Time to Say Goodbye (12 page)

She stopped by the mighty beech, the roots of which spread out to form exciting black pools, and looked upward. The branches did not even begin until ten or twelve feet above the ground, but each one was as thick as a man’s thigh and so well leafed that when she sat with her back against the trunk and tilted her face right up she could not see the brilliant blue of the sky. With a sigh of satisfaction she settled herself comfortably and began to open her satchel, whereupon Rufus, edging close, gave the little purr of satisfaction with which he greeted the hope of a snack for himself. Indeed, past experience told him that whatever food there was would be shared, though the water which had gathered in the roots of the beech would be his alone, since he had no taste for lemonade.

Leaning comfortably against the bole of the tree, Imogen undid the greaseproof paper in which the sandwiches were wrapped and examined the contents: lettuce and tomato and cheese and pickle, her favourites. She had just begun to divide the first sandwich – a cheese and pickle one – between herself and Rufus when a voice interrupted her. ‘Imogen, Imogen,’ it called softly. ‘I know you’re there, Imogen. I can see you; can you see me?’

Imogen was so frightened that the whole sandwich, only partly severed, fell from her hand on to the mossy ground, and Rufus, misunderstanding, ate it before she could move a muscle. But the voice had scared her so much that she could not have eaten the sandwich even had Rufus not already done so. She looked round wildly, but could see no one. Could it be Rita, playing a trick on her? The gentle Debby never played tricks on anyone, but in any case the voice belonged to neither of them. She knew it wasn’t Jill or Auntie, but supposed it could be someone from the village school, for who else would know her name? But the voice was speaking again, and this time in a sort of chuckling half-whisper.

‘Imogen, do you believe in fairies? I’m sure you do. I expect you’d like to come and see fairyland with me, but there’s a price you have to pay to the Lordly Ones. You must put your sandwiches and your lemonade on the other side of my tree and then walk away, out of the wood. You must count to ten and return to this very tree – no other will do – and as you get nearer you will find yourself shrinking and shrinking until you’re small enough to come into fairyland with me.’

Imogen looked very carefully all around her and then, with considerable caution, looked up. It was a hot and windless day, yet the leaves of the biggest branch above her head were vibrating ever so slightly. Imogen frowned. What sort of person could climb up that ice-smooth trunk to gain the first mighty branch? But then she thought she saw a tiny, tiny movement as though someone lying on the branch shifted to get her into focus, so when she spoke at last her voice was firm. ‘I dunno who you are or how the devil you gorrup that tree, ’cos the trunk is smooth as glass,’ she said, with only the slightest tremble in her voice. ‘But I
don’t
believe in fairies, or in fairyland. I reckon you’re just some kid from the village what fancies lettuce and tomato sandwiches and fizzy lemonade. Well, you can forget stuffin’ yourself wi’ my grub, you cunnin’ little weasel, and bugger off!’ She had deliberately used the tone and words which she had often heard in the courts of Liverpool, though she could not have said why.

And the voice which answered her immediately took up the same accent. ‘If you ain’t a-goin’ to obey me fairy command then I’ll bleedin’ well strike you deaf and dumb,’ it said indignantly. ‘Aw, c’mon, gairl, I’m fair clemmed; gi’s a sangwidge.’

All fear banished by the well-remembered Scouse accent, Imogan giggled and looked up. A narrow, weaselly face looked down at her through the delicate green of the beech leaves. It had eyebrows which slanted up at the corners and gleaming hazel eyes, and its dark hair grew in a widow’s peak on its forehead, increasing the devilish look. As she watched, the boy – for it was definitely a boy – gave a reluctant grin, revealing very white pointed teeth. ‘If I come down will you set your dog on me?’ he asked, then added with a chuckle, ‘But he don’t look much like a ravening wolf from up here, so I guess I might as well come down.’ The grin widened. ‘Course, if you’ll close your eyes I’ll fly down, provin’ I really am one of the fairy folk.’

Imogen snorted. ‘Fairy folk?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You’re pretty bloody substantial for one of them. And anyhow, I want to see how you got up there and I shan’t see that with me eyes shut!’

The boy sighed. ‘Well don’t go telling anyone else, ’cos I’ve not let on to a soul,’ he said. And Imogen was not much surprised when a good length of knotted rope came whistling past her ear and landed with a thump on the ground. It was easy, now, to see how the boy had got up there. He must have thrown the rope over the lowest branch, pulled it until the ends hung evenly and then shinned up it. He had then pulled the rope up and stowed it amongst the leafy foliage whilst presumably climbing even higher up the tree in a more conventional fashion, and indeed, when he presently came down the rope with all the ease of long practice, he admitted that she had got it right.

‘Most of these beeches are the same: no hand-or foothold for ten or fifteen feet, but then you can go up almost like ascending a staircase,’ he assured her. ‘And the view from the top . . .’ He whistled softly beneath his breath. ‘I’m telling you, it’s bleeding fantastic. Apart from the woods and copses and that – and this beech wood in particular – the ground’s pretty flat. Well, it would have to be, else they wouldn’t have put an airfield here, would they? So once you’re right at the top of this tree you can even see the planes and that: runways, huts, everything. It looks like one of those models you see in the Boy’s Own annual. I’ve made a sort of lookout ’cos I thought if everyone’s right and the Germans do plan an invasion, then I’ll get me a gun and some ammo and lay on the platform picking off the Nazis one by one.’

Imogen gave him a long, hard look. He was taller than she by several inches and thin but wiry. He was wearing a patched grey shirt and grey shorts, grey knee socks both of which had descended to his ankles, and the scruffiest pair of plimsolls she had ever seen. From below she had registered that his hair was dark and curly but now she realised that it was also cropped exceedingly short; a convict cut, her mother would have called it. He had a narrow face in which those peculiar eyebrows were the most striking feature, but now she saw that, far from being weaselly, his face lit with humour when he grinned and his slanting eyes smiled at her with a good deal of understanding.

‘Know me again?’ he asked. ‘Remember me from . . . oh, earlier times?’ His hand, which was extremely dirty, hovered over the sandwiches. ‘Going to give me one?’ he asked, though his fingers had already closed on the next cheese and pickle. ‘Oh go on, give us one!’

‘What would you say if I said no? Or rather, what would you do?’ Imogen said. ‘Yes, all right, we’ll share, only I’ll do the sharing ’cos your hands are filthy.’

‘Filthy? That they ain’t,’ the boy said indignantly. ‘Well, if they’re a bit black it’s ’cos I’ve been tree climbing, but they were dead clean when I left home this morning.’

Imogen chuckled. ‘Fair enough. And we’ll have to drink out of the same bottle ’cos I’ve only got the one.’ She put a protective hand across the neck of it. ‘And not one swig of this will you get until you tell me who you are, and why I don’t know you. I’m Imogen Clarke and I live at the Canary and Linnet – so c’mon, who are you and how do you know my name?’

‘I’m Winston Churchill,’ the boy began, then laughed and dodged as Imogen aimed a punch at him. ‘All right, all right, I’m an evacuee like you and commonly known as Woody. Your name’s unusual; I heard someone calling out to you in the village when I was last there. Most of my school live at Hemblington Hall, but Josh and meself were two of the lucky ones. There wasn’t room for everybody at the Hall, so Josh and myself were sent to Pilgrim Farm. It’s grand up there: no teachers, no one nagging us. How about you? What’s this Canary and Linnet you mentioned? Are there lots of you there, or are you the only one?’

‘Oh, there are three of us, all girls,’ Imogen said. She passed him the lemonade bottle and a sandwich. ‘I remember Auntie telling me that Hemblington Hall had been taken over by a school, and that Mrs Pilgrim had taken two of the boys. And they were talking about it in the post office once when I was queuing for a stamp so that I could send a letter home. Young Mrs Bonner was saying that the Hall was now a prep school – what’s a prep school? – and she had a job there helping Mrs Catchpole in the kitchen. Apparently Mrs Catchpole used to cook for the squire when he lived at the hall.’ She stared at him thoughtfully. ‘So why didn’t Mrs Pilgrim give you a packed lunch? It’s Saturday, so I reckon you’ll have the day off, same as me.’

The boy swallowed a mouthful of sandwich before he replied. ‘A prep school means they only take boys up to the age of thirteen; after that you go on to the big school, which is for boys from thirteen to eighteen. As for a packed lunch, I could have asked Mrs P for some food but there was a big bustle on at the farm when I left. The men were driving the cattle down to the market – my pal Josh has gone with them – and I knew if I asked for grub they’d expect me to give a hand, so I kept shtum and slipped out when no one was looking.’ He cocked one of his strange slanted eyebrows. ‘Satisfied?’

‘Ye-es,’ Imogen said after a thoughtful pause. ‘So the reason I don’t know you is because you aren’t at the village school. But surely you must leave Pilgrim Farm at around the same time as we leave the Canary and Linnet – it’s a pub, by the way – so why haven’t we met before?’

‘Because we only came to Hemblington Hall a couple of weeks ago,’ Woody explained patiently, ‘and we’ve been helping to bring the hay in. Did you say you were living in a pub?’

‘That’s right. But I don’t really understand why there wasn’t room for all of you at the Hall. I mean, I could understand if ten or a dozen of you had to go somewhere else, but surely they could squeeze in two?’

The boy grinned his odd, saturnine grin, and reached for another sandwich. ‘The Hall isn’t that huge, you know. By the time they had turned the ground floor into classrooms, offices and so on, and the bedrooms into dormitories, it was pretty cramped. They asked for volunteers to live out and I can tell you my hand shot up at once. There are six of us – four above the feed merchant’s in town, and Josh and I at the Pilgrims’. They’ve promised to get us bicycles so we can cycle to and fro, but I bet they don’t succeed; bikes are already like gold dust, and anyway we enjoy the walk.’

Imogen snorted. ‘It’s plain you weren’t here in the winter,’ she said. ‘We were cut off from the village for weeks, and most of the time we couldn’t even get out of doors because of the blizzards. If we have another winter like the last one you wouldn’t be able to cycle even if they did provide you with bikes.’

Woody’s eyes lit up. ‘No school for weeks,’ he said reverently. ‘I shall pray for snow.’

‘Oh, will you?’ Imogen said mockingly. ‘But suppose the snow starts when you’re in school, and you can’t get back to Pilgrim’s, bike or no bike? How would you like that? And snow in the country isn’t like snow in the cities . . .’

But the boy interrupted. ‘Don’t you worry your head about me and Josh,’ he said. ‘At the first sign of a flake we’d tell whichever master was in charge that we mustn’t be late for tea at Pilgrim Farm. They’re so keen to keep on the right side of the folk who’ve taken us in that they’d probably let us go hours before it was necessary. Still, it probably won’t happen. It would be just my luck for next winter to be as mild as summer.’

Imogen giggled. ‘Well, time will tell,’ she said. ‘You don’t have a wristwatch, do you? Only I’m supposed to be home by half past five, and it took me the best part of an hour to get this far, so I suppose I ought get moving.’ She stood up, brushed crumbs from her skirt and slipped a hand through Rufus’s collar. ‘Come on, old feller, we can’t sit here chatting all day.’

Woody scrambled to his feet as Imogen began to put the sandwich wrappings and the empty bottle back into her satchel. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he protested. ‘Aren’t you going to climb up to my lookout? I told you the view was tremendous, but you don’t have to take my word for it; you can see it for yourself.’

Imogen looked up and up and up to the very top of the tree, where the sun glinted on the topmost branches. Just looking up at it made her feel dizzy, and she hastily lowered her gaze to the dangling rope. ‘No thanks,’ she said firmly. ‘Rufus needs a longer walk, and if I get a move on we might actually reach the airfield – and don’t worry, I know better than to get near the perimeter fence. You might think I don’t look much like a spy, but if the guards are the sort of men who believe in nuns floating down from the sky they might believe that wandering schoolgirls are spies as well.’

‘It’s a fair way; you’ll be late for your tea,’ Woody said warningly. ‘I know what it is, you’re scared I’ll see your knickers when you start to climb. Suppose I promise to keep my eyes averted; would you go up then? Or are you a real little ninny, scared of heights and no good at climbing anyhow?’

Imogen realised that Woody’s invitation amounted to a dare, so she sighed and stood up. If she refused to climb the tree her reputation would rapidly sink to a low from which it might never recover. But she had one last card to play. ‘I don’t mind the climb, because it will prove that I’m as good as you any day of the week,’ she said, ‘but it’s Rufus. He’ll get terribly upset if I go somewhere he can’t follow. Auntie only allows me to go out alone if I’m with him, you see.’

Woody gave her a thoroughly evil grin and put an arm round Rufus’s shaggy neck. ‘I’ll stay with your diddums dog and reassure him if he gets scared,’ he said mockingly. ‘I had meant to climb with you, show you the best footholds, but we wouldn’t want Rufus to try to follow you up the rope, would we? So I’ll stay down here while you go up that tree as fast as a monkey on a stick.’

Imogen grasped the rope, cast a malevolent glance at Woody and began to climb. She reached the first wide branch and grabbed the one above. By concentrating fiercely on her hands and feet and trying to ignore the increasingly enormous drop below her, she got halfway up the tree, then wedged herself into a fork to consider her next move, for she knew that when it came to descending she would be unable to ignore her dizzying distance from the ground. She considered staying where she was for a further five or ten minutes and then going down and saying how she admired the view, but this plan was foiled when Woody’s head suddenly appeared below her, a taunting grin on his face.