Charlotte Sometimes Read online

  Elizabeth stopped laughing at her after a little and became argumentative, waving her hands about to enforce her point.

  “Why don’t you grow up, you two, for goodness’ sake? Some people hate having water thrown in their faces, and I don’t blame them one little bit.”

  “It’s only meant to be a joke, Elizabeth,” protested Janet.

  Vanessa said coldly, “Oh, don’t be such a prig. You can’t talk anyway. You’re a prig and Susannah’s a crybaby—and Charlotte—well, Charlotte’s just standoffish. She never says a word or talks to us. What a hopeless lot!”

  Charlotte did not like being called standoffish much. But it was so difficult when she was only here every other day. Often she did not know what had happened, what was going on, and she was afraid of showing it, of saying things that might make everyone suspicious. It seemed safer usually not to speak at all.

  She wondered about Sarah’s mother, whether she had had the tricks played on her; whether they had been played in 1918 even. How long ago had Sarah’s mother come to the school? She must be quite old now with all her children grown up except for Sarah.

  She began, quite vaguely at first, to add up the dates—but then, after a while, added more accurately, more carefully, realizing with a shock that Clare and Emily, too, could be alive now still, in the present. In fact, they would be much younger than her Grandfather Elijah. Charlotte was not at all sure she found that thought comfortable. She did not want to meet an elderly Emily while knowing the ten-year-old.

  Chapter 5

  ON SATURDAY morning Emily ignored Charlotte pointedly, turning her back on her when they had to be together in their bedroom or at their double classroom desk, and then after lunch, when they set out on the school walk, she partnered Bunty, leaving Bunty’s friend Ruth and Charlotte, both rather disconsolate, to go together.

  They went across the river to the great park at the top of the hill. An army training camp lay just inside its gates. Wheels had injured all the smooth turf there. Trucks were ranged in the shade of the trees, their hoods painted tree color as camouflage, green and brown and gray. Indeed everything except the autumn trees was green and brown and gray—the trucks, the huts, the soldiers dressed in khaki, who strolled casually about or marched up and down, much stiffer-limbed than toys. One squad was drilling. The sergeant, his moustache as wide on him as horns, gave indistinguishable bellows, each one so huge that it seemed to contain its own echo. The soldiers were like one block, not individual men. They stopped, wheeled, halted to the bellows, their arms swinging up simultaneously like lengthy flaps or shelves.

  Bunty pointed to the sergeant and whispered something to Emily, who began to giggle.

  “Tenshun,” roared Bunty in her deep, impressive voice. Emily put her arm out as if it held a rifle and began to march. The teacher, Miss Wilkin, looking like a plump little, well-dressed bird, was far ahead of them, talking to an older girl, and did not turn.

  “Tenshun! Left, right. Left, right. Left, right,” shouted Bunty. Left, right marched Emily, exaggeratedly, giggling.

  “Bunty—oh, Bunty, don’t, please don’t,” cried Ruth, but hopelessly, for others were imitating Emily now, some self-conscious about it, some not at all, girls called Olive—Peggy—Dorothy—Susan—Joan. They let Bunty drill them, holding themselves upright, sloping imaginary guns, marching stiff as soldiers. More and more joined in. Bunty’s orders grew louder, louder. Emily pranced so exaggeratedly that she might have been a horse, not a soldier any more.

  “Oh, Bunty, stop,” cried Ruth.

  “Emily, stop it,” Charlotte said, but Emily glanced at her defiantly and carried on more furiously than ever.

  Some soldiers near the fence had begun to laugh at them, to shout and point. The noise came to Miss Wilkin’s ears at last, and she hurried back, her hair fluffed out, her hat tipped at an idiotic angle. She was one of the youngest schoolteachers. Charlotte had seen her skip upstairs once when she thought no one was watching, as if she were as young as Emily. She wore an engagement ring, which she glanced at constantly and touched and turned, but she was not touching or looking at it now.

  “Olive, Dorothy, Joan,” she was scolding, scarlet in the face. “Bunty, whatever are you doing?” Some of the soldiers whistled and winked at her, which did not help her dignity.

  As the crocodile moved off again, Emily was still giggling, but the grin died when she saw Charlotte’s eyes on her. She looked quickly the other way.

  It had grown very hot. All the grass had been rubbed from the track, and the earth beneath was cracked and white, its dust soon blurring the shine on polished shoes. Emily began to limp and lag and complain about being too hot. Bunty told her briskly to make less fuss. The trees, though bright, were almost too dry, shabby-looking; the grass was yellow and pale beneath a brilliant sky.

  They came to a patch of woodland, oak trees mostly, thickset as old stags, their branches spread like antlers. The children except for Bunty, who was in disgrace, were allowed to wander a little, do as they liked, so Charlotte sat herself down against a tree’s gawky roots and rummaged among its debris of leaves and twigs, odd spots of sunlight swinging about her skirt. She discovered acorns there and took them from their cups, but found when she tried to fit one back that it would not fit so well, though there seemed no difference in either the acorn or its cup.

  She glanced up suddenly to find Emily planted in front of her; rather odd-looking, seen from below, her feet appearing huge, her face elongated, small. She was red with heat, her hat crooked, her mouth and fingers purple with blackberry. She thrust some blackberries down toward Charlotte, and for the first time for days she was looking at her directly, so making Charlotte blush and turn her face down, away.

  “I want you to tell me what’s happening,” Emily said angrily. “Something’s happening. You’re so odd, not like you at all. As if you were someone different. You’ve got to tell me. I won’t not be told any more. I hate it.”

  It would be frightening for Emily, Charlotte thought, quite uncanny and odd. What would she have felt to find a stranger in her sister Emma’s place, yet who was nevertheless supposed to be the real Emma? This was what decided her that Emily must be told; that it would be easier for her to know the truth of it. She remembered, guiltily, what Clare had said, but Emily had not asked her what was happening as she had asked Charlotte now.

  She made her voice as gentle and apologetic as she could.

  “I’m not Clare. That’s why I’m different. Clare’s changed places with me, she’s me. She’ll be back here tomorrow, honestly.”

  “Whatever do you mean? How can you not be Clare? Where is she? Where’s she gone?” asked Emily wildly.

  “It’s all right, really, Emily. She’s gone into my time instead of me, and I’ve come back into the past, to you.”

  “What do you mean? You’re crazy. What do you mean, back into the past?” said Emily, disguising panic by truculence so effectively and for such a long time that Charlotte found her patience hard to keep. She floundered about in words and sentences, trying to explain it different ways round, twenty times at least, and each time Emily cried, “I don’t believe it. Things like that don’t happen. I don’t believe it.”

  “All right, don’t believe it,” cried Charlotte, made angry at last. It did not help to be so hot, to sweat and itch inside her thick school clothes. “All right, don’t believe it. But it’s true, I tell you.”

  “Really, really true?” asked Emily, quieter.

  “Yes, really true. You can ask Clare tomorrow if you don’t believe me.” Charlotte was ashamed now for being angry and spoke more calmly, too. They remained in silence for a little while. There were girls’ voices and the sound of engines from the army camp. Charlotte found a dried bracken frond on Emily’s stocking and crumbled it between her fingers till its brown teeth fell to tiny prickly pieces, not quite to dust on her skin.

  Emily squatted down beside her and played with an acorn and its cup.

  “What�
��s your name then?” she asked.

  “My name?” asked Charlotte.

  “If you’re not Clare.”

  “Charlotte,” said Charlotte.

  “Charlotte?” said Emily, giggling. “What a funny old-fashioned name. How funny you’ve got an old-fashioned name.” And suddenly, she might never have shown disbelief at all. She was not frightened any more, or did not appear to be, not truculent, but excited, pestering Charlotte with questions, insisting on partnering her in the crocodile again and whispering to her about it. Charlotte could at last ask questions for herself about things that puzzled her.

  “How did you know something was odd. How was I different from Clare?” she asked.

  “You were just different. Oh, I don’t know.”

  “You must know, a little.”

  “I suppose—well, I suppose, you didn’t answer the questions. You didn’t—well, you were less bossy, that’s all. And . . .”

  “That can’t be all, it can’t be.”

  “Clare’s fearfully holy, sort of, you know, and good, horribly good. You are good in a way, but different.”

  “Didn’t you guess at all I was really a different person and not just Clare being different?”

  “I don’t know if I did or not,” said Emily, which was not any answer that Charlotte wanted. She had, though, approached the question the wrong way round. What she really wanted to know was why Emily had ever mistaken her for Clare. Were they so very alike? But she hesitated to ask this, for it was the most baffling and in some ways the most worrying question of all.

  Much later, while they were getting ready for bed, Emily said, “Your bed’s different from mine. It’s got those funny wheels on it. I wanted it because it was by the window, but Nurse Gregory made Clare have it instead. Do you think it might have something to do with you and Clare changing? Do you think that if I slept there tonight I might end up in your time, too?”

  “I don’t suppose so for a minute,” said Charlotte firmly. It was certainly an interesting, not to say startling, idea, but not one, she thought, to be explored with Emily now or at any time.

  “Won’t you let me try and see,” pleaded Emily. “Oh, please let me try.”

  “Even if you did change, it would be hopeless. No one would think you were me. You’re much too small, and besides you have brown hair.”

  “Charlotte, will you really change again? Suppose you couldn’t? What will happen when we go to lodgings again and there isn’t this bed? Suppose you got stuck here, and Clare there in your time. Just suppose you did?”

  Emily sounded anxious now. Charlotte wanted to reassure her. “We won’t get stuck,” she said. “Of course we won’t get stuck.”

  Chapter 6

  DEAR Charlotte,

  “Did Emily tell you about the bed? I think she might be right, though I did not tell her so. We should be moving to lodgings now quite soon. We must make quite sure I am in 1918, not you, the day we move. Emily would be so worried if you got caught then, and I in your time, and I would be so worried about her.

  “Yours sincerely, Clare.”

  This Monday, there was no sign of Bunty at breakfast.

  “That rotten Miss Wilkin! She told,” Emily said. “You know, about playing soldiers in the park on Saturday. Poor old Bunty’s in fearful trouble now.”

  “You were just as bad as Bunty,” Charlotte pointed out.

  “I know; wasn’t I lucky not to be seen first,” said Emily.

  At prayers, Ruth was subdued, rather red-eyed, as if she had been crying. Miss Wilkin looked unhappy, too, twisting her engagement ring. Bunty seemed more cheerful than either of them, even though she had to sit on the platform with the staff. She grinned and wriggled on her chair, while Charlotte wondered how she could endure the embarrassment of being there at all, before all those eyes, let alone so cheerfully.

  After Miss Bite had read out to the school her usual reports about the war, she spoke of Bunty in extremest gravity and sorrow. She was a tall, solemn lady who made no attempts at jollity like Charlotte’s own headmistress, Miss Bowser. She wore a high, old-fashioned collar and steel-rimmed spectacles. The only exception to severity was her hair, which she wore piled on her head but which, being very thick and abundant, edged its way out of an armory of pins.

  Bunty, she said, had let the school down, let herself down and the girls she had led astray; let her country down in these grave days; disgraced herself, her school, her king, her country.

  “The way she spoke, anyone would think Bunty had been rude to God,” said Emily at the midmorning break.

  “Emily,” cried Charlotte, “you mustn’t say things like that.”

  But though she was shocked, she wondered, disconcertingly, if she would have been quite so shocked if she had not known Clare would be.

  And Emily said gleefully, “You rise just like Clare when I say that sort of thing, except that I think she’d have said it was wicked to say that, too. I wondered if you’d rise. That’s why I said it, as a matter of fact. Anyone would think you were the same person, wouldn’t they?”

  Even so, when someone handed Charlotte a letter, Emily snatched it away and ran off by herself to read it, crying over her shoulder, “It’s my letter from my father, and Clare’s, but not yours at all; you’re not to look at it.”

  Charlotte walked on alone along a gravel path. It was dry again this morning, yet much less warm, with something in the air that made her feel curiously sad. For the first time she was glad of her thick school clothes. She had awakened briefly in the night to hear the wind blow and had not known which time she had heard it in, her own time or the past. There was a wind today most certainly. It had blown the orange leaves from the ends of chestnut branches and yellow ones from the edges of the limes. It blew them along the path toward her with little dry rustling sounds, until she turned into shelter round the corner of the school buildings and met Elsie Brand, crying over a letter.

  “Are you all right, Elsie?” she asked anxiously.

  “Yes,” said Elsie Brand.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” said Elsie, sniffing. Charlotte walked with her for a while, to keep her company, but need not have bothered for all the notice Elsie took.

  Elsie Brand was a very ugly girl. She had big uneven teeth and dust-colored hair. She had a nose big enough, Bunty said, to hang out a flag on.

  Neither Bunty, kind as she usually was, nor anyone else made the slightest effort to be nice to her.

  “Her name is Brandt really, not Brand. Her father’s German, you see,” Bunty had told Charlotte and Emily conspiratorially. “My mother says all Germans ought to be interned; they’re all spies these days, even the ones who’ve been here years and years.”

  “You must be careful what you say in front of her,” whispered Ruth. “She might send letters to Germany and tell them things.”

  “Whatever sort of things would she have to tell?” asked Emily.

  “Well, if you said my father was with the army in France, she might write that.”

  “Well, that’s silly; they don’t need spies to tell them there’s an army in France. Anyway, no one can send letters to Germany.”

  “And all our letters from here are read anyhow,” added Charlotte.

  “She could write them in code, though, and her mother could send them on by submarine.”

  “I thought you said her father was German, not her mother.”

  “Her mother must like Germans or she wouldn’t have married one.”

  “Well, I think it’s silly. My Aunt Dolly says all this talk of spies is silly. They’d never have let Elsie in the school if she was a spy. Besides she’s much too ugly,” said Emily.

  “She’s not really very ugly, Emily,” protested Charlotte.

  “My mother says there are spies everywhere, and you can’t be too careful,” said Bunty.

  As she walked with Elsie, Charlotte remembered this conversation. The wind caught at Elsie’s letter, tugged and rustled it between
her hands, and Charlotte glanced sideways at it, curious. But immediately she told herself not to be so silly, jerking her eyes away and then back to smile at Elsie, blushing a little.

  Elsie did not even glance at her.

  •

  Despite all the care they took, mistakes were bound to happen now and then in their peculiar circumstances. Teachers had been lenient with their mistakes at first, since Clare and Charlotte were new to school, but they became increasingly less lenient. Once between the two of them they forgot a Latin exercise, and another time both Charlotte and Clare drew a map of Africa for Miss Wilkin’s geography class to Miss Wilkin’s decided puzzlement.

  Worst of all, perhaps, were the piano lessons. Clare had already been learning the piano for four years, Charlotte for barely a year, and though Clare said she tried to play badly in her lessons, she must often have forgotten, judging by the way the teachers reacted to Charlotte’s playing.

  “You’d almost think, Charlotte,” said her own teacher exasperatedly one day, “that you changed into different people from one lesson to the next.”

  Clare’s teacher said nothing. She wore ties like a man’s and brown suits made of pin-striped cloth. She was white and old as a bone, as rigid, too, and she rapped bones, knuckles hard with a ruler when fingers erred. Charlotte’s knuckles she rapped at all the time. Charlotte dreaded her lessons, though she was learning to play scales faster than might have been possible otherwise, practicing furiously in the narrow drafty cells that were practice rooms.

  She felt she had to island herself now more and more, to draw in bridges, like a knight barricading himself in his castle. Otherwise she feared she would give herself away, asking a question, for instance, about something she ought to have known if she spent every day in the same place and time, or doing or saying something that would look odd because serious, conscientious Clare would never do or say such things.

  This vigilance was tiring. Charlotte began to think that the one thing she really wanted was to be by herself for a while, for it seemed impossible ever to be alone at school. It was impossible in Clare’s school, at least. But in her own time, each day after games they had more than half an hour to change before work started again. One afternoon she dressed herself as fast as she could.