Gyp's come into the kitchen,' said a soft voice from the doorway. Caro had apparently overcome her earlier nerves and now hovered, just as St. Christopher would have done, Di suspected, undecided as to whether or not to step across the threshold of the room. Di put out an arm to her. Tentatively and clutching a rag doll to her chest in the one hand and a candle rather clumsily in the other, Caro came in and being too small to scale the height of the bed, reached up to Di, who bent over and lifted her up effortlessly, but not before setting the candle well out of harm's way.
'I see,' she said as she did so. 'And St. Christopher doesn't get on with Gyp?'
'Not at all,' said Caro, all traces of nervousness vanishing in that moment and nestling against Di. Her hair was down, having been made ready for bed by her mother, and it fell dark and massy over her shoulders, straying even to the corners of her mouth. Gently Di reached across and swept it away, and shuddered to think what damage the candle could have wrought in a moment of carelessness. It was these conflicting sensations, in Di's memory, that laid the groundwork of the bond that ever afterwards marked Caro out as specially hers.
'Peter reckons St. Christopher thinks Gyp's some sort of devil. What do you think?' Richard asked, kneading the quilt on the bed as he tried to make himself comfortable thereon.
'I don't presume to know what any creature so magnificent as your St. Christopher is or isn't thinking,' said Di, and the cat on the sill purred approval. Now Caro, her eyes drawn moth-like to the flickering flame of the candle Di had taken from her, squirmed slightly to see it and craning her neck made out the photo that rested behind it.
'Who is that?' she asked, turning her head again to Di and looking up with blue eyes wide and deep and dark as pools in a wood with no moon.
'Yes who,' asked Laura Lee eagerly.
Di lifted Caro up into her lap and impulsively reached for the photo that had so struck them. There were two, one of the family all together, dating to just after the war, with Jem looking taller than usual and dressed to go away, and Susan grimly smiling, but it was the other that had struck the children's fancy and Di knew this.
'Here, look,' Di said, holding the frame out to Caro, and the others crawled nearer, Paul laying his head on Di's shoulder to see over his older siblings.
'That's Walter,' she said to Caro, 'my brother.' It was not a good photo of him, but it was the last and most recent one she had. It showed Walter in his army khaki, smiling except for the corners of his eyes, his hands folded across his chest as if he had been unsure where to put them. The gesture made him look remarkably young, almost boyish. It had been taken in Rainbow Valley, by an inexpert Carl, and the result was that the Old Bailey House loomed threateningly in the background, throwing Walter, and presumably Carl likewise, into shadow.
'Is he in Canada?' asked Caro, and Richard laughed.
''Course he's in Canada Caro, where else would he be?'
'Heaven,' said Di softly, setting the photograph back and wrapping her arms around Caro.
'Oh,' said Caro, instinctively snuggling against the figure of the woman who held her, being then to young to adequately express the sentiment that stirred her.
'You must miss him awfully,' said Paul, and Di turned her head to catch his eye and said, 'now and then. But not just now, not with all of you making so merry.'
After that, she would journal later; they wanted to hear all about Ingleside and Walter. Peter came in –though not Gyp, and they joined forces, would you believe it. So I told them all about Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde, and Peter said something like 'so that's how you come to speak Cat,' though I think it had more to do with that first cat of Rilla's, Jack Frost, and very likely the Manse cats too. I made the mistake of saying as much and then had to explain all about the Manse and the Merediths –you can imagine what a chore that proved, though I hardly minded. They made it up in their own way, telling me all about themselves, the house and the neighbours –though that mostly from Peter over cocoa once they had gone up to sleep. I gather that Mr. Murdock's sheep are forever slipping their pasture and I'm to watch for them because odds are if they do they'll end up in the kitchen garden and I'll know before anyone else –assuming I happen to be in the kitchen, also that Mrs. Olive Abbot hasn't got the trick of saying pleasant things, and only that of gloominess.
Paul tells me his second name is 'Temple,' and he is terribly proud of this, as it was his mother's name before she married. There's a character in that name, if a writer should ever want it –a detective perhaps. Laura Lee was full of all her mother's opinions, and her visitors too –clearly she has an ear for conversations she's not meant to catch –
There was the careful tread of a child trying not to be heard and there was Caro standing in the candlelight, rag doll exchanged for a white and grey rabbit.
'Goodness –did you come all the way through the house in the dark?' Di asked of her.
'Ye-es –I couldn't sleep,' she said plaintively, and so Di put the journal by and carried her over to the bed.
'Why not love?' she said as her mother had been used to, 'did you hear something to startle you?'
'No,' said Caro hesitantly, as though saying so would put an end to any comfort she might draw from this warm, low-ceilinged room with it's Log Cabin quilt, square windows and hook rug.
'But I'm afraid to sleep in case I dream about The Thing; it comes and it sits on my chest and then I can't breath, and, and, and…' there were so many terrifying possibilities that there seemed nothing for it but to fold back the quilt and tuck child and cuddly toy under it.
'Shall I sit by you until you sleep?' Di asked. Caro, doubly tired from spent anxiousness and natural drowsiness made an incomprehensible noise and burrowed under the quilt. Di moved to put her candle out but a little voice said, 'please no, It comes in the dark,' so Di left the candle to burn itself out. 'I'll wish you a dream then, love,' she said, as she and her sister had been used to say to one another, adding for clarification, 'a pleasant one.' Caro was asleep in minutes.
When she was sure Caro was lost to dreaming and no sooner, Di came through into the kitchen. It was a spacious room, but no less comfortable for that. It was dominated at its centre by a trestle table designed for working at rather than eating on, and all around the room were cupboards where there were not counters. In spite of this the stove was positioned awkwardly against the wall nearest her own room, almost on top of the door, so that you could not open it outward without knocking the edge of the stove, and certainly couldn't move from one room to the other while the stove was lit for fear of a fire.
'Odd,' she said as she decisively shut the door that separated the two rooms, 'earlier she seemed to be frightened of me. What's come over her?'
It was not yet nine o'clock according to the cuckoo clock on the wall and Peter was sitting at the kitchen table bent over the newspaper with abnormal acuity.
'What do you make of 'an eye without a head'*?' he asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Di came and attempted to read over his shoulder, and finding him to be tackling a crossword, decided that at least made sense of the headless eyes.
' I tried with 'Potato' but no good came of it,' he added for further clarification, 'and clocks have faces but not eyes. What do you suppose it is?'
'I think you keep very little company with sewers. Try 'needle.''
'Ah!' he said with satisfaction, adding a bit sheepishly as an afterthought, 'thank-you for that. What was it you were saying about Caro –or were you?' He folded the paper into quarters and set the crossword to one side.
'Only noticing the difference between her when I arrived and this evening,' said Di, sitting down opposite him.
'Oh that,' he said, 'It wasn't you she took a fit of nerves over, don't go thinking it was. It was her mum she was being shy about; she always has been. It's a curious understanding they have between them, I've not seen the like of it before or since and don't reckon I'm likely to.'
This did nothing to enlighten Di, who, rotating the crossword to peer at the clues, said 'odd how?'
'I don't know exactly how to put it,' said Peter, laying the crossword where they could both read it.
'Let me think, 'Ned's cinder mix was withdrawn,' that will be 'rescinded,' he murmured, 'I wonder how I missed that. Caro though, where to start?'
'The beginning I think,' said Di patiently, puzzling over 'Roman or Venetian pleat used to cover eyes.'
'You may be right. And that, I think, turns out to be 'blindfold' –about Caro. The trouble started with her not being able to eat anything, as far as I could make out. I remember because I was here and her father was –well he was able to go away to war even if I wasn't. How anyone ever looked at this farm and deemed it of sufficient income without him to run it I doubt even God knows, but someone as was thought to matter did, and they would have tried to let it run itself to if they hadn't looked at me and decided I wouldn't do for a soldier. I wouldn't have done either, I never was the sort of lad to play at being one, so that was likely just as well. Never mind all that. All I could think at the time was that someone had to milk the cows, and it wouldn't be Mrs. Harris because she was and is frightened by them, though gracious knows why, and it couldn't've been Richard because he was still to young to be minding anyone calling him so–which was the one sensible thought anyone had –about my not going that is and the milk –because as it turned out we were one of the few families who hadn't to worry over whether the stuff they were putting into their porridge was sour. But that's as may be. Mostly it mattered to us at Hillside about that milk because it was one of the few things Caro could have.'
'But why couldn't she eat?'
'I was coming to that, I was coming to that,' said Peter soothingly. 'It was something in the food that was the trouble –well not the food exactly, she wasn't on to proper food –but what she could and was having, you know…' Peter turned severely pink and bent over the crossword again. 'That is –her mother was still seeing to her,' he said in a rush, 'nursing her, or trying to, and the longer she went on trying the more our Caro got to look like one of those African children you sometimes hear tell of, or see in the paper, all swollen up like she'd been filled with air. It was Colette who finally insisted we have doctor Carson in, as I remember it, and she said –Colette I mean, Mrs. Harris was never one for telling me much of anything –she said that man took one look at Caro and said, 'that child's been surviving on love and nothing else.' I wonder if he'd still say it of her…somehow it doesn't strike me that he would. But then…well I think it must have been true then because Caro was getting on for half a year or thereabouts and doctor Carson couldn't believe she hadn't died of hunger pains. Mind you,' said Peter as he pencilled in yet another clue, 'she hadn't got the hunger fur you sometimes see on children without enough food to go round, and that was something. Not that I've seen it myself,' he added, frowning and tapping impatiently at 'islets of langerhans.'
'Where are they, do you suppose?' he asked.
'In the pancreas,' said Di, not Gilbert Blythe's favourite for nothing, 'now, go on about Caro.'
'Caro. Yes –it was Gran, incidentally, and mum, that had experience of the hunger fur, not me. Gran used to tell me about it of an evening while she was spinning. She had one of those great round wheels and there was nothing better for setting her talking. I've wandered again, haven't I? I was telling you that Dr. Carson wanted Caro put onto soft food early –this from Colette by the way –he never would have said a thing like that to me, he'd have thought it not right and I'd have agreed with him very likely –and he left behind a massively complicated percentage-based recipe for feeding her and said to be careful what we gave her. It gave Colette terrible trouble, that chart. I had a look over it for her once, reckoning it might be like one of these,' and he jabbed again at the crossword, 'but it was something else entirely, that chart, and doctor Carson's handwriting didn't help any. So she and I guessed as best we could with it, short of taking it into the chemist for an opinion. The man who had the running of that shop, you know, was an old hand at reading doctor Carson's writing, but Colette didn't want anyone else dragged into the trouble with Caro. This house was going merrily to pieces without that, so she said. It was what drove Colette out in the end, at least I think it was, those percentages and always having to watch what Caro was eating. Never have I seen anything like that table…I take it that this was another thing left out of your correspondence with Mrs. Harris?'
'She certainly didn't say anything about Caro's diet, when she wrote about the children, no,' said Di, 'but that's what I can't work out, you make it sound as if Colette had care of Caro after that –where was Mimi in all of this?'
Peter fidgeted uncomfortably with a corner of the newspaper and said to the table, 'she wasn't really –not after Colette started on those percentage tables. Mrs. Harris –Mimi –she never did bear a crisis well, and she had worked up Caro's not eating into near enough of one as to make herself half hysterical over it. If she hadn't been she might have understood that chart better than we did, or so I've often thought.'
'I see,' said Di, though without much certainty.
'No,' said Peter, smiling guilelessly and looking for all the world like a djinn with a trick tucked still up his sleeve, 'I don't know that you do and I don't see how you could –and I'm glad. You'll get to seeing soon enough and then, like as not, you'll wish you couldn't.'
Overhead the clock tolled the hour and a little bird poked its head out and quaveringly chirruped up to ten. Peter rose and crossed to the cold cupboard for the last of that day's milk.
'For the green people,' he said candidly and unconcernedly, 'and Caro and Paul too. I don't know but that it would crush them to think the milk had been forgot. It's years I've been putting it out on the well, but it's the pair of them that minds most that it's done.' So saying he set the empty milk bottle by the basin and bidding Di goodnight, went out into the dark. Di, coming through again to her own room, was relieved to find the chiming of the clock had not awakened the little girl under the quilt. She looked at her in the shadowy light that penetrated the curtains and netting both, and took in fully for the first time the smallness and paleness of this child. Noiselessly she went through the motions of getting ready for bed and sensed more than felt, when she finally climbed in beside her, Caro's hands wrapping themselves round her neck, the down of her soft toy crushed between them, somewhere in the vicinity of Di's shoulder and the little girl's dark head. Protectively she threaded an arm around Caro, indistinctly saying into the hush of the night, 'you mustn't worry, Peter's remembered about the milk, it's all right,' before joining Caro in sleep.
* The crossword clues Peter and Di puzzle out are not mine, I'm not nearly good enough at the cryptic to set one. These are variously (and will continue to be unless otherwise indicated) taken from the Telegraph and the Online Cryptic I solve.
