Wild Robert (3 page)

The teenagers were still there, romping about. Heather wondered how she could ever have thought Robert Toller was one of them. He stood out as quite different, now she saw them. Three of the
girls were up on the fallen statue throwing empty coke cans at the boys. Robert Toller stopped dead and stared at them. Heather looked at the black leather mini-skirts and the tall punk hairstyles and suddenly saw that they must seem outrageous to someone from three hundred and fifty years ago.

But it was not that. Robert Toller had gone white again. He said, “This I will not have! This temple was where my father met with my mother.” And he shouted at the teenagers, “Get you gone! Go riot in some other place!” They all looked round at him, a bit surprised. Then they laughed and went back to
pelting one another with cans. Robert Toller’s face bunched up. His lower lip stuck out. He looked exactly like a very small boy who was just about to burst into tears, but Heather was fairly sure he was very angry. He spread one hand out palm down in front of him, and muttered something under his breath. Then he tipped his hand slowly sideways. “Go riot, then, until I bid all stop,” he said.

Heather felt as if something tipped with Robert’s hand. It was as if the part of the world that was ordinary and possible went slanting away sideways in a thin sheet. One edge of the thin sheet went upwards, and the other sloped down through the harder, stranger part of the world that was always underneath, leaving that part bare. Heather actually saw the grey edge tip and travel across the sunny grass and the white stone pillars and the laughing girls and boys. For a moment, she was sure she was standing out sideways, somehow, on the slice of ordinariness. Then she found she was on the deeper bit after all.

And, as the grey edge passed across the teenagers, each of them changed. The boys lost their shirts and jackets and grew brown fur instead of trousers. The girls grew tousled long hair and even more tousled long dresses, with ivy leaves wound round them. The cans they were holding became metal goblets. All of them shouted at once:

“IO!”

After that the girls screamed and ran and the boys ran after them on twinkling little hooves. Before Heather had come out of standing sideways, they were chasing madly through the wood, crying out to one another in a strange language.

As their screams and shouts faded into the distance, Robert Toller turned to Heather with a pleased smile, like a small boy who has got his own way. “There. Now you know I can indeed use the magic art,” he said. “Those will romp until sundown releases them.”

“Yes, but—” said Heather. She wanted to say all sorts of things, but all she could manage was, “Why did you do
that?
”

Robert seemed surprised. “I told you,” he said. “This temple was where my father used to meet in secret with my mother, in the days before they were married. See, I will show you.” He strode across the beautifully mown grass, past the fallen statue, to where the slender white pillars gathered into a shape that was almost like a house. There was a block of stone there, embedded in the turf, which looked as if it had once been part of a roof above the pillars. Maybe it had once had carvings on it. At any rate, Heather could see some sort of pattern on the side of it, worn with age and covered with green mildew.

“See,” Robert said, and smoothed his hand across the old worn shapes.

It was as if his hand brought the stone into focus. It became clear and white and new. The carving was a sort of figure-eight shape that looked as if it was intended to be a piece of rope with a capital letter carved on either side of it. The letter on the left was a large plain F. The one on the right was a curlier E.

“They carved their initials here,” Robert said, “together with a true-love knot. Francis was my father’s name. My mother was called Eglantine.”

He was looking beyond the stone into the square of green turf enclosed by the white pillars. Heather looked there too and, just for an instant, it seemed to her that there were two people there, walking gladly towards one another as if they had not seen each other for a very long time. The man was taller and burlier than Robert, though his hair was the same colour. The woman was small – tiny – and she
seemed all floating: floating hair, floating clothes. Heather only saw them for the length of time it took them each to stretch an arm out to the other. Then she was not sure she had seen them at all. She looked at Robert to ask him, but he had turned away, smiling fiercely, and the stone was blurred and green again.

“Let us sit on this stone,” he said. “There are savoury smells from that bag you carry that remind me I have not eaten for more than three centuries.”

“It’s only tuna fish,” said Heather.

R
obert Toller seemed so hungry that Heather took one sandwich herself and let him have all the rest. He kept saying it was the best food he had ever eaten – which made Heather feel a bit silly, because it
was
only tuna fish, after all. While he was wolfing the sandwiches down, Heather kept hearing distant shouts and yells from the teenagers in the wood. She told herself that they had deserved what happened to them, but this did not stop her feeling quite uncomfortable about it. She decided she liked Robert, and she knew she was sorry for him, waking up to find so much time had passed, but she was still uncomfortable.

To take her mind off it, she said, “People in the village say there was some treasure buried with you.”

That was an unwise thing to say. Robert gave her a sideways look. “They still say that, do they?” Heather could tell he had gone very cautious. She tried to say that it was just something she had
heard
, and not important, but he interrupted her with a
laugh. It was the hurt laugh again, Heather saw. “And who am I to say what men will call a treasure?” he said. Then he jumped up briskly and said, “Eating fish is dry work. I could do with some fruit.”

“There are strawberries and redcurrants ripe in the kitchen garden,” Heather said, “but they’re supposed to be for sale. I don’t think Mr McManus will let us have any.”

“McManus?” Robert said. “That was a name you said when you called me up. What right has he to sell fruit from Castlemaine?”

“He’s the gardener,” Heather explained. “The
money from the fruit helps pay for the house.”

“I see,” said Robert. He said it very grimly, as if Heather had explained something quite different. Before she could say any more, he was striding to the door in the walled garden.

She caught up when Robert stopped, right in the middle, staring round at the rose arches, and the rose bushes, and the roses trained up the walls. “What is this?” he said. “Not a herb in sight! It is all roses!”

Heather understood how strange things must be to him. She said kindly, “Dad told me they made this into a rose garden about a hundred years ago. The kitchen garden’s through that door in the wall over there.”

“Then it has changed about,” Robert said. “The roses used to be through there.” He strode towards the door. On the way to it he passed several pairs of the usual elderly people. Heather was afraid he was going to ask them what they were doing there, but he walked straight past them, giving each pair a cool nod, as if in his day you expected to see people about. The elderly people stared a bit, but they nodded back politely. All the same, Heather was relieved when they reached the kitchen garden and went through the door marked NO ADMITTANCE TO THE PUBLIC.

“Ah!” said Robert Toller.

The strawberry beds stretched right across the garden, with lines of currant bushes on either side. They were neatly spread with straw. Giant red berries gleamed on the straw, under the leaves and crowns of white flowers. Robert crunched out into the straw and began picking strawberries as fast as he could go. “I do not remember strawberries so big!” he remarked to Heather over his shoulder. And when Heather had, rather timidly, crunched out to join him, he added with his mouth full, “Time was when I thought I would never taste one again.”

Mr McManus had an instinct about people picking fruit. Heather had just picked her first
strawberry when Mr McManus crashed out from the left-hand line of currant bushes with a roar. “Get out of that! You leave those berries alone, you, or I’ll have you arrested for stealing!”