Paws for Alarm (2 page)

I wasn't looking forward to several months in their company.

* * *

The train lurched to a halt and shut off power, the carriage shivered violently, then went still. All around us backpackers sprang into action, leaping from their seats and struggling to reshoulder their burdens.

‘Come on.' Arnold got to his feet. ‘This is our stop.'

Once again we battled our way on to an almost perpendicular escalator, grimly clutching luggage and children. Strange advertising messages on small upright posters kept the twins busy reading all the way to the surface. I was glad someone was amused; I was getting a headache.

We negotiated a passageway, then a couple of flights of stairs and emerged into a grubby run-down area that looked more like a combat zone than a glamorous introduction to one of the world's most historic and cultural cities.

‘Arnold, are you sure we're in the right place?'

‘Of course I am.' He took a better grip on the suitcases and looked around dubiously.

‘There's a penny arcade!' Donald shouted rapturously. ‘Can we go in? Just for a minute? Can we go in?'

‘NO!' His father and I thundered in chorus, unanimous for once. The place looked like some murky depth of an unsavoury ocean – and as for the denizens swimming around just behind the dark plate glass windows ... well!

‘Arnold, what are we doing here? I mean, why did you get tickets to this place? I've never heard of it and –' I broke off as a girl with a shaven head, except for two long thin braids, drifted past us and entered the penny arcade.

‘Somebody told me it was a good place to –'

Arnold's voice faded as the vision walked past him and his head turned automatically to follow her progress. ‘I mean –' He cleared his throat and got a fresh grip on himself as well as the cases. ‘They said there were cheap hotels here and –'

This time two boys with orange, green and purple hair radiating in spikes from their scalps came along. They were too busy holding hands to notice us, but we sure noticed them.

‘Wow!' Donald said. ‘Did you see that hair?'

‘Don't stare,' I said automatically. ‘Arnold, do you know where we're going? I'm sure these aren't the directions Celia gave us.'

‘We'll go there later,' Arnold said firmly. ‘Maybe tomorrow. I thought, today, we could stay at a hotel in the city and you and the kids could get acclimatized while I found the London Library and asked about joining. Come on –' He turned in the direction of a leafy square just off the main drag – and I was beginning to suspect that drag was the right word.

‘Arnold, I'd rather go straight to the house and start getting acclimatized there.' We followed him uncertainly. He was nowhere near as confident as he was pretending to be.

The square was bordered with small hotels. It was also lined with females, either standing alone or in clusters of two or three. They watched us with speculative eyes as we walked along, innocently reading out the names of hotels to each other.

My first reaction was a rather relieved thought that I was not going to be surrounded by Celia-clones in this country, after all. None of these women looked like Celia. This was rapidly followed by an unnerving second thought: they looked like ...

‘Arnold –' I said. ‘Arnold, we're not staying here!'

‘I guess maybe it's not such a good idea,' he agreed uneasily. ‘Maybe we ought to try another part of town –'

‘Maybe we ought to go straight to Waterloo Station and take the train to St Anselm, the way we're supposed to!'

‘Well ...' With a deep sigh, Arnold turned slowly and began leading us back to King's Cross Station. ‘There's a subway line to Waterloo –'

‘No, Arnold.' I put my foot down. ‘This time we're taking a taxi.'

‘Is this the place?' Donald asked incredulously.

‘This is it.' Surreptitiously, I checked the address again, just to be sure. The house lurking behind the tall holly hedge was smaller than it had appeared in the photographs Celia had shown us and, although we had known it was semi-detached, somehow the other half of the house seemed to impinge more.

‘It's teensy,' Donna said. ‘Our house is a lot bigger.'

‘All houses are different.' Arnold was impatient. He had paused at the station to collect a timetable. Already, in his mind, he was hallway to the London Library, the Reading Room of the British Museum, the Library in the Houses of Parliament. It was a great trial to him that he had to see his family settled before he was off about his precious research. It was martyrdom that the process was taking so long that he could not possibly get back to London before all the libraries closed for the day.

‘We didn't exchange on a room-for-room basis,' he explained. ‘We exchanged for the privilege of residing as natives in another country; of moving into an existing circle of friends and being treated as one of them; of –'

‘Enough –' I cut him short. ‘Let's go inside and view the damage.'

You had to hand it to Celia. When she sold a sucker on an idea, they stayed sold.

Once inside, we discovered the house was bigger than it looked. It would have to be. The rooms were spacious and the building made up in length what it lacked in breadth. I was relieved to see that the long wide downstairs hallway ran along the inner side, against the other half of the house. From the position of the two front doors, I assumed that the Sandgates' hallway ran parallel, for which I was duly grateful. The kids can get noisy at times and that would cut down the nuisance factor. We'd never lived in such close proximity to other people before; I was not at all sure how it was going to work out.

‘Well ...' Arnold set down the suitcases and looked around. ‘Well ... this is fine. Just fine ... great ...' He looked at his watch and shook his head sadly. I could see the thought moving through his mind as clearly as if it had been flashing across his forehead in neon lights:
An early night and the first train in the morning back to London and the libraries.

‘Well,' Arnold said brightly as though the idea had just occurred to him, ‘why don't we get to bed and we can get off to a good start bright and early in the morning?'

‘We can't go to bed now,' Donald said indignantly. ‘It's still light out.'

‘That's right,' I agreed. ‘Furthermore, it's only eleven o'clock in the morning back home. We may be jet-lagged, but our interior clocks are going to take a few days to adjust. We're wide awake, even if we are exhausted. Apart from which, we want to do some shopping.
Food
shopping –' I cut Arnold off in midwince. ‘We don't know what sort of emergency provisions Rosemary may have left for us.' If she was anything like Celia, I was prepared to mistrust any arrangements she might have made.

That's a thought. Why don't we go and look?' When you got on to the subject of food, you hit Arnold where he lived. He headed in the probable direction of the kitchen with nearly as much animation as if it were a reference library. The rest of us trailed after him.

It was an ordinary kitchen, and yet there was something different about it. I stood in the doorway trying to spot the difference while Arnold strode straight to the refrigerator, threw open the door and stooped to examine the contents. The twins crowded behind him.

‘There's a lot of cream in here,' Arnold reported over his shoulder. ‘Someone must think Americans live on coffee and cream.'

‘It isn't cream –' Donna had snatched up one of the small cartons and was reading the information printed on it. ‘It's milk! Those dinky little things are what they put the milk in!' She whooped with laughter. ‘Donald can drink more than that all by himself.'

‘The eggs are smaller, too,' Donald said accusingly.

‘Everything is smaller here.' I had recognized the major difference about the kitchen; the minor one was that everything appeared to be about ten years behind the times, although obviously fairly new. ‘We'll get used to it. Meanwhile, I suggest we go into town and get something to eat there, because I sure as hell am not going to do any cooking tonight.'

‘Sure, honey, sure,' Arnold said quickly, recognizing the dangerous note in my voice. ‘We didn't mean to imply that you should. We were just looking to see what was around. We'll go get a real English meal, then we'll find a supermarket and pick up some groceries, and then –' a major concession – ‘we'll get a taxi back here.'

By the time we got back, I was in a worse mood. My feet were wet, my head was aching and my stomach had begun a pitched battle with the food I had just sent down to it. To make matters worse, the twins had reached the whining stage.

‘I didn't come three thousand miles,' I complained, while Arnold fumbled for the key, ‘to eat hamburgers and French fries in a fast food outlet that would have been closed down by any right-thinking Board of Health in the States.'

‘They were pretty funny-tasting hamburgers,' Donald said.

‘That's because they were half lamb,' I said. ‘Or maybe fat pork. And those French fries were almost solid lumps of grease – and stale grease, at that.'

‘Mom, I think I'm going to be sick.' Donna had turned an unhealthy colour and was breathing heavily through her mouth.

‘Be reasonable, Nancy –' Arnold was getting his beleaguered look. ‘It was the only place open. You saw that for yourself. What else could we do?'

‘And that's another thing. Who ever heard of half-day closing? Shutting up everything at one o'clock in the middle of the week? Even the taxis disappeared!'

‘All right, all right,' Arnold said. ‘I'll hire a car first thing in the morning.'

‘Damn right, you will!' So far as I was concerned, the gloves were off. ‘Are they all crazy over here?'

‘Shhh!' Arnold looked around nervously as my voice rose. It was true that several people had suddenly appeared on the street, but they appeared to be going about their own business, or rather, coming home from their place of business, and paying no attention to us whatsoever. They might at least have smiled or nodded.

‘We're not at home, honey, we're guests in this country. You've got to be more careful.' Arnold frowned censoriously. ‘And I don't think you should have used that language to the bus conductor –'

‘Arnold, I don't give a rat's ass what you think!'

At least the passers-by weren't deaf. Heads turned in our direction and turned away again swiftly.

‘Shhh,
please,
Nancy.' Arnold had gone a dull crimson.

‘A-ahem —' The throat-clearing sound came from our offside. We whirled to discover a tall elegant blonde smiling through a gap in the hedge between the two front doors and trying to look as though she had just appeared there and hadn't heard a word of our previous conversation.

‘You must be the Harpers,' she said. ‘I'm sorry I wasn't here to meet you, but I wasn't sure when you were arriving and it's half-day closing. I'm Lania – Lania Sandgate.' She stepped through the gap, obviously a well-used short cut, and extended her hand.

‘Oh, sure –' Arnold grabbed for her hand, dropping the key. ‘I'm Arnold, this is Nancy – and these are the twins: Donna and Donald.'

‘How nice to meet you.' She turned to me as Arnold bent and groped for the key. ‘I've been looking forward to having you here. If there's anything you need or want to know, you mustn't hesitate to call on me.'

‘How kind of you.' I matched her tooth for tooth, reserving judgement. My first impression was that she was too soignée but, after the twenty-four hours I'd just put in, even Apple Annie would have seemed like a Riviera sophisticate.

‘In fact, perhaps you'd like to come over now and have a cup of tea?'

‘Not just now,' I said quickly. ‘I'm afraid Donna isn't feeling very well.'

‘I'm okay, Mom.' Donna suddenly perked up, eyes sparkling, and beamed at our new neighbour.

‘Then perhaps you'd like to come to dinner tomorrow?' Lania Sandgate's smile stiffened, her voice lost a shade of its cordiality.

‘We'd love to.' I tried to retrieve the situation. ‘We'll all be a bit less jet-lagged by tomorrow. The kids don't know how they're feeling right now –'

‘Ooooh!' Donald suddenly stepped over to the side of the path and threw up all over a rose bush. '

They kept doing that to me! And it still took me by surprise. I never knew where I was with them. I wondered if I'd ever be able to cope satisfactorily with the peculiarities of twinship. It was eerie when one twin produced the symptoms of an illness and the other one produced the effects. My sole consolation was that they weren't single-cell same-sex twins and the problem was bound to improve as they gained adulthood. I wasn't sure that they'd grow out of it – but at least I'd know which one was going to produce the baby.

‘I mustn't keep you any longer –' Lania backed hastily through the gap in the hedge. ‘I'll expect you at about seven tomorrow then.'

I put the twins to bed and stayed with them until they went to sleep, still protesting that they weren't tired. It didn't take long.

When I went back downstairs, I found Arnold had already taken over the small study. His portable typewriter was open on the desk, as was a bottle of duty-free bourbon. At least he had provided two glasses.

‘Some day, huh, honey?' He poured a drink and handed it to me.

‘I don't want to face another like this in a hurry,' I agreed, blanking out the thought that I'd have to for the return trip. That was almost three months away and we'd have a good rest before then.

I leaned back in the easy chair while Arnold roamed around the room peering at the bookshelves. From where I sat, I could see a couple of shelves of novels, which cheered me immensely. I'd been afraid they were all textbooks and technical books.