The Pinhoe Egg (UK) Read online

  “With pleasure,” said the nurse. “Come in and make another target, do!”

  As Marianne went into the hall, she could not help snatching a look at the ferret’s glass dome. There still seemed to be something yellow inside the glass, but it did not look so much like a ferret today. Damn! she thought. It was fading. Illusions did that.

  But here Gammer distracted her by coming rushing down the stairs in a frilly white nightdress and a red flannel dressing gown, with the other nurse pelting behind her. “Is that you, Marianne?” Gammer shrieked.

  Maybe she’s all right again, Marianne thought, a bit doubtfully. “Hallo, Gammer. How are you?”

  “Under sentence of thermometer,” Gammer said. “There’s a worldwide epidemic.” She looked venemously from nurse to nurse. “Time to leave,” she said.

  To Marianne’s horror, the big long-case clock that always stood by the stairs rose up and launched itself like a battering ram at the nurse who had opened the door. The nurse screamed and ran sideways. The clock tried to follow her. It swung sideways across the hall, where it fell across the ferret’s dome with a violent twanging and a crash of breaking glass.

  Well, that takes care of that! Marianne thought. But Gammer was now running for the open front door. Marianne raced after her and caught her by one skinny arm as she stumbled over the brass tray at the bottom of the steps.

  “Gammer,” she said, “you can’t go out in the street in your nightclothes.”

  Gammer only laughed crazily.

  She isn’t all right, Marianne thought. But she’s not so un-all right as all that. She spoke sternly and shook Gammer’s arm a little. “Gammer, you’ve got to stop doing this. Those nurses are trying to help you. And you’ve just broken a valuable clock. Dad always says it’s worth hundreds of pounds. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  “Shame, shame,” Gammer mumbled. She hung her head, wispy and uncombed. “I didn’t ask for this, Marianne.”

  “No, no, of course not,” Marianne said. She felt the kind of wincing, horrified pity that you would rather not feel. Gammer smelt as if she had wet herself and she was almost crying. “This is only because Gaffer Farleigh put a spell on you —”

  “Who’s Gaffer Farleigh?” Gammer asked, sounding interested.

  “Never mind,” Marianne said. “But it means you’ve got to be patient, Gammer, and let people help you until we can make you better. And you’ve really got to stop throwing things at those poor nurses.”

  A wicked grin spread on Gammer’s face. “They can’t do magic,” she said.

  “That’s why you’ve got to stop doing it to them,” Marianne explained. “Because they can’t fight back. Promise me, Gammer. Promise, or …” She thought about hastily for a threat that might work on Gammer. “Promise me, or I shan’t even think of being Gammer after you. I shall wash my hands of you and go and work in London.” This sounded like a really nice idea. Marianne thought wistfully of shops and red buses and streets everywhere instead of fields. But the threat seemed to have worked. Gammer was nodding her unkempt head.

  “Promise,” she mumbled. “Promise Marianne. That’s you.”

  Marianne sighed at a life in London lost. “I should hope,” she said. She led Gammer indoors again, where the nurses were both standing staring at the wreckage. “She’s promised to be good,” she said.

  At this stage, Mum and Aunt Helen arrived hotfoot from the village, Aunt Polly came in by the back door, and Great Aunt Sue alighted from the carriage behind Great Uncle Edgar. Word had got round as usual. The mess was cleared up and, to Marianne’s enormous relief, nobody noticed that there was no stuffed ferret among the broken glass. The nurses were soothed and took Gammer away to be dressed. More sandwiches were made, more Pinhoes arrived and, once again, there was a solemn meeting in the front room about what to do now. Marianne sighed again and thought Joe was lucky to be out of it.

  “It’s not as if it was just anyone we’re talking about, little girl,” Dad said to her. “This is our head of the craft. It affects all of us in three villages and all the country that isn’t under Farleighs or Cleeves. We’ve got to get it right and see her happy or we’ll all go to pot. Run and fetch your Aunt Joy here. She doesn’t seem to have noticed there’s a crisis on.”

  Aunt Joy, when Marianne fetched her from the Post Office, did not see things Dad’s way at all. She walked up the street beside Marianne, pinning on her old blue hat as she went and grumbling the whole way. “So I have to leave my customers and lose my income – and it’s no good believing your Uncle Charles will earn enough to support the family – all because this spoilt old woman loses her marbles and starts throwing clocks around. What’s wrong with putting her in a Home, I want to know.”

  “She’d probably throw things around in a Home too,” Marianne suggested.

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t be dragged off to deal with it,” Aunt Joy retorted. “Besides,” she went on, stabbing her hat with her hatpin, “my Great Aunt Callow was in a Home for years and did nothing but stare at the wall, and she was just as much of a witch as your Gammer.”

  When they got to Woods House, Marianne escaped from Aunt Joy by going to look for Nutcase in the garden, where, sure enough, he was, stalking birds in the overgrown vegetable plot. He seemed quite glad to be taken back to Furze Cottage and given breakfast.

  “You stupid old thing!” Marianne said to him. “You have to have your meals here now. I don’t think Gammer knows you exist any more.” To her surprise, Marianne found herself swallowing back a sob as she spoke. She had not realised that things were as upsetting as that. But they were. Gammer had never done anything but order Marianne about, nothing to make a person fond of her, but all the same it was awful to have her screaming and throwing things and behaving generally like a very small child. She hoped they were deciding on a way to make things more reasonable, up at Woods House.

  It seemed as if it had not been easy to decide anything. Mum and Dad came home some hours later, with Uncle Richard, all of them exhausted. “Words with the nurses, words with Edgar and Lester,” Mum said, while Marianne was making them all cups of tea.

  “Not to speak of Joy rabbiting on about that nursing home she stuck old Glenys Callow in,” Uncle Richard added. “Three spoonfuls, Marianne, love. This is no time for a man to watch his weight.”

  “But what did you decide?” Marianne asked.

  It seemed that the nurses had been persuaded to stay on another week, for twice the pay, provided one of the aunts was there all the time to protect them.

  “So we take it in turns,” Mum said, sighing. “I’ve drawn tonight’s shift, so it’s cold supper and rush off, I’m afraid. And after that —”

  “It’s my belief,” Dad said peacefully, “that they’ll settle in and she’ll get used to them and there’ll be no more need to worry.”

  “In your dreams!” Mum said. Unfortunately, she was right.

  The nurses lasted two more nights and then, very firmly and finally, gave notice. They said the house was haunted. Though everyone was positive the haunting was Gammer’s doing, no one could catch her at it and no one could persuade the nurses. They left. And there was yet another Pinhoe emergency meeting.

  Marianne avoided this one. She told everyone, quite reasonably, that you had to keep a cat indoors for a fortnight in a new place or he would run away. So she sat in her room with Nutcase. This was not as boring as it sounded because, now Joe was not there to jeer at her, she was able to open the secret drawer in her heart-shaped desk and fetch out the story she was writing. It was called The Adventures of Princess Irene and it seemed to be going to be very exciting. She was quite sorry when everyone came back to Furze Cottage after what Uncle Richard described as a Flaming Row and even Dad described as “a bit of difficulty”.

  According to Mum, it took huge arguments for them even to agree that Gammer was not safe on her own, and more arguments to decide Gammer had to live with someone. Great Uncle Edgar then cheerfully announced that he and Great
Aunt Sue would live in Woods House and Great Aunt Sue would look after Gammer. This had been news to Great Aunt Sue. She did not go for the idea at all. In fact, she had said she would go and live with her sister on the other side of Hopton, and Edgar could look after Gammer himself and see how he liked it. So everyone hastily thought again. And the only possible thing, Mum said, was for Gammer to come and live with one of Gammer’s seven sons.

  “Then,” said Uncle Richard, “the fur really flew. Cecily let rip like I’ve never seen her.”

  “It’s all very well for you!” Mum said. “You’re not married and you live in that room over in the Pinhoe Arms. Nobody was going to ask you, Richard, so take that smug look —”

  “Now, Cecily,” Dad said peaceably. “Don’t start again.”

  “I wasn’t the only one,” said Mum.

  “No, there was Joy and Helen and Prue and Polly all screeching that they’d got enough to do, and even your Great Aunt Clarice, Marianne, saying that Lester couldn’t have his proper respectable lifestyle if they had to harbour a madwoman. It put me out of patience,” Dad said. “Then Dinah and Isaac offered. They said as they don’t have children, they had the room and the time, and Gammer could be happy watching the goats and the ducks down in the Dell. Besides, Dinah can manage Gammer —”

  “Gammer didn’t think so,” said Mum.

  Gammer had somehow got wind of what was being decided. She appeared in the front room wrapped in a tablecloth and declared that the only way she would leave Woods House was feet first in her coffin. Or that was what most Pinhoes thought she meant when she kept saying, “Root first in a forcing bucket!”

  “Dinah got her back to bed,” Uncle Richard said. “We’re moving Gammer out tomorrow. We put a general call out for all Pinhoes to help and —”

  “Wait. There was Edgar’s bit before that,” Mum said. “Edgar was all set to move into Woods House as soon as Gammer was out of it. Your Great Aunt Sue didn’t disagree with him on that, surprise, surprise. The ancestral family home, they said, the big house of the village. As the oldest surviving Pinhoe, Edgar said, it was his right to live there. He’d rename it Pinhoe Manor, he thought.”

  Dad chuckled. “Pompous idiot, Edgar is. I told him to his face he couldn’t. The house is mine. It came to me when Old Gaffer went, but Gammer set store by living there, so I let her.”

  Marianne had had no idea of this. She stared. “Are we going to live there then?” And after all the trouble I’ve been to, training Nutcase to stay here! she thought.

  “No, no,” Dad said. “We’d rattle about in there as badly as Gammer did. No, my idea is to sell the place, make a bit of money to give to Isaac to support Gammer at the Dell. He and Dinah could use the cash.”

  “Further flaming row,” said Uncle Richard. “You should have seen Edgar’s face! And Lester saying that it should only be sold to a Pinhoe or not at all – and Joy screeching for a share of the money. Arthur and Charles shut her up by saying ‘Sell it to a Pinhoe, then.’ Edgar looked fit to burst, thinking he was going to have to pay for the place, when he thought it was his own anyway.”

  Dad smiled. “I wouldn’t sell it to Edgar. His side of the family are Hopton born. He’s going to sell it for me. I told him to get someone rich from London interested, get a really good price for it. Now let’s have a bit of a rest, shall we? Something tells me it may be hard work moving Gammer out tomorrow.”

  Dad was always given to understating things. By the following night, Marianne was inclined to think this was Dad’s understatement of the century.

  Chapter Three

  Everyone gathered soon after dawn in the yard of the Pinhoe Arms: Pinhoes, Callows, half-Pinhoes and Pinhoes by marriage, old, young and middle aged, they came from miles around. Uncle Richard was there, with Dolly the donkey harnessed to Dad’s furniture delivery cart. Great Uncle Edgar was drawn up outside in his carriage, alongside Great Uncle Lester’s big shiny motor car. There was not room for them in the yard, what with all the people and the mass of bicycles stacked up among the piles of broomsticks outside the beer shed, with Uncle Cedric’s farm cart in front of those. Joe was there, looking sulky, beside Joss Callow from That Castle, alongside nearly a hundred distant relatives that Marianne had scarcely ever met. About the only people who were not there were Aunt Joy, who had to sort the post, and Aunt Dinah, who was getting the room ready for Gammer down in the Dell.

  Marianne tried to edge up to Joe to find out how he was getting on among all the enemy enchanters, but before she could get near Joe, Uncle Arthur climbed on to Uncle Cedric’s cart and, with Dad up there too to prompt him, began telling everyone what to do. It made sense to have Uncle Arthur do the announcing. He had a big booming voice, rather like Great Uncle Edgar’s. No one could say they had not heard him.

  Everyone was divided into work parties. Some were to clear everything out of Woods House, to make it ready to be sold, some were to take Gammer’s special things over to the Dell, and yet others were to help get Gammer’s room ready there. Marianne found herself in the fourth group that was supposed to get Gammer herself down to the Dell. To her disappointment, Joe was in the work party that was sent to Aunt Dinah’s.

  “And we should be through by lunchtime,” Uncle Arthur finished. “Special lunch for all, here at the Pinhoe Arms at one o’clock sharp. Free wine and beer.”

  While the Pinhoes were raising a cheer at this, the Reverend Pinhoe climbed up beside Uncle Arthur and blessed the undertaking. “And may many hands make light work,” he said. It all sounded wonderfully efficient.

  The first sign that things were not, perhaps, going to go that smoothly was when Great Uncle Edgar stopped his carriage outside Woods House slap in the path of the farm cart and strode into the house, narrowly missing a sofa that was just coming out in the hands of six second cousins. Edgar strode up to Dad, who was in the middle of the hall, trying to explain which things were to go with Gammer and which things were to be stored in the barn outside the village.

  “I say, Harry,” he said in his most booming and important way, “mind if I take that corner cupboard in the front room? It’ll only deteriorate in storage.”

  Behind him came Great Uncle Lester, asking for the cabinet in the dining room. Marianne could hardly hear him for shouts of “Get out of the way!” and “Lester, move your car! The sofa’s stuck!” and Uncle Richard bawling, “I have to back the donkey there! Move that sofa!”

  “Right royal pile-up, by the sound,” Uncle Charles remarked, coming past with a bookshelf, two biscuit tins and a stool. “I’ll sort it out. You get upstairs, Harry. Polly and Sue and them are having a bit of trouble with Gammer.”

  “Go up and see, girl,” Dad said to Marianne, and to Edgar and Lester, “Yes, have the blessed cupboard and the cabinet and then get out of the way. Though mind you,” he panted, hurrying to catch up with Marianne on the stairs, “that cupboard’s only made of plywood.”

  “I know. And the legs on the cabinet come off all the time,” Marianne said.

  “Whatever makes them happy,” Dad panted.

  The shouts outside rose to screams mixed with braying. They turned round and watched the sofa being levitated across the startled donkey. This was followed by a horrific crash as someone dropped the glass case with the badger in it. Then they had to turn the other way as Uncle Arthur came pelting down the stairs with a frilly bedside table hugged to his considerable belly, shouting, “Harry, you’ve got to come! Real trouble.”

  Marianne and Dad squeezed past him and rushed upstairs to Gammer’s bedroom, where Joss Callow and another distant cousin were struggling to get the carpet out from under the feet of a crowd of agitated aunts. “Oh, thank goodness you’ve come!” Great Aunt Clarice said, looking hot and wild-haired and most unlike her usual elegant self.

  Great Aunt Sue, who was still almost crisp and neat, added, “We don’t know what to do.”

  All the aunts were holding armfuls of clothes. Evidently they had been trying to get Gammer dressed.


  “Won’t get dressed, eh?” Dad said.

  “Worse than that!” said Great Aunt Clarice. “Look.”

  The ladies crowded aside to give Dad and Marianne a view of the bed. Dad said, “My God!” and Marianne did not blame him.

  Gammer had grown herself into the bed. She had sunk into the mattress, deep into it, and rooted herself, with little hairy nightdress-coloured rootlets sticking out all round her. Her long toenails twined like transparent yellow creepers into the bars at the end of the bed. At the other end, her hair and her ears were impossibly grown into the pillow. Out of it her face stared, bony, defiant and smug.

  “Mother!” said Marianne’s dad.

  “Thought you could get the better of me, didn’t you?” Gammer said. “I’m not going.”

  Marianne had almost never seen her father lose his temper, but he did then. His round amiable face went crimson and shiny. “Yes, you are going,” he said. “You’re moving to Dinah and Isaac’s whatever tricks you play. Leave her be,” he said to the aunts. “She’ll get tired of this in the end. Let’s get all the furniture moved out first.”

  This was easier said than done. No one had realised quite how much furniture there was. A house the size of Woods House, that was big enough to have held a family with seven children once, can hold massive quantities of furniture. And Woods House did. Joss Callow had to go and fetch Uncle Cedric’s hay wain and then borrow the Reverend Pinhoe’s old horse to pull it, because the farm cart was just not enough and they would have been at it all day. Great Uncle Edgar prudently left at this point in case someone suggested they use his fine, spruce carriage too; but Great Uncle Lester nobly stayed and offered to take the smaller items in his car. Even so, all three vehicles had to make several trips to the big barn out on the Hopton Road, while a crowd of younger Pinhoes rushed out there on bikes and broomsticks to unload the furniture, stack it safely and surround it in their best spells of preservation. At the same time, so many things turned up which people thought Gammer would need in her new home, that Dolly the donkey was going backwards and forwards non stop between Woods House and the Dell, with the cart loaded and creaking behind her.