The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (10 page)

I had to put her hand on the door handle, but then she pulled herself together and knocked and waited and went through. I followed her and switched on the light, not that it was going to be any use, me seeing what happened, and then I went and stood beside her with my hand on her shoulder, so she'd know I was there, but careful not to let her dad spot there was anything different. She was doing her best, smiling—just—and not crying—just—and you'd have thought anybody would have seen there was something wrong, something bothering her badly. Maybe he asked, because at one place she shook her head and said a few words and tossed her pigtails back and tried to smile a bit more.

Then she took the book and it became shadowy in her hands, and sat on the stool and made that come shadowy too and began trying to read. It was awful. I could see her stammering, and making a word out, and trying again, and getting it wrong again, with her finger hardly moving along the page at all. Then she'd reach out and hand the book over and take it back—he'd been telling her the word she was stuck at, I guessed—and struggle along a bit more.

On and on it went like that. I wanted to go away, pretend it wasn't happening. Not that it was as bad for me as it was for her, anything like, but I got close to screaming at there being nothing I could do to help, nothing at all. She never seemed to notice I'd got my hand on her shoulder. You'd not have known it to look at her, but when she got badly stuck her whole body set up juddering, like a lorry that's standing in the road, not moving along but with its engine running. I tried stroking her when that started but it wasn't any use. The clocks outside struck six, and getting on an hour later, it felt like, they struck the quarter, and he didn't let her go and he didn't let her go and she had to sit there hunched and juddering and trying to read and trying not to cry, on and on, till the clocks struck the half past.

Maybe he heard it too, because now she passed the book across and stood up and waited, listening and nodding her head and trying to smile and fidgeting with one of her pigtails. I went over to the door and waited till she came walking slowly across with her head up, proud, and turned and did her curtsey and walked through, never even looking at me.

I switched off the light and slipped out, and she was already running along to the main stair, not stopping for me, though she must have known it was no use and she'd be shut in the cupboard for sure. She went skimming up the main stair with me after and I only caught her up just as she was reaching the top. I tried to take her hand, tell her I was coming with her to the nursery, though what sort of trouble I'd be in with my grandmother if I didn't show up in the kitchen soon I don't know, but she spun round and said something I couldn't hear, with her face all set white and hard like a statue, and before she'd finished speaking she put out both hands and gave me a shove in the chest. I wasn't ready for it, and it sent me tumbling back down the stairs. I could have hurt myself really bad on that marble, but I must have been lucky how I fell, half against the rail, which I managed to grab hold of and stopped myself falling any further.

Soon as I'd got myself together I went tearing after her. She was almost up the top stairs when I reached the bottom of them, but I went up them two at a time, and left at the top, the other way from the nursery, switching on the lights when I came to them. That slowed me, and she was out of sight by the time I got to the next corner, but I knew where she was heading and went belting on round the next corner to the linen room. There wasn't any bulb in there, but there wasn't any blackout either, and I could see her against the window trying to get it open. She didn't hear me coming, of course, and the first she knew was when I grabbed her round the shoulders and dragged her clear. She tried to pull away but I hung on and put my mouth against her ear and said, “No you don't. Not yet.”

She went on trying to pull away and get my mouth off her ear but I managed to get hold of one of her pigtails and held her head still and said, gasping after all that running, “Listen. I've thought of something. I don't know if it'll work but it's worth a try. Please, Adalina, give it a go. Please. But we've got to be quick. Now, at once. Oh, come on! You owe it me, you really do. I've stuck by you when I didn't need to, because I could see you were in trouble, and now I've gone and got myself in real bad trouble for you, and you owe it me. Yes, you do, and it's no use making out you don't, because you know it's so. You owe it me.”

She'd been all rigid and juddering when I'd got to her, and she didn't go soft now, not exactly, but she eased a bit and the juddering stopped and when I let go of her pigtail she put her mouth to my ear and whispered, “All right. But next time …”

“Next time you can do whatever you've a fancy to,” I told her, “because I don't expect I'm going to be allowed to be here no more.”

So we went out into the passage where I could see her, and I gave her a smile to show her it was all going to come out all right, though I knew in my heart it was a desperate long shot, and at least it would get her away from that window. She couldn't go jumping out of there, not if she was shut in a cupboard. She didn't smile back, but she let me hang on to her hand and take her back round to the nursery.

I was planning to stop outside and tell her I wasn't coming in, not just now, but I'd be back in a minute and I'd stay with her all night if I had to, but before I'd got a chance she was grabbed out of nowhere and hauled away through the door, and I could see from her mouth before she vanished she was screaming.

I didn't bother going in after. I didn't know how long I'd got so I pelted back down the main stairs and never mind the racket, and along the passage and in through the library door, and turned on the light and shut it behind me. I ran across to the chair she'd been reading to and tried to sit in it, only I couldn't because there was something hard and lumpy on the seat, so I looked under the dust sheet and there was the stool I'd just seen only the shadow of when she was sitting on it to read. I pulled it out and sat in the chair, on top of the dust sheet.

I gave myself a moment to get my breath back, and then I pulled myself up tall as I could and said, “Go to the nursery. Go to the nursery now.”

I said it out loud, not shouting or anything, but slowly and carefully, as if everything in the world depended on it. If he wasn't still sitting there after he'd let Adalina go it wouldn't be any use—that's why I'd been in such a tear—and even if he was I'd no way of knowing if he could hear me, but my idea was if I could say the words right inside him, right inside his head, maybe that's how he'd hear them, the way Adalina and me could hear each other. In one of the books I'd read there'd been a bloke who'd heard his twin brother calling to him like that, and had gone and rescued him. I wasn't sure if that kind of thing could truly happen, or if it was just an idea the writer had made up, but all I can tell you is I had this feeling, very strong, it was what I was supposed to do, so I did it.

I'd been meaning to give it three goes, but before I'd drawn breath to try again I felt—I'm not sure how I can describe this, but it was like the bit of air I was sitting in had given a sort of kick. Or you know when you're coming downstairs and there's one more step than you'd thought there was going to be, and
before
your foot bangs into the floor you get this kind of jolt inside you? Like that, but without me moving at all. No, that's not it, either. But I did feel something, very sudden and strong, so I was pretty sure I'd gone and done it.

I didn't bother saying my words again. I just ran back up to the nursery to see if anything happened. It was pretty well dark by now of course, so I left the door open with the light on in the passage.

It was the same bare empty room with the cupboard and the couple of chests. I opened the cupboard door and there was Adalina lying shuddering under the coat hangers, staring up at nothing. I knelt down and took her hand and was leaning in to get at her ear with my mouth when suddenly she screwed herself almost into a ball and cringed even further into the corner with her eyes wider still and staring out past me. She couldn't see me of course because it was pitch dark in the cupboard for her, and she couldn't see out either, but it was like there was some kind of monster in the room now, snuffling round after her blood.

When I managed to get my mouth against her ear to ask her what was going on all she did was lie there making herself as small as she could. In the end I did the only thing I could think of. She was wearing hard little leather boots, the sort that lace up crisscross on hooks running up in front of your ankle, so I grabbed her leg and banged her foot hard against the door. It was the door in her time, of course, so I couldn't see it and I couldn't hear the racket it made, but I knew when it hit because it stopped, sharp, where the door would have been.

I did that two or three times with Adalina trying to fight me off, which would only have added to the racket, and then she jerked her leg free and I was getting ready to grab it again when she cringed back with her arm over her face and then she sailed right out of the cupboard and up into the air. Whoever it was must have reached right through me to get hold of her. Her boot banged against the side of my head as she went past and knocked my specs off.

I scrabbled around and found them and looked to see what was up. She was floating in the air, lying a bit forward with her head turned sideways and her knees a bit up and her arms spread out and round. I got it at once. Someone was holding her on their arm and she'd got her head on their shoulder and her arms round their neck. I moved where I could see her face and she was crying, great heaving sobs that shook her through and through, not like the other crying I'd seen her do, when she was trying her best not to. She was letting it happen now, crying her heart out because she was allowed to because she was all right at last. (You'll say this is silly, telling you that a twelve-year-old kid who didn't know much about anything would have spotted something like that, but you're wrong. Anybody could have seen it.)

After a bit she started floating to and fro because whoever it was was carrying her around comforting her, and when they crossed the light from the door I could just about see the shadow of him, or maybe I couldn't. And then they floated off out of the room and along the passage and all the way down to the library, where he must have sat back down in his chair to judge by the way she settled. And now I could see the shadow of him, for sure, but very faint and misty so that I couldn't have told you anything about him except he wasn't as big as I'd expected. And maybe he had a beard.

She'd got her head against his chest and she was still sobbing, but quieter now. I'd have liked to have just squeezed her hand or something, by way of saying goodbye, but I didn't want to come between them, so I turned out the light and went back up to the attics so I could be sure of being in bed before my grandmother came up to check on me.

Just to tidy up. In school the next day Mrs. Corcoran asked me what my grandmother had been on about in the post office. I mumbled and muddled until she got it into her head that I'd used the bit of copying I'd had to do as an excuse to get some reading in as well, instead of playing crib with my grandmother. After that I'd let on there was more copying I'd got to do so I could get off the crib most evenings and read my book instead. Mrs. Corcoran said I was a bad boy, lying like that, but I could see she wasn't that cross because she liked having a kid in her class who really wanted to read proper books. A couple of days later she gave me a note for my grandmother, who read it and put it away in her pocket, and next evening she fetched
Kings and Queens
off the shelf and gave it to me and said Mrs. Corcoran had told her something about a misunderstanding, but even so it wasn't all right because she still didn't think I'd been straight with her, but maybe it wasn't as bad as she'd thought so I could go back to reading, and if I was tired of playing crib with her then maybe some evenings I could read to her instead. (That was how I came to read
Jane Eyre
to her, like I told Mr. Glister.)

That was all right with me, but it meant that I wasn't likely to be going up past the bad patch on the stairs same time as Adalina might be, and anyway I didn't think Miss Tarrant would be staying on, so things would be different her time too. I didn't look around for her either, being pretty sure I wasn't going to see her again.

I put
Kings and Queens
back on the shelves in the West Passage, but next time I looked I found someone had moved a lot of the books around and it wasn't there anymore.

9. Me, Cyril Batson

Now, if you don't mind, we'll go back to me today, and me standing by the red baize door on the stairs at Theston, remembering about Adalina. And maybe you'll want to know why I didn't put all that in where it belongs in the story, after the bit about Miss van Deering finding me in the library, and before all the stuff about Mr. Glister and getting my own bookshop and so on. So I'll finish up with some explanations.

I'm not going to tell you I'd completely forgotten about Adalina all those years, the way you read about people completely forgetting horrible things that happened to them when they were kids, because they couldn't bear to live with themselves remembering. No, it would be truer to say I'd just stopped thinking about it, and if you stop thinking about something every now and then, then it begins to fade, if you know what I mean, and goes all misty and faint until maybe you lose it completely, until something happens that brings it into your mind, just a bit of it maybe, and you somehow can't get hold of the rest of it, or else you can tease it out from that one bit until you can see it all clear and think about it. That's what happened to me, going back to Theston. I'll come to that in a minute.