Witch Week (6 page)

While everyone else was writing the same sort of things, there were four people in the class who were writing something quite different.

Nirupam wrote,
Today, no comment. I shall not even think about high table.

Brian Wentworth, oblivious to everything, scribbled down how he would get from Timbuktu to Uttar Pradesh by bus, allowing time for roadworks on Sundays.

Nan sat for a considerable while wondering what to write. She wanted desperately to get some of today off her chest, but she could not at first think how to do it without saying something personal. At last she wrote, in burning indignation,
I do not know if 6B is average or not, but this is how they are. They are divided into girls and boys with an invisible line down the middle of the room and people only cross that line when teachers make them. Girls are divided into real girls (Theresa Mullett) and imitations (Estelle Green). And me. Boys are divided into real boys (Simon Silverson), brutes (Daniel Smith), and unreal boys (Nirupam Singh). And Charles Morgan. And Brian Wentworth. What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan. They are
allowed to cross the invisible line to prove this. Everyone is allowed to cross the invisible line to be nasty to Brian Wentworth.

Nan paused here. Up to then she had been writing almost as if she was possessed the way she had been at lunch. Now she had to think about Brian Wentworth. What was it about Brian that put him below even her?
Some of Brian’s trouble,
she wrote,
is that Mr. Wentworth is his father, and he is small and perky and irritating with it. Another part is that Brian is really good at things and comes top in most things, and he ought to be the real boy, not Simon. But SS is so certain he is the real boy that he has managed to convince Brian too.
That, Nan thought, was still not quite it, but it was as near as she could get. The rest of her description of 6B struck her as masterly. She was so pleased with it that she almost forgot she was miserable.

Charles wrote,
I got up, I got up, I GOT UP.
That made it look as if he had sprung eagerly out of bed, which was certainly not the case, but he had so hated today that he had to work it off somehow.
My running shoes got buried in cornflakes. I felt very hot running around the field and on top of that I had lunch on high table. I do not like rice pudding. We have had games with Miss Hodge and rice pudding and there are still about a hundred years of today to go.
And that, he thought, about summed it up.

When the bell rang, Mr. Crossley hurried to pick up the books he had been marking in order to get to the staff room before Miss Hodge left it. And stared. There was another note under the pile of books. It was written in the same capitals and the same blue ballpoint as the first note. It said:
HA HA. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO TELL YOU. DIDN’T YOU?

Now what do I do? wondered Mr. Crossley.

A
T THE END OF LESSONS
, there was the usual stampede to be elsewhere. Theresa and her friends, Delia, Heather, Deborah, Julia, and the rest, raced to the lower school girls’ playroom to grab the radiators there, so that they could sit on them and knit. Estelle and Karen hurried to get the chillier radiators in the corridor, and sat on them to cast on their stitches. Simon led his friends to the labs, where they added to Simon’s collection of honor marks by helping tidy up. Dan Smith left his friends to play football without him, because he had business in the shrubbery, watching the senior boys meeting their senior girl friends there. Charles crawled reluctantly to the locker room to look for his running shoes again. Nan went, equally reluctantly, up to Mr. Wentworth’s study.

There was someone else in with Mr. Wentworth when she got there. She could hear voices and see two misty shapes through the wobbly glass in the door. Nan did not mind. The longer the interview was put off the better. So she hung about in the passage for nearly twenty minutes, until a passing monitor asked her what she was doing there.

“Waiting to see Mr. Wentworth,” Nan said. Then, of course, in order to prove it to the monitor, she was forced to knock at the door.

“Come in!” bawled Mr. Wentworth.

The monitor, placated, passed on down the passage. Nan put out her hand to open the door, but, before she could, it was pulled open by Mr. Wentworth himself and Mr. Crossley came out, rather red and laughing sheepishly.

“I still swear it wasn’t there when I put the books down,” he said.

“Ah, but you know you didn’t look, Harold,” Mr. Wentworth said. “Our practical joker relied on your not looking. Forget it, Harold. So there you are, Nan. Did you lose your way here? Come on in. Mr. Crossley’s just going.”

He went back to his desk and sat down. Mr. Crossley hovered for a moment, still rather red, and then hurried away downstairs, leaving Nan to shut the door. As she did so, she noticed that Mr. Wentworth was staring at three pieces of paper on his desk as if he thought they might bite him. She saw that one was in Miss Hodge’s writing and that the other two were scraps of paper with blue capital letters on them, but she was much too worried on her own account to bother about pieces of writing.

“Explain your behavior at high table,” Mr. Wentworth said to her.

Since there really was no explanation that Nan could see, she said, in a miserable whisper, “I can’t, sir,” and looked down at the parquet floor.

“Can’t?” said Mr. Wentworth. “You put Lord Mulke off his lunch for no reason at all! Tell me another. Explain yourself.”

Miserably, Nan fitted one of her feet exactly into one of the parquet oblongs in the floor. “I don’t know, sir. I just said it.”

“You don’t know, you just said it,” said Mr. Wentworth. “Do you mean by that that you found yourself speaking without knowing you were?”

This was meant to be sarcasm, Nan knew. But it seemed to be true as well. Carefully, she fitted her other shoe into the parquet block which slanted towards her first foot, and stood unsteadily, toe to toe, while she wondered how to explain. “I didn’t know what I was going to say next, sir.”

“Why not?” demanded Mr. Wentworth.

“I don’t know,” Nan said. “It was like—like being possessed.”

“Possessed!”
shouted Mr. Wentworth. It was the way he shouted just before he suddenly threw chalk at people. Nan went backward to avoid the chalk which came next. But she forgot that her feet were pointing inward and sat down heavily on the floor. From there, she could see Mr. Wentworth’s surprised face, peering at her over the top of his desk. “What did that?” he said.

“Please don’t throw chalk at me!” Nan said.

At that moment, there was a knock at the door and Brian Wentworth put his head around it into the room. “Are you free yet, Dad?”

“No,” said Mr. Wentworth.

Both of them looked at Nan sitting on the floor. “What’s she doing?” Brian asked.

“She says she’s possessed. Go away and come back in ten minutes,” Mr. Wentworth said. “Get up, Nan.”

Brian obediently shut the door and went away. Nan struggled to her feet. It was almost as difficult as climbing a rope. She wondered a little how it felt to be Brian, with your father one of the teachers, but mostly she wondered what Mr. Wentworth was going to do to her. He had on his most harrowed, worried look, and he was staring again at the three papers on his desk.

“So you think you’re possessed?” he said.

“Oh no,” Nan said. “All I meant was it was
like
it. I knew I was going to do something awful before I started, but I didn’t know what until I started describing the food. Then I tried to stop and I couldn’t somehow.”

“Do you often get taken that way?” Mr. Wentworth asked.

Nan was about to answer indignantly No, when she realized that she had gone for Brian with the witch’s broom in exactly the same way straight after lunch. And many and many a time, she had impulsively written things in her journal. She fitted her shoe into a parquet block again, and hastily took it away. “Sometimes,” she said, in a low, guilty mutter. “I do sometimes—when I’m angry with people—I write what I think in my journal.”

“And do you write notes to teachers too?” asked Mr. Wentworth.

“Of course not,” said Nan. “What would be the point?”

“But someone in 6B has written Mr. Crossley a note,” said Mr. Wentworth. “It accused someone in the class of being a witch.”

The serious, worried way he said it made Nan understand at last. So that was why Mr. Crossley had talked like that and then been to see Mr. Wentworth. And they thought Nan had written the note. “The unfairness!” she burst out. “How
can
they think I wrote the note
and
call me a witch too! Just because my name’s Dulcinea!”

“You could be diverting suspicion from yourself,” Mr. Wentworth pointed out. “If I asked you straight out—”

“I am
not
a witch!” said Nan. “And I didn’t write that note. I bet that was Theresa Mullett or Simon Silverson. They’re both born accusers! Or Daniel Smith,” she added.

“Now, I wouldn’t have picked on Dan,” Mr. Wentworth said. “I wasn’t aware he could write.”

The sarcastic way he said that showed Nan that she ought not to have mentioned Theresa or Simon. Like everyone else, Mr. Wentworth thought of them as the real girl and the real boy. “Someone accused
me,
” she said bitterly.

“Well, I’ll take your word for it that you didn’t write the note,” Mr. Wentworth said. “And next time you feel a possession coming on, take a deep breath and count up to ten, or you may be in serious trouble. You have a very unfortunate name, you see. You’ll have to be very careful in future. How did you come to be called Dulcinea? Were you called after the Archwitch?”

“Yes,” Nan admitted. “I’m descended from her.”

Mr. Wentworth whistled. “And you’re a witch-orphan too, aren’t you? I shouldn’t let anyone else know that, if I were you. I happen to admire Dulcinea Wilkes for trying to stop witches being persecuted, but very few other people do. Keep your mouth shut, Nan—and don’t ever describe food in front of Lord Mulke again either. Off you go now.”

Nan fumbled her way out of the study and plunged down the stairs. Her eyes were so fuzzy with indignation that she could hardly see where she was going. “What does he take me for?” she muttered to herself as she went. “I’d rather admit to being descended from—from Attila the Hun or—or Guy Fawkes. Or anyone.”

It was around that time that Mr. Towers, who had stood over Charles while Charles hunted unavailingly for his running shoes in the boys’ locker room, finally smothered a long yawn and left Charles to go on looking by himself. “Bring them to me in the staff room when you’ve found them,” he said.

Charles sat down on a bench, alone among gray lockers and green walls. He glowered at the slimy gray floor and the three odd football boots that always lay in one corner. He looked at nameless garments withering on pegs. He sniffed the smell of sweat and old socks. “I hate everything,” he said. He had searched everywhere. Dan Smith had found a really cunning place for those shoes. The only way Charles was going to find them was by Dan telling him where they were.

Charles ground his teeth and stood up. “All right. Then I’ll ask him,” he said. Like everyone else, he knew Dan was in the shrubbery spying on seniors. Dan made no secret of it. He had got his uncle to send him a pair of binoculars so that he could get a really close view. And the shrubbery was only around the corner from the locker room. Charles thought he could risk going there, even if Mr. Towers suddenly came back. The real risk was from the seniors in the shrubbery. There was an invisible line around the shrubbery, just like the one Nan had described between the boys and the girls in 6B. Anyone younger than a senior who got found in the shrubbery could be most thoroughly beaten up by the senior who found them. Still, Charles thought, as he set off, Dan was not a senior either. That should help.

The shrubbery was a messy tangle of huge evergreen bushes, with wet grass in between. Charles’s almost-dry shoes were soaked again before he found Dan. He found him quite quickly. Since it was a cold evening and the grass was so wet, there were only two pairs of seniors there, and they were all in the most trodden part, on either side of a mighty laurel bush. Ah! thought Charles. He crept to the laurel bush and pushed his face in among the wet and shiny leaves. Dan was there, among the dry branches inside.

“Dan!” whispered Charles.

Dan took his binoculars from his eyes with a jerk and whirled around. When he saw Charles’s face leaning in among the leaves at him, beaming its nastiest double-barreled glare, he seemed almost relieved. “Pig off!” he whispered. “Magic out of here!”

“What have you done with my spikes?” said Charles.

“Whisper, can’t you?” Dan whispered. He peered nervously through the leaves at the nearest pair of seniors. Charles could see them too. They were a tall, thin boy and a very fat girl—much fatter than Nan Pilgrim—and they did not seem to have heard anything. Charles could see the thin boy’s fingers digging into the girl’s fat where his arm was around her. He wondered how anyone could enjoy grabbing, or watching, such fatness.