The Pinhoe Egg (3 page)

Aunt Joy, when Marianne fetched her from the Post Office, did not see things Dad's way at all. She walked up the street beside Marianne, pinning on her old blue hat as she went and grumbling the whole way. “So I have to leave my customers and lose my income—and it's no good believing your uncle Charles will earn enough to support the family—all because this spoiled old woman loses her marbles and starts throwing clocks around. What's wrong with putting her in a Home, I want to know.”

“She'd probably throw things around in a Home too,” Marianne suggested.

“Yes, but I wouldn't be dragged off to deal with it,” Aunt Joy retorted. “Besides,” she went on, stabbing her hat with her hatpin, “my Great-Aunt Callow was in a Home for years and did nothing but stare at the wall, and she was just as much of a witch as your Gammer.”

When they got to Woods House, Marianne escaped from Aunt Joy by going to look for Nutcase in the garden, where, sure enough, he
was, stalking birds in the overgrown vegetable plot. He seemed quite glad to be taken back to Furze Cottage and given breakfast.

“You stupid old thing!” Marianne said to him. “You have to have your meals here now. I don't think Gammer knows you exist anymore.” To her surprise, Marianne found herself swallowing back a sob as she spoke. She had not realized that things were as upsetting as that. But they were. Gammer had never done anything but order Marianne about, nothing to make a person fond of her, but all the same it was awful to have her screaming and throwing things and being generally like a very small child. She hoped they were deciding on a way to make things more reasonable, up at Woods House.

It seemed as if it had not been easy to decide anything. Mum and Dad came home some hours later, with Uncle Richard, all of them exhausted. “Words with the nurses, words with Edgar and Lester,” Mum said while Marianne was making them all cups of tea.

“Not to speak of Joy rabbiting on about that nursing home she stuck old Glenys Callow in,” Uncle Richard added. “Three spoonfuls,
Marianne, love. This is no time for a man to watch his weight.”

“But what
did
you decide?” Marianne asked.

It seemed that the nurses had been persuaded to stay on another week, for twice the pay, provided one of the aunts was there all the time to protect them.

“So we take it in turns,” Mum said, sighing. “I've drawn tonight's shift, so it's cold supper and rush off, I'm afraid. And after that—”

“It's my belief,” Dad said peacefully, “that they'll settle in and she'll get used to them and there'll be no more need to worry.”

“In your dreams!” Mum said. Unfortunately, she was right.

The nurses lasted two more nights and then, very firmly and finally, gave notice. They said the house was haunted. Though everyone was positive the haunting was Gammer's doing, no one could catch her at it and no one could persuade the nurses. They left. And there was yet another Pinhoe emergency meeting.

Marianne avoided this one. She told everyone, quite reasonably, that you had to keep a cat indoors for a fortnight in a new place or he would
run away. So she sat in her room with Nutcase. This was not as boring as it sounded because, now that Joe was not there to jeer at her, she was able to open the secret drawer in her heart-shaped desk and fetch out the story she was writing. It was called “The Adventures of Princess Irene” and it seemed to be going to be very exciting. She was quite sorry when everyone came back to Furze Cottage after what Uncle Richard described as a Flaming Row and even Dad described as “a bit of difficulty.”

According to Mum, it took huge arguments for them even to agree that Gammer was not safe on her own, and more arguments to decide Gammer had to live with someone. Great-Uncle Edgar then cheerfully announced that he and Great-Aunt Sue would live in Woods House and Great-Aunt Sue would look after Gammer. This had been news to Great-Aunt Sue. She did not go for the idea at all. In fact, she had said she would go and live with her sister on the other side of Hopton, and Edgar could look after Gammer himself and see how
he
liked it. So everyone hastily thought again. And the only possible thing, Mum said, was for Gammer to come
and live with one of Gammer's seven sons.

“Then,” said Uncle Richard, “the fur really flew. Cecily let rip like I've never seen her.”

“It's all very well for
you
!” Mum said. “You're not married and you live in that room over in the Pinhoe Arms. Nobody was going to ask
you
, Richard, so take that smug look—”

“Now, Cecily,” Dad said peaceably. “Don't start again.”

“I wasn't the only one,” said Mum.

“No, there was Joy and Helen and Prue and Polly all screeching that they'd got enough to do, and even your Great-Aunt Clarice, Marianne, saying that Lester couldn't have his proper respectable lifestyle if they had to harbor a mad-woman. It put me out of patience,” Dad said. “Then Dinah and Isaac offered. They said as they don't have children, they had the room and the time, and Gammer could be happy watching the goats and the ducks down in the Dell. Besides, Dinah can manage Gammer—”

“Gammer didn't think so,” said Mum.

Gammer had somehow gotten wind of what was being decided. She appeared in the front room wrapped in a tablecloth and declared that
the only way she would leave Woods House was feet first in her coffin. Or that was what most Pinhoes thought she meant when she kept saying, “Root first in a forcing bucket!”

“Dinah got her back to bed,” Uncle Richard said. “We're moving Gammer out tomorrow. We put a general call out for all Pinhoes to help and—”

“Wait. There was Edgar's bit before that,” Mum said. “Edgar was all set to move into Woods House as soon as Gammer was out of it. Your Great-Aunt Sue didn't disagree with him on
that
, surprise, surprise. The ancestral family home, they said, the big house of the village. As the oldest surviving Pinhoe, Edgar said, it was his
right
to live there. He'd rename it Pinhoe Manor, he thought.”

Dad chuckled. “Pompous idiot, Edgar is. I told him to his face he couldn't. The house is mine. It came to me when Old Gaffer went, but Gammer set store by living there, so I let her.”

Marianne had had no idea of this. She stared. “Are
we
going to live there, then?” And after all the trouble I've been to, training Nutcase to stay
here
! she thought.

“No, no,” Dad said. “We'd rattle about in there
as badly as Gammer did. No, my idea is to sell the place, make a bit of money to give to Isaac to support Gammer at the Dell. He and Dinah could use the cash.”

“Further flaming row,” said Uncle Richard. “You should have seen Edgar's face! And Lester saying that it should only be sold to a Pinhoe or not at all—and Joy screeching for a share of the money. Arthur and Charles shut her up by saying, ‘Sell it to a Pinhoe, then.' Edgar looked fit to burst, thinking he was going to have to
pay
for the place, when he thought it was his own anyway.”

Dad smiled. “I wouldn't sell to Edgar. His side of the family are Hopton born. He's going to sell it for
me
. I told him to get someone rich from London interested, get a really good price for it. Now let's have a bit of a rest, shall we? Something tells me it may be hard work moving Gammer out tomorrow.”

Dad was always given to understating things. By the following night, Marianne was inclined to think this was Dad's understatement of the century.

E
veryone gathered soon after dawn in the yard of the Pinhoe Arms: Pinhoes, Callows, half-Pinhoes, and Pinhoes by marriage, old, young and middle-aged, they came from miles around. Uncle Richard was there, with Dolly the donkey harnessed to Dad's furniture delivery cart. Great-Uncle Edgar was drawn up outside in his carriage, alongside Great-Uncle Lester's big shiny motor car. There was not room for them in the yard, what with all the people and the mass of bicycles stacked up among the piles of broomsticks outside the beer shed, with Uncle Cedric's farm cart in front of those. Joe was there, looking sulky, beside Joss Callow from That Castle, alongside nearly a
hundred distant relatives that Marianne had scarcely ever met. About the only people who were
not
there were Aunt Joy, who had to sort the post, and Aunt Dinah, who was getting the room ready for Gammer down in the Dell.

Marianne tried to edge up to Joe to find out how he was getting on among all the enemy enchanters, but before she could get near Joe, Uncle Arthur climbed onto Uncle Cedric's cart and, with Dad up there too to prompt him, began telling everyone what to do. It made sense to have Uncle Arthur do the announcing. He had a big booming voice, rather like Great-Uncle Edgar's. No one could say they had not heard him.

Everyone was divided into work parties. Some were to clear everything out of Woods House, to make it ready to be sold; some were to take Gammer's special things over to the Dell; and yet others were to help get Gammer's room ready there. Marianne found herself in the fourth group that was supposed to get Gammer herself down to the Dell. To her disappointment, Joe was in the work party that was sent to Aunt Dinah's.

“And we should be through by lunchtime,” Uncle Arthur finished. “Special lunch for all, here
at the Pinhoe Arms at one o'clock sharp. Free wine and beer.”

While the Pinhoes were raising a cheer at this, the Reverend Pinhoe climbed up beside Uncle Arthur and blessed the undertaking. “And may many hands make light work,” he said. It all sounded wonderfully efficient.

The first sign that things were not, perhaps, going to go that smoothly was when Great-Uncle Edgar stopped his carriage outside Woods House slap in the path of the farm cart and strode into the house, narrowly missing a sofa that was just coming out in the hands of six second cousins. Edgar strode up to Dad, who was in the middle of the hall, trying to explain which things were to go with Gammer and which things were to be stored in the shed outside the village.

“I say, Harry,” he said in his most booming and important way, “mind if I take that corner cupboard in the front room? It'll only deteriorate in storage.”

Behind him came Great-Uncle Lester, asking for the cabinet in the dining room. Marianne could hardly hear him for shouts of “Get out of the
way
!” and “Lester, move your car! The sofa's
stuck
!” and Uncle Richard bawling, “I have to
back the donkey there!
Move
that sofa!”

“Right royal pile-up, by the sound,” Uncle Charles remarked, coming past with a bookshelf, two biscuit tins, and a stool. “I'll sort it out. You get upstairs, Harry. Polly and Sue and them are having a bit of trouble with Gammer.”

“Go up and see, girl,” Dad said to Marianne, and to Edgar and Lester, “Yes,
have
the blessed cupboard
and
the cabinet and then get out of the way. Though mind you,” he panted, hurrying to catch up with Marianne on the stairs, “that cupboard's only made of plywood.”

“I know. And the legs on the cabinet come off all the time,” Marianne said.

“Whatever makes them happy,” Dad panted.

The shouts outside rose to screams mixed with braying. They turned around and watched the sofa being levitated across the startled donkey. This was followed by a horrific crash as someone dropped the glass case with the badger in it. Then they had to turn the other way as Uncle Arthur came pelting down the stairs with a frilly bedside table hugged to his considerable belly, shouting, “Harry, you've
got
to come! Real trouble.”

Marianne and Dad squeezed past him and
rushed upstairs to Gammer's bedroom, where Joss Callow and another distant cousin were struggling to get the carpet out from under the feet of a crowd of agitated aunts. “Oh, thank goodness you've come!” Great-Aunt Clarice said, looking hot and wild-haired and most unlike her usual elegant self.

Great-Aunt Sue, who was still almost crisp and neat, added, “We don't know what to do.”

All the aunts were holding armfuls of clothes. Evidently they had been trying to get Gammer dressed.

“Won't get dressed, eh?” Dad said.

“Worse than that!” said Great-Aunt Clarice. “Look.”

The ladies crowded aside to give Dad and Marianne a view of the bed. Dad said, “My God!” and Marianne did not blame him.

Gammer had grown herself into the bed. She had sunk into the mattress, deep into it, and rooted herself, with little hairy nightdress-colored rootlets sticking out all round her. Her long toe-nails twined like transparent yellow creepers into the bars at the end of the bed. At the other end, her hair and her ears were impossibly grown into
the pillow. Out of it her face stared, bony, defiant, and smug.

“Mother!” said Marianne's dad.

“Thought you could get the better of me, didn't you?” Gammer said. “I'm not going.”

Marianne had almost never seen her father lose his temper, but he did then. His round amiable face went crimson and shiny. “Yes, you
are
going,” he said. “You're moving to Dinah and Isaac's whatever tricks you play. Leave her be,” he said to the aunts. “She'll get tired of this in the end. Let's get all the furniture moved out first.”

This was easier said than done. No one had realized quite how much furniture there was. A house the size of Woods House, that was big enough to have held a family with seven children once, can hold massive quantities of furniture. And Woods House did. Joss Callow had to go and fetch Uncle Cedric's hay wain and then borrow the Reverend Pinhoe's old horse to pull it, because the farm cart was just not enough and they would have been at it all day. Great-Uncle Edgar prudently left at this point in case someone suggested they use his fine, spruce carriage too; but Great-Uncle Lester nobly stayed and offered to take the smaller items in his
car. Even so, all three vehicles had to make several trips to the big barn out on the Hopton Road, while a crowd of younger Pinhoes rushed out there on bikes and broomsticks to unload the furniture, stack it safely, and surround it in their best spells of preservation. At the same time, so many things turned up that people thought Gammer would need in her new home, that Dolly the donkey was going backward and forward nonstop between Woods House and the Dell, with the cart loaded and creaking behind her.

“It's so
nice
to have things that you're used to around you in a strange place!” Great-Aunt Sue said. Marianne privately thought this was rather sentimental of Aunt Sue, since most of the stuff was things she had never once seen Gammer use.

“And we haven't touched the attics yet!” Uncle Charles groaned, while they waited for the donkey cart to come back again.

Everyone else had forgotten the attics. “Leave them till after lunch,” Dad said hastily. “Or we could leave them for the new owner. There's nothing but junk up there.”

“I had a toy fort once that must be up there,” Uncle Simeon said wistfully.

But he was ignored, as he mostly was, because Uncle Richard brought the donkey cart back with a small Pinhoe girl who had a message from Mum. Evidently Mum was getting impatient to know what had become of Gammer.

“They're all ready,” small Nicola announced. “They sprung clent.”

“They
what
?” said all the aunts.

“They washed the floor and they dried and they polished and the carpet just fits,” Nicola explained. “And they washed the windows and did the walls and put the new curtains up and started on all the furniture and the pictures and the stuffed trout and Stafford and Conway Callow teased a goat and it butted them and—”

“Oh, they spring cleaned,” said Aunt Polly. “Now I understand.”

“Thank you, Nicola. Run back and tell them Gammer's just coming,” Dad said.

But Nicola was determined to finish her narrative first. “And they got sent home and that Joe Pinhoe got told off for being lazy. I was good. I helped,” she concluded. Only then did she scamper off with Dad's message.

Dad began wearily climbing the stairs. “Let's
hope Gammer's uprooted herself by now,” he said.

But she hadn't. If anything, she was rooted to the bed more firmly than ever. When Great-Aunt Sue said brightly, “Up we get, Gammer. Don't we want to see our lovely clean new home?” Gammer just stared, mutinously.

“Oh, come on, Mother. Cut it out!” Uncle Arthur said. “You look ridiculous like that.”

“Shan't,” said Gammer. “I said root downward and I meant it. I've lived in this house every single year of my life.”

“No, you haven't. Don't talk nonsense!” Dad said, turning red and shiny again. “You lived opposite the Town Hall in Hopton for twenty years before you ever came here. One last time—do you get up, or do we carry you to the Dell bed and all?”

“Please yourself. I can't do with your tantrums, Harry—never could,” Gammer said, and closed her eyes.

“Right!” said Dad, angrier than ever. “All of you get a grip on this bed and lift it when I count to three.”

Gammer's reply to this was to make herself
enormously heavy. The bare floor creaked under the weight of the bed. No one could shift it.

Marianne heard Dad's teeth grind. “Very well,” he said. “Levitation spell, everyone.”

Normally with a levitation spell, you could move almost anything with just one finger. This time, whatever Gammer was doing made that almost impossible. Everyone strained and sweated. Great-Aunt Clarice's hairstyle came apart in the effort. Pretty little combs and hairpins showered down on Gammer's roots. Great-Aunt Sue stopped looking neat at all. Marianne thought that, for herself, she could have lifted three elephants more easily. Uncle Charles and four cousins left off loading the donkey cart and ran upstairs to help, followed by Uncle Richard and then by Great-Uncle Lester. But the bed still would not move. Until, when every possible person was gathered round the bed, heaving and muttering the spell, Gammer smiled wickedly and let go.

The bed went up two feet and shot forward. Everyone stumbled and floundered. Great-Aunt Sue was carried along with the bed as it made for the doorway and then crushed against the
doorpost as the bed jammed itself past her and swung sideways into the upstairs corridor. Great-Aunt Clarice rescued Aunt Sue with a quick spell and a tremendous
POP!
which jerked the bed on again. It sailed toward the stairs, leaving everyone behind except for Uncle Arthur. Uncle Arthur was holding on to the bars at the end of the bed and pushing mightily to stop it.

“Ridiculous, am I?” Gammer said to him, smiling peacefully. And the bed launched itself down the stairs with Uncle Arthur pelting backward in front of it for dear life. At the landing, it did a neat turn, threw Uncle Arthur off, bounced on his belly, and set off like a toboggan down the rest of the stairs. In the hall, Nutcase—who had somehow gotten out again—shot out of its way with a shriek. Everyone except Uncle Arthur leaned anxiously over the banisters and watched Gammer zoom through the front door and hit Great-Uncle Lester's car with a mighty
crunch
.

Great-Uncle Lester howled, “My car, my
car
!” and raced down after Gammer.

“At least it stopped her,” Dad said as they all clattered after Great-Uncle Lester. “She hurt?” he
asked, when they got there to find a large splintery dent in the side of the car and Gammer, still rooted, lying with her eyes shut and the same peaceful smile.

“Oh, I do hope so!” Great-Uncle Lester said, wringing his hands. “
Look
what she's done!”

“Serve you right,” Gammer said, without opening her eyes. “You smashed my dollhouse.”

“When I was
five
!” Great-Uncle Lester howled. “Sixty
years
ago, you dreadful old woman!”

Dad leaned over the bed and demanded, “Are you ready to get up and walk now?”

Gammer pretended not to hear him.

“All
right
!” Dad said fiercely. “Levitation again, everyone. I'm going to get her down to the Dell if it kills us all.”

“Oh, it will,” Gammer said sweetly.

Marianne's opinion was that the way they were all going to die was from embarrassment. They swung the bed up again and, jostling for a hand-hold and treading on one another's heels, took it out through the gates and into the village street. There the Reverend Pinhoe, who had been standing in the churchyard, vaulted the wall and hurried over to help. “Dear, dear,” he said. “What a
very strange thing for old Mrs. Pinhoe to do!”

They wedged him in and jostled on, downhill through the village. As the hill got steeper, they were quite glad of the fact that the Reverend Pinhoe was no good at levitation. The bed went faster and faster and the vicar's efforts were actually holding it back. Despite the way they were now going at a brisk trot, people who were not witches or not Pinhoes came out of the houses and trotted alongside to stare at Gammer and her roots. Others leaned out of windows to get a look, too. “I never knew a person could
do
that!” they all said. “Will she be like that permanently?”

“
God
knows!” Dad snarled, redder and shinier than ever.

Gammer smiled. And it very soon appeared that she had at least one more thing she could do.

There were frantic shouts from behind. They twisted their heads around and saw Great-Uncle Lester, with Uncle Arthur running in great limping leaps behind him, racing down the street toward them. No one understood what they were shouting, but the way they were waving the bed carriers to one side was quite clear.