Aunt Maria (24 page)

It sounded utterly sane. It looked as if Mum had accidentally said the right thing. She went on being accidentally helpful, too, because she really was puzzled. Mr. Phelps fetched food to the dining room we turned out to be in. All the time I was eating my share as hungrily as Chris, Mum was asking about time travel and Antony Green was telling her, quite clearly and sanely. But he couldn't eat much.

“My stomach's shrunk,” he said. “It was bound to, I suppose.”

Miss Phelps came shuffling in and shook hands shyly with him. “I'm pleased to see you back,” she said. “But I can't stay long. Margaret and her mother will be back shortly.”

“But we're here!” said Mum. She was hopeless.

After that Mr. Phelps took Antony Green upstairs to have a bath. The bathroom was over the dining room. We could hear tremendous splashing, mixed with a lot of loud, unhappy laughter and Mr. Phelps barking orders that weren't listened to.

“He's gone dotty again,” I said.

The doorbell rang. We heard Miss Phelps shuffling to answer it. Now I knew why Miss Phelps said, “Ah, I thought you'd be back.” I didn't know I sounded so wimpish. Then our earlier footsteps went into the living room. Shortly mine came racing out again, and my wimpish voice yowled, “Mr. Ph—elps!” All this while there were such splashings and yellings from the bathroom that I couldn't understand how we hadn't heard them the first time we were there.

As soon as Mr. Phelps came downstairs, Mum dived for the door. “I don't think he should be left alone,” she said. She raced upstairs and I raced after her, whispering, “Mum! Mum, it's not our house!” and trying to make her stop.

Actually, Antony Green was quite all right. He was sitting up to his neck in bubble bath with his beard trailing in the foam, building the bubbles into shapes. When we came in, he gave us his long grin, put out a skinny arm, and touched the nearest pile of bubbles. All the piles of foam took on faint, misty color. You could suddenly see they were hills and fields, with castles on the hills and clusters of little houses in the dips. It was like when you see landscapes in your bedclothes.

Mum said, “Good heavens! That's beautiful.”

I said, “You ought to come out now. You've gone all wrinkly.”

Then Mr. Phelps came back, and he was terribly shocked to find us in the bathroom. He made us go out onto the landing and shut the bathroom door. Then he began barking orders again.

“I wish he'd stop. That's not the way to manage him,” Mum said, leaning her ear to the door. “I wish he'd let me.”

“I don't think people should manage people at
all
,” I said.

“Yes, but he's treating him like a
child
!” Mum said, not listening.

I leaned gloomily on the banister, wondering how I would ever get Chris turned back to a boy now that Antony Green was mad, until Mr. Phelps threw open the bathroom door and said, “Do either of you cut hair? He won't let me touch it.”

“We could try,” Mum said.

Antony Green was sitting on a cork-topped stool looking halfway normal. His body was in neat fawn trousers and sweater, but his head looked like a shipwrecked pirate's. He was staring at himself in the bathroom mirror. “Raggedy Andy,” he said.

“Robinson Crusoe,” I said.

“Do you want to stay like that?” Mum said.

He gave us a long, wondering grin. “I
am
like that,” he said. “Can I change?”

“You changed yourself while you were dancing round Cranbury,” I said.

“Hush, child,” said Mr. Phelps. He kept trying to stop me talking about things like that. He said, “Hush!” every time I mentioned the mound or any of the mad things Antony Green had done, but Antony Green didn't mind, and Mum didn't try to stop me.

“I could cut the beard off,” he said, looking in the mirror.

“I wish you would,” I said. ”It looks awful.”

“And my hair?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Mum and I.

“Then could you find some scissors, Nat?” Antony Green asked. Mr. Phelps looked at the ceiling and took a pair of scissors out of his dressing-gown pocket. He held them toward Mum, but Mum waved to him to give them to Antony Green. Mr. Phelps raised his eyebrows, but he put the scissors into Antony Green's pale, withered hand. Antony Green looked at the scissors uncertainly for a moment, then he said, “I'd be grateful for a bit of help, really.”

So Mum cut his hair and his beard. He looked quite a bit better like that. I think his hair was sort of bleached by the earth, because it was much darker near the roots. Or maybe he turned it darker. When it was done, he looked at himself again and said he ought to shave the beard right off. So we all pothered around for Mr. Phelps's shaving things. In the midst of the pother, I began to suspect we had simply swapped looking after Aunt Maria for looking after Antony Green.

“Don't be unfair, Mig!” Mum said. “It's not a bit the same. You can't expect someone who's been buried alive to get over it in half a day!”

“I don't suppose he ever will,” I said. “And how are we
ever
going to get Chris back now?”

We were unwisely whispering this in the bathroom doorway. While I was saying that, we both realized that Antony Green must have heard. He was staring at us with the razor poised and half his face covered with white cream. We stared back guiltily.

“The two black cats!” Antony Green said. “I knew I'd seen you somewhere else before that dream! You were trying to warn me, weren't you?”

I said, “Yes. And we sent you into the mound by tripping you up.” Mr. Phelps was bustling jerkily about, picking up every bit of Antony Green's hair in a ritualistic kind of way, and he of course began shushing me. But I took no notice and said, “Would you have stayed out and realized about Naomi, if we hadn't done that?”

“No, I don't think so,” Antony Green said. “There's no need to feel guilty about it.” He turned back to the mirror and began shaving himself again. He said the rest in jerks, while he was dipping the razor in water or twisting his face sideways to see if he had got all the beard off the sides. “I was besottedly set on it, I'm afraid. It wasn't only Naomi's doing. I wanted to force her to be trustworthy—I didn't realize that if people really can trust one another, it doesn't need proving. I only saw that”—he paused, scraping the place under his funny bent nose, to say this—“some rather long months later.”

“But you did love Naomi,” I said. “And I'm afraid she's—”

“Hush!” said Mr. Phelps.

“Dead,” said Antony Green quite calmly, turning his face up to do under his chin. “I know she must be, or I wouldn't be out. I saw what she was like quite early on … when an hour had passed and I was still underground. But her mother's still alive, isn't she?”

“Yes!” Mr. Phelps said, in an angry explosion.

“But something else happened,” said Antony Green. He seemed to turn saner and saner as he talked. Maybe it was the sight of his own face coming out of the lather. It wasn't a usual face, and it was awfully thin, but wasn't the mad castaway's face, or the court jester's face of the ghost, either. It was sort of halfway between those and the face of the young man who had bent down and held out his hand to me as a kitten. “Something gave me an access of strength a short while back,” he said. “I was almost done for by then. But I suddenly began to be able to project and dream and time travel again.”

Mr. Phelps gave me a meaning glare. “Oh,” I said. “Me. I opened the green box and a lot of the stuff got out.”

Antony Green caught my eye in the mirror. “Thank you,” he said. “Your brother's a wolf, isn't he?”

See what I mean about him getting saner? “How do you know?” I said.

“I saw you with him in that room,” he said. “I'd gone back to the present by then. First of all, I homed in on the green box and tried to find it. It was in that room for years, and I went doggedly through the years, trying to find someone there with it who might help me. I'd worked back to about four months ago, before there was anyone in the room at all, and then unfortunately there was Gregory Laker—”

“Dad,” I said. “What did he do?”

“Took the box away,” Antony Green said. “I managed to make him understand—I thought. But perhaps he didn't. He got very excited.”

If Antony Green could accept hard facts, I thought I could. “He wanted it himself,” I said. “He envied you. He told me.” Mum sat on the edge of the bath and looked unhappy. I said, mostly to make her feel better, “Aunt Maria got at him after that, and I think he forgot he'd seen you.”

“So I had to try again,” Antony Green said. He finished shaving and turned round to talk after that. “Something
had
happened, because I still thought the green box was in that room. I found the next person by daylight—an elderly woman I didn't know—who was making up the bed.”

“Lavinia?” Mum asked me.

“I scared her silly,” Antony Green said. “She began laughing hysterically and ran out of the room shouting, ‘Mrs. Laker! You did some poor fellow in, didn't you? I'm not staying with you one moment longer!' And I never saw her again.”

“She's a cat now,” I said.

“So then I found your brother,” said Antony Green. “I'd just begun to make him understand, and I was almost at my last gasp, when I realized he was a wolf, and you were there.” The way he said this made me see that the nights must have run together for Antony Green. I suppose they would if you were lying underground. He frowned a bit and said, “I must put that right at once.”

“Oh, bless your heart!” Mum said.

T
hey went to find Chris, but I stayed behind. I was sitting on the edge of the Phelpses' bath nine-tenths asleep by then. Mum didn't seem to notice that two mornings in succession add up to a whole day. There is that advantage to not understanding time travel. She was fresh as a daisy. And I hadn't done credit to how worried she was about Chris. She said to Antony Green, “I could have screamed all the time you were careering round the town! I kept thinking of poor Chris.”

He gave her his long, mischievous, getting-away-with-it grin. “I am sorry.”

“No, you're not,” said Mum. “You were enjoying yourself. Not that I blame you.”

Antony Green was fresh, too, in a calm, easy way. I supposed as I nodded on the edge of the bath that he had had twenty years to rest in, but now I think it was more than that. He had something within him, now that he was sane. He turned to Mr. Phelps and held out a hand. “I'll take the green box, Nat.”

Mr. Phelps took the wonderful flashing, glowing box out of his pocket and plonked it into Antony Green's hand, very hastily, as if it hurt him to touch it. Then he bustled to the bathroom cupboard and came back with the big green highwayman's-coat kind of robe. It smelled of mothballs. “I rescued this from the woods,” he said.

Antony Green looked up from running his fingers gently over the patterns on the box, and his long grin was rather bemused. It often is, actually. “Thanks,” he said. “But I don't think I'm quite ready to reassume that yet. Can you keep it here and make people think I'm here with it?”

He opened and shut the box a tiny bit as he said it. Mr. Phelps gave a pained gasp at the waste and said, “Certainly. But—”

“I'm going to disappoint you, Nat, I know,” Antony Green said. “I always did, rather, didn't I? I had time to think underground. And I'm not sure I care for our way of doing things here. Men's ways with the power shut in the box. Women's ways with the virtue hoarded in the Queen—”

“
Virtue!
” Mum said. She almost exploded at the idea. “How can you
sit
there—! After all you've been through, how
can
you sit there and call Auntie virtuous?”

“It means something different, Mum,” I said.

Antony Green turned to Mum, sort of kindly. “Yes, it does,” he said. “It's an old use of the word, meaning a certain kind of power. It's been our word for it in Cranbury for centuries. It goes back to the time when somebody here decided that men and women were different sorts of people and the rules for the ways they used the power should be different. That was early in the Middle Ages, I think. They divided into men's ways and women's ways then, and they've been making up more and more rules ever since to make the difference seem even bigger. Women allowed men the strong, out-of-doors things—provided the men put the virtue of their thoughts and ambitions into the box so that it couldn't get loose and run wild—while the men gave over all the secret, indoors things to the women—on condition the main power was kept safe by just a few strong women who would work by the rules. Those are the ones we call the Queens.”