Ordinary Jack Page 3

  They stayed on quite a while after the fire was out. They sat round in the kitchen and told the Bagthorpes a lot of interesting things about arson and so on, and before they left Rosie got all their autographs. They seemed quite flattered by this. Rosie told them the autographs were more of a gamble than anything, just in case one of them ever died rescuing someone from a burning building, and became a national hero and got a post-mortem award on the television. Soon after this the firemen left.

  When they had gone, Mrs Fosdyke (who came in daily to do for the Bagthorpes, but refused to sleep in) said she thought they had all looked too young and inexperienced to be proper firemen. She did not believe they had been a proper Fire Brigade at all, and said that her carpet and her furniture would not now be in the state they were in if a proper Brigade had been sent in time. People were too easily deceived by uniforms, she said. (Mrs Fosdyke had missed the actual moment when the tablecloth went up in the air and was naturally bitter about this.)

  Nobody did anything about cleaning up after the fire that night. They all sat round and talked about it till quite late. At around ten o’clock Mr Bagthorpe went out to close his greenhouse for the night and fell over Zero, who had not been seen since the Party. Jack had even feared him lost, and had had a quick look among the debris for signs of bones, though he was not certain what exactly a burned bone would look like.

  “That infernal hound’s back,” Mr Bagthorpe announced and Zero crept in behind him. He was still shaking. Jack stood up.

  “I’m going to bed,” he said. Zero always slept in his room and he looked as if he needed a rest.

  “Nobody’s sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to me yet,” Grandma said. “My birthday’s nearly over. I shan’t be having many more. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Nothing really matters.”

  “Oh, darling, of course it matters. We’ll all sing it now, this very moment, won’t we, everyone?” cried Mrs Bagthorpe. “But what a shame about the candles.”

  Chapter Three

  Jack wondered whether Zero’s legs looked wobbly because of the chilliness or because they had still not picked up after last night. Zero had certainly not wanted to go with Jack when he went to have a look at the scene of the disaster in daylight, or rather, dawnlight. It was not yet six o’clock. The gutted and blackened state of the dining-room had shaken Jack himself. The tattered curtains swung to and fro in the shattered windows. It looked more like a scene out of a film than home.

  Jack and Zero were padding together over the fields towards The Knoll, Uncle Parker’s house. (He had wanted to call it “Parker Knoll” but Aunt Celia had said she would leave him if he did.) Jack had not slept too well. He had not been thinking especially about the fire, though he had once or twice been tempted to go down and make sure that there wasn’t anything still smouldering. Mrs Fosdyke had been very definite about the dubious credentials of the firemen who had come, and they had certainly been jumpy. But what was really exercising his mind was Uncle Parker’s idea. He had obviously thought of a way that he, Jack, could become immortal and keep up with the rest of the Bagthorpes. He had been, maddeningly, on the very brink of imparting it on the previous afternoon.

  “If I get immortal, old chap,” Jack told Zero now, “I’ll make sure you do as well. I’ll work you in on the act somehow.”

  He made quite a few other similarly encouraging remarks to Zero on the walk, because his self-confidence must have suffered a severe setback last night, and Mr Bagthorpe, for one, wouldn’t let him forget it in a hurry. (Jack was right about this. Quite often in weeks and even months to come he would say things like, “Look to yourself – here comes that incendiary hound again,” or, “If that animal’s stopping, the house insurance’ll have to go up again, you realise that”.)

  Jack was going to The Knoll so early partly because he was impatient to hear the idea and partly because he knew that this was Uncle Parker’s best time of the day. Uncle Parker spent his whole time apparently lounging around and led a life of ease, but he had long ago confided to Jack that this sort of thing was by no means as simple as it looked. He rose at six, summer and winter alike, did a workout and then jogged for three miles round the fields. He then went home, took a cold shower, prepared orange juice, toast and coffee and retired into his study with the morning papers, which he paid an extra fifty pence a week to have delivered early. What he did then, or so Jack gathered, was something to do with stocks and shares. In the village opinion ranged from suspecting him of being the compiler of The Times crossword (which would explain why Aunt Celia was so good at it) to his being an Enemy Agent (this by people who had had particularly narrow escapes from Uncle Parker’s car). He stayed in the study till about ten answering letters and making telephone calls, and then the rest of the day was free.

  This infuriated other people who were mystified as to what Uncle Parker actually did in life to maintain, for instance, the kind of car he drove round in, terrifying the life out of everyone else. They were also irritated by the way he looked so lean and fit while apparently inviting flab and liver trouble by lounging around sipping gin and doing crosswords.

  “I am an idle devil,” Uncle Parker once told Jack. “But at least I work at it.”

  Jack could see him now, at a distance, clad only in shorts and vest, jogging along in a shower of spray. He shouted and Uncle Parker waved and veered in his direction.

  “Up early,” he called. “House hasn’t gone up again, has it?”

  “They’re all asleep. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Uncle Parker, drawing up to him. “No more could I. And the thing that kept coming at me all night was those allfired mottoes.”

  “Mottoes?”

  “In all those crackers. We’ll never know what they were, now. I use ’em, you know, at dinner parties, as conversation-stoppers. The minute they start on about politics, out I come with one of my little mottoes. To tell you the truth, I collect them. Got a little book full of ’em. I wonder who thinks them up.”

  “Nobody, I don’t suppose,” Jack said. “I should think they’re handed down through the generations. They’re immortal. And that reminds me …”

  “I know, I know.” Uncle Parker raised a silencing hand. “You jog along back with me, and I’ll tell all.”

  “I don’t know if Zero’s up to jogging.” Jack eyed him dubiously. “Do his ears look droopy to you?”

  “He’s not much of a livewire at the best of times.” Uncle Parker in turn surveyed him. “On the other hand, he did have a bit of a raw deal yesterday. If he had any spirit, he’d take a piece out of Daisy’s leg.”

  “He’d never!” Jack was shocked.

  “To be frank –” Uncle Parker started jogging and Jack kept up – “I was about ready to take a piece out of her leg myself. All those mottoes!”

  “What about being immortal, then?” Uncle Parker would keep going off on different tacks if he were not pinned down.

  “Ah. Well. What I’ve hatched up for you, young Jack, is going to shake that family of yours to its foundations. To its core.”

  “It is?”

  “What you are going to be,” Uncle Parker told him, as they entered the field that was the home straight to The Knoll, “is a prophet.”

  Jack was struggling to keep up. He was a full foot shorter than Uncle Parker and what was a jog to him was an all-out striding for Jack.

  “You mean—?” He was bewildered. “Make a profit? Be in business? But I said nothing to do with figures.”

  Uncle Parker stopped so suddenly that Jack was several yards past him before he realised, and had to turn back.

  “What I mean,” he said, “is that you are to become a mystery, an enigma, a mystically gifted being beyond all ken. Beyond anybody’s ken.”

  There was quite a long silence then, which allowed Zero to catch up.

  “It was what you said yourself, yesterday,” Uncle Parker said. “About going into a trance.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t in a real on
e,” Jack assured him hastily. “All I meant—”

  “I know you weren’t in a real one,” said Uncle Parker. “But what if you had been?”

  They looked at one another.

  “What,” said Uncle Parker pregnantly, “if you’d been having a Vision?”

  “B-but I never do have visions. I’ve never had one in my whole life. I—”

  “From now on,” Uncle Parker told him firmly, “you will have Visions. Frequently. You will also hear Voices.”

  “W-will I?”

  “You will receive,” said Uncle Parker, “Messages.”

  “But I don’t get them either.”

  “Didn’t,” corrected Uncle Parker. “You didn’t get Messages. From now on, you will get them. Daily. Well, no, perhaps not daily, not at the start. If we overdo things, it’ll arouse suspicions. No, to begin with, you will just get the odd Message.”

  “What sort of Message?”

  Uncle Parker was not even listening.

  “And hear the odd Voice. But there again, we don’t want to go overdoing the Joan of Arc bit, not at the beginning.”

  “Look, Uncle Parker. I know you’re trying to help. But—”

  “I’ve got the first move all planned. As soon as I get back and change, I’ll prime you up. But you realise –” he started jogging again, and Jack had no option but to follow suit – “that there’ll have to be a bit of discipline and hard work.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “I’ve told you. The easier it looks, the harder it is. And to start with, I think you ought to start practising a few basic skills.”

  Jack did not bother to ask what these basic skills were because he knew he was about to hear anyway.

  “One that occurred to me last night when I was lying there thinking about those cursed mottoes, was water divining. Dowsing. Read an article about that only last week, and there’s definitely something in it. Might even give it a go myself. Just think – you and me waltzing about the place with forked twigs leaping in our hands like live fish – give ’em something to think about that will!”

  Jack felt, despite himself, the stirrings of excitement. He too had read about water divining, but had imagined that you had to be the seventh son of a seventh son even to think of taking it up. He said so.

  “Pooh!” returned Uncle Parker. “Anyone can do it. Just takes a bit of application. Or else,” he added, “a map showing local underground water courses.”

  “You mean …?”

  “I mean,” said Uncle Parker, “that we shall both have a good stab at making ourselves into diviners of water. But if all else fails, we shall content ourselves with convincing other people that you, at any rate, are.”

  “Oh,” said Jack. “Cheating.”

  “Being one cleverer than they are,” corrected Uncle Parker. “Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

  “Well, I suppose …”

  “Come on, old son, brace up.” They were entering the garden of The Knoll now. “You stop here, and I’ll be back in a jiffy and let you have the lowdown on the whole thing.”

  He jogged off over the lawn leaving his footprints in the dew.

  “You could try having a ferret round for a dowsing twig,” he called over his shoulder. “Hazel’s best.”

  Jack took a look about, but Uncle Parker’s garden was full of flowering shrubs and rambling roses and did not look half wild enough to house dowsing twigs. After a while he gave up looking, and sat on a stone bench and got Zero to sit in front of him while he took a good look at his ears. He was not really satisfied with what he saw, so he spent the time waiting for Uncle Parker to reappear in giving Zero a pep talk. He told him how the whole thing had been Daisy’s fault, how sensible Zero had been to clear right off out of things instead of hanging around waiting to be burned, and how Grandma had said that the carpet and curtains were getting shabby anyway.

  “By the time the Insurance have paid up,” he told Zero, “our whole dining-room’ll be better than it’s ever been. And it’s all due to you. Good boy. Good boy.”

  He leaned back to survey Zero’s ears and assess how much good his pep talk had done, but just then Uncle Parker came back. He sat next to Jack and produced two loose-leaf notebooks. He passed one to Jack.

  “Here,” he said. “Guard this with your life.”

  Interested, Jack opened it.

  “But there’s nothing in it!”

  “Yet,” said Uncle Parker. “There will be. This is for notes and records of the Campaign. Better not to have one, of course, better to commit all to memory – but there you are. With due respect, I don’t think you’ve got the memory.”

  “No.” Jack was not offended. He was used to this kind of remark.

  “Now, here’s a pen.” Uncle Parker passed one over, the felt-tipped variety. He opened his own notebook and Jack saw that his first page was already full.

  “Write down ‘Create Mysterious Impression’,” commanded Uncle Parker. “And underline it.”

  Jack obeyed.

  “One ‘e’ in mysterious and two ‘esses’ in impression,” said Uncle Parker, “but never mind.”

  “What does it mean?” Jack asked.

  “It means,” Uncle Parker told him, “that from now on you are to behave, now and then, Mysteriously. What I mean by this is that you are to give the impression, now and again, that your eyes are fixed on things invisible to mortal eyes. That you are, possibly, seeing Visions.”

  “How?” Jack asked.

  “Watch me.”

  Uncle Parker laid aside his notebook and looked with a kind of mad intensity at something just to the right of Jack’s head. It was as if he were trying to look Jack in the eyes to hypnotise him, but missing. His look deepened in such a definite way that Jack, alarmed, actually turned his head to see if there were anything there behind him.

  “Aha!” Uncle Parker was triumphant. “Ha! Got you! See what I mean? That’s the kind of look to give ’em! Come on, you do it. Have a go at looking Mysterious.”

  Jack, whose sole dramatic experience to date had been playing Third Shepherd in a Nativity play when he was six, tried to oblige. He fixed his gaze on a point behind Uncle Parker’s left ear and tried to imagine he was seeing a Vision. He kept it up for what seemed a very long time. He tried not to blink because that seemed a good and visionary thing to do, but then his eyes started to water and he ended up having to blink twice as much as usual. Through a blur he moved his gaze on to Uncle Parker.

  “Look,” said Uncle Parker kindly, “it was a good start. Fine. But you did look a bit as if rigor mortis had set in. The whole idea is to look Mysterious and faraway – there was too much stare about the whole thing. Now watch me again.”

  Jack watched Uncle Parker do it and then Uncle Parker watched him have another go. This time Jack decided on imagining a plateful of bacon, egg, sausage, tomato, mushroom and fried bread behind Uncle Parker’s ear.

  “How was that?” he asked, reluctantly letting the picture go.

  “Better.” Uncle Parker was emphatic. “Not far off first class. There was a whole lot of soul about that. You really looked as if you were seeing a Vision that time.”

  “I was,” said Jack simply.

  “We’ll forget that for now,” said Uncle Parker, “and get on to the first Vision.”

  “I thought that was it,” said Jack.

  “That,” explained Uncle Parker, “was for you to go round doing a few times during the day. Do it while several people are around, if you can, and do it about twice this morning and the same this afternoon. Make sure they get the message.”

  “The awful thing would be if I laughed,” Jack said.

  “If you laugh,” said Uncle Parker sternly, “I wash my hands of you. Clear?”

  “Clear,” Jack said. “There is one thing. Could Zero be in on it as well?”

  Uncle Parker, floored, looked at Zero lying slumped by Jack’s feet as if he were sculpted in dough.

  “Now listen,” he said, “
I’ll take you on, because by and large I think you’re promising material. I think I’ll make something of you. But that hound’s another matter.”

  “Don’t call him an h-o-u-n-d,” pleaded Jack. He spelled the word out because he was pretty sure that Zero, being so simple in other ways, would almost certainly not understand. “Please. Father does it all the time. It undermines his confidence. And he’s in a terrible state after last night.”

  “We’re all in a terrible state after last night,” said Uncle Parker. “And some of us didn’t do double somersaults with burning tablecloths on our heads.”

  “You would,” said Jack, “if you’d been under there, in his position.”

  “We won’t go into that,” said Uncle Parker. “All I’m saying is that any question of that dog having Visions is out. Come to think –” he eyed Zero speculatively – “that’s not quite right. Come to think, he goes round half the time looking as if he’s having Visions. You could do worse than study him.”

  “Hear that?” Jack, delighted, bent and patted him. “Hear that, Zero? Good old boy!”

  Zero wagged his tail lethargically.

  “I’m glad you said that,” Jack told Uncle Parker. “It’s cheered him up no end.”

  “So – ready for another note.” Uncle Parker changed the subject. “Write ‘Vision One’ and underline.”

  Jack obeyed.

  “Now write what I dictate.”

  Jack poised his felt-tip ready.

  “Write: ‘I see … I see … I see a Lavender Man who Bears Tidings.’”

  Jack let his pen drop.

  “Write what?” he said incredulously.

  “Never mind that. You write it down. ‘I see dot dot dot, I see dot dot dot, I see a Lavender Man who Bears Tidings.’”