Island of the Aunts (4 page)

“Wow!” Fabio too was struck by the view. “What a place.”

Minette had gone over to the door. “Look, it isn’t locked!”

“I’m going out,” said the boy. “They don’t seem to have taken our clothes away. They’re crummy kidnappers.”

“Unless it’s all a trap.” She thought of the films she had seen—holes suddenly opening in the ground with man-eating piranhas or sharks. “Do you think they’ve kidnapped us to feed us to something?”

He shrugged. “You’d think they’d choose fatter children than us. Come on, get dressed. I’m going out.”

There was no one in the corridor; there was no one on the stairs.

Then, from behind a door across the hallway, they heard a scream, followed by a thump, and then a second scream. Someone in there was being tortured—and it sounded like a child.

Minette leant back against the wall, white-faced and trembling.

“Come on—quick!” Fabio clutched her arm.

The children ran out across the turf, over the dunes, along the perfect crescent of sand. The tide was out; it was a shell beach; there were Venus shells and cowries and green stones polished like emeralds. No one stopped them; there was no one to be seen. It would have been like Paradise except for that ghastly scream.

“Look,” said Fabio.

A group of seals had swum towards the shore and were looking at them, swimming in a semicircle, snorting and blowing…With their round heads they looked like a group of Russian dolls.

The children were silent, looking at the seals, and the seals stared back at them. Then suddenly they turned and swam back into the deep water.

All except one, a bull seal with white markings on the throat, who came close to the shore, and closer, till he was in the shallows with his flippers resting in the sand.

“It’s as if he’s trying to tell us something.”

“He’s got incredible eyes,” said Minette dreamily. “He doesn’t look like a seal at all. He looks as though inside he’s a person.”

“Well, seals are persons. Everything that’s alive is a person really.”

But that wasn’t what she’d meant.

They took off their shoes and walked on the firm wet sand between the tidemarks towards a cliff covered with nesting kittiwakes and puffins and terns. The tide was still going out, leaving behind its treasures: pieces of driftwood as smooth as velvet, crimson crab shells, bleached cuttlefish bones, whiter than snow. There was no sign of any ship. They might have been alone in the universe.

“What’s that noise?” asked Fabio, stopping suddenly.

A deep and mournful sound, a kind of honking, had come from somewhere inland.

“It must be a foghorn,” said Minette.

But there wasn’t any fog, nor any lighthouse to give warning if there had been.

They listened for a few moments but the sound did not come again, and they ran on along the shore. It was a marvellous island; it seemed to have everything. To their left was a green hill; two hills, actually, with a dip between, the slopes covered with bracken and gorse. The far shore would be wilder, exposed to the wind.

“If we climbed up there we could see exactly where we are. There might be other islands or a causeway. If we’re going to escape we’re going to have to know,” said Minette.

They had to get away—that terrible scream still rang in their ears—but Minette couldn’t help thinking of where she would be if she hadn’t been kidnapped. In her father’s dark sitting room trying to get interested in a book till he came back from the university.

Fabio seemed to be having the same sort of thoughts. “I can’t help wondering if my grandparents will pay the ransom for me. They’re horribly mean and they don’t like me.”

Minette tried to think if her parents liked her enough to pay a lot of money to get her back but when she thought about her parents her stomach always started to lurch about so she said, “There’s a little path there to the top of the hill.”

They began to run towards the gap in the dunes, forgetting the lives they had left behind, forgetting even that awful tortured scream. The wind was in their backs; it was like flying. No one could imagine anything dangerous or dark.

And then it happened! From behind the hummock of sand that had hidden them, there arose suddenly the cruel figures of two enormous women.

It was the evil aunts!

The sinister kidnappers glared at the children, and the children, terrified, stared back. Here was the tall bony aunt with her fierce eyes who had drugged Minette’s sandwich, and here was the plump mad person with her scarves flying in the wind who had given sleeping powders to a defenceless boy.

The children reached for each other’s hands. Minette was shaking so much she could hardly stand. What punishment would they be given for escaping from their room?

It was the tall bony aunt, Etta, who spoke. “You’re late for breakfast,” she said in her fierce and booming voice.

The children continued to stare.

“Breakfast,” the other one went on. “You’ve heard of that? We have it at seven and the cook gets ratty if he’s kept waiting. Go and wash your hands first—the bathroom’s at the top of the stairs.”

The children ran off, completely puzzled by this way of kidnapping people, and Etta and Coral followed. They were talking about Myrtle, who hadn’t stopped crying since she came back.

“She’s got to stop blaming herself,” said Coral. “Mistakes can happen to anyone.”

“Yes. Mind you, Lambert is quite a mistake!”

Breakfast was laid in the dining room, a big room with shabby leather chairs, which faced the patch of green turf and the bay. All the windows in the L-shaped farmhouse had at least a glimpse of the sea. Even the bathroom, with its huge claw-footed bath and ancient geyser, looked out on the ledge of rock where the seals hauled out of the water to rest.

“Porridge or cereal?” asked Aunt Etta, as the children came in.

Minette blinked at her. “Cereal,” she managed to say.

“Porridge,” said Fabio.

“Please,” said Etta briskly, picking up the ladle. “Porridge,
please.”

Fabio was the first to shake himself awake. “This is a very odd kidnap,” he said crossly. “And I won’t eat anything drugged.”

Aunt Etta leant forward, scooped a spoonful of porridge from his plate and gulped it down.

“Satisfied?” she said.

Fabio waited to see if she yawned or became dopey. Then he began to eat. The porridge was delicious.

They were both on second helpings when the screams began again. This time they were even worse than before and were followed by sobs and wails and a low shuddering moan. Then the door opened and a woman they had never seen before ran into the room. She had long, reddish-grey hair down her back; a bloody scratch ran along one cheek and she seemed to be quite beside herself.

The children shrank back in their chairs, their fear returning. The woman looked every inch a torturer.

“Really, Myrtle,” said Aunt Etta, “I’ve told the children they mustn’t be late for breakfast and now look at you.”

But no one could be cross with Myrtle for long, not even her bossy sister. The scratch on Myrtle’s cheek had begun to bleed again, there were tooth marks on her wrist, and though she took a helping of porridge she was quite unable to swallow it.

And when she was introduced to Minette and Fabio, her tears began to flow again.

“Yours are so nice,” she sobbed. “They look so intelligent and friendly.”

“That’s as maybe,” said Etta. “We haven’t tried them out yet.” She frowned as more bangs and thumps came from across the corridor. “He can’t stay in the broom cupboard, Myrtle. What would happen if he goes for the Hoover? We’d never get the place cleaned up again.”

“It’s just for now,” said Myrtle. “I gave him my bedroom when he first came round but I was afraid for the ducklings.”

Myrtle often had motherless ducklings keeping warm in her bed and her underclothes drawer.

“I suppose we shall have to
un
kidnap him,” said Coral. “But how? No one’s going to pay a ransom for Lambert Sprott.”

“We could offer to
give
his father some money if he’ll take Lambert away,” suggested Myrtle, blowing her nose.

“Don’t be silly, Myrtle,” said Etta. “For one thing we haven’t got any money—and for another he’d tell everyone about the Island and photographers would come, and journalists.” She shuddered. Keeping the position of the Island secret was the most important thing of all.

“We could turn him round and round till he was completely giddy and leave him in a telephone kiosk somewhere on the mainland,” said Coral. But she did not sound very convinced by her idea.

Myrtle began to sob again. “I should have left him on the floor,” she gulped. “I should never have brought him. But it seemed so cruel just to leave him there unconscious.”

“Hush. What’s done is done.”

But Myrtle couldn’t be consoled. “And my cello case smells of the awful child,” she wailed. “He puts terrible stuff on his hair.”

“Perhaps he’ll settle down when we’ve got some breakfast into him.”

Judging by the screams and thumps coming from across the corridor though, this did not seem likely.

But Fabio was getting impatient. “What about
us?
Are you going to unkidnap us?”

The aunts stared at him. “Are you mad?” said Etta. “After all the trouble we took. In any case, you haven’t been kidnapped exactly. You’ve been
chosen.”

Minette and Fabio stared. “How?” asked Minette.

“What do you mean?” enquired Fabio.

Aunt Coral put down her coffee cup. “It’s time we explained. But first you’d better come and meet Daddy. He gets upset when things are kept from him.”

Captain Harper was a hundred and three years old and spent most of the day in bed looking at the Island through his telescope.

He was very deaf and very grumpy and what he saw through the window didn’t please him. When he was young there had been far more geese coming from Greenland—hundreds and thousands of geese—and their feet had been yellower and their bottoms more feathery than the geese who came nowadays. The sheep had been fleecier when he was a boy and the flowers in the grass had been brighter and the seals on the rocks ten times larger and fatter.

“Huge, they were,” Captain Harper would say, throwing out his arms. “Great big cow seals with big bosoms and eyes like cartwheels, and look at them now!”

No one liked to say that it was probably because he couldn’t see or hear too well that things had changed, and when he told the same stories for the hundredth time, his daughters just smiled and tiptoed out of the room because they were fond of him and knew that being old is difficult.

“Here are the children, Father,” yelled Coral. “The ones that have come to stay with us.”

The old man put down his telescope and stared at them.

“They’re too small,” he said. “They won’t be a mite of use. You need ones with muscles. When I was their age I had muscles like footballs.”

He put out a skinny arm and flexed his biceps, and they could see a bump like a very small pea come up on his arm. “We were all strong in those days. There was a boy in my class who could lift the teacher’s desk with one hand. Freddie Boyle he was called. He was the one who put the grass snake down the teacher’s trouser leg.”

The aunts let him tell the story about the grass snake and the teacher’s trouser leg because it was a short one, but when he began on the one about Freddie Boyle’s brother, who’d run over his own false teeth in a milk float, they shepherded the children out quietly.

“He won’t notice,” they said.

When they went downstairs again they found Art, the cook, wiping porridge off his trouser leg. He had tried to give Lambert some breakfast and had it thrown in his face.

“Nasty little perisher you’ve got in there,” he said. “Best drown him, I’d say. Shouldn’t think his parents would want him back.”

Before he escaped and was washed up on the Island, Art had worked in the prison kitchens, which was why he made such good porridge. Because he’d killed a man once, Art didn’t like the sight of blood and it was always the aunts who had to chop the heads off the fish before they went into the frying pan or get the chickens ready for the pot. Another thing Art didn’t like to do was anything energetic.

“I don’t know my own strength,” he would say, when there was anything messy or difficult to be done. “I might forget myself and do someone an injury.”

This didn’t seem likely—Art was a skinny person who hardly came up to Aunt Etta’s shoulder—but he’d quickly locked the door on Lambert and, leaving him to scream for his mobile telephone, retreated to his kitchen.

But Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral now led the children into the garden behind the house. It was time to explain.

The garden was surrounded by grey walls to give shelter from the wind; but no walls on the Island were built so high that they shut out the view of the sea. Aunt Myrtle had gone down to play her cello to the seals. A bumblebee droned on a clump of thrift. It was very peaceful.

“Perhaps I’d better tell you a story,” said Etta. “It’s a true story and it begins with five girls coming to an island with their widowed father to look for a new life.

“They found a lovely and deserted place, but ruined, abandoned. All the people who had lived there had left long, long ago. Even the ghost in the old graveyard seemed to have gone away.”

Minette sat with her arms hugging her knees and her eyes closed. She loved stories.

“So the girls and their father repaired the house and planted a garden and learnt to fish and cut peat and do all the things the Islanders had done before they left. But of course the world outside was changing. Oil was spilled into the sea, and sewage, and trawlers started to use nets that caught even the smallest fish. The water became overheated by nuclear power stations. You’ll have learnt all that at school.”

Minette nodded, but Fabio only scowled. Absolutely
nothing
useful had been taught at Greymarsh Towers.

“Soon the sisters and their father found themselves looking after things that came ashore. Oiled seabirds…stunned seals…poisoned squids…And other things…”

Etta paused and looked up at Coral who raised her eyebrows in a warning way.
Not yet,
said Coral’s eyebrows.
Remember what we decided.