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“Oh?” Mr Bagthorpe was not comforted. “So what does she do now for kicks? Poisons people, perhaps – something like that?”
“She is in a very interesting Phase at the present,” said Uncle Parker. “She is doing all kinds of things.”
“Can she come, Father?” begged Rosie. “I think she’s really sweet. I’d look after her.”
“I shouldn’t think the question will arise, Rosie,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “I should hardly think your uncle will have the gall to accept this prize.”
“Why’s that?” enquired Uncle Parker, tipping back his chair with the air of careless ease that particularly aggravated Mr Bagthorpe.
“It’s a moral issue,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “You have never eaten a SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALL in your life.”
“I have not,” conceded Uncle Parker.
“There you are then!” Mr Bagthorpe had the air of a man clinching an argument.
“I don’t get your drift,” said Uncle Parker. “Nothing in the small print says anything about eating the wretched stuff. All one had to do was buy a packet and pick up a leaflet. I did both these things. It will, of course, be glorious for Celia and myself, cruising in the Caribbean. I expect, Henry, you wish you had the chance yourself.”
“I wish no such thing!” snapped Mr Bagthorpe. “There is nothing I can think of I would hate more. Given the choice between the salt mines and the Caribbean, I’d plump for the former any time.”
“Someone might be running a competition for the salt mines,” suggested Uncle Parker. “You must keep your eyes open.”
“Luckily,” said Mr Bagthorpe, “I have work to do in life. Luckily, I have a service to give to my fellow men and do not have to fill in my pointless existence wafting round among palm trees drinking gin and tonic by the bucketful.”
“Hallo, Uncle Parker.” William came in. “Jolly good work. What was the slogan?”
“Tell him, Jack,” said Uncle Parker wearily.
Jack told him. Even he was beginning to tire of repeating it, and could see how weak it sounded.
“You’re joking,” said William after a slight pause.
“No,” said Mr Bagthorpe, “he is not, unfortunately, joking. I often wonder whether we should have brought children into a world of such colossal triviality.”
“Well, if you don’t mind my saying,” said William, with true Bagthorpian ruthlessness, “I should think the sales of SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS will plummet when that gets out. Go into a fatal nosedive, I should think.”
“SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS will be bankrupt within the month,” affirmed Mr Bagthorpe.
“When’re you going?” Jack asked. He was going to miss Uncle Parker. He got on well with him, and could feel equal in his company.
“Next week, we thought,” Uncle Parker replied.
Mr Bagthorpe rose.
“I must get back to work,” he said witheringly, and went.
“I saw that competition, Mr Parker,” said Mrs Fosdyke then. “And d’you know, I nearly went in myself. Worked a slogan out, and all, I did, and never got round to sending it off.”
“What was the slogan?” asked Rosie.
“Well…” Mrs Fosdyke cleared her throat, stood up straight and twitched her overall. “Not very good. Not like Mr Parker’s. What I thought of was: ‘Puffballs in fields is poisonous but out of packets is delicious.’”
There was a puzzled silence.
“Er – what exactly…?” William groped for an explanation without wishing to appear completely nonplussed.
“There’s these things grow in fields, see, like mushrooms,” explained Mrs Fosdyke, quite pink with the interest she was creating. “Look a bit like mushrooms, but if you was to eat them they’d kill you, you’d die in agony, my ma used to tell me. Fact is, I look at every mushroom I cook, I do, to be on the safe side. So you see I thought my slogan would be quite a good one, to let people know it wasn’t that kind of puffball.”
“Mmmmm. Yes.” William tried to sound enthusiastic but came nowhere near it. “I don’t think that would have got you far, though. Too long, for one thing. And I don’t think the breakfast cereal people would want the word ‘poisonous’ in their adverts.”
“But they’re not poisonous!” cried Mrs Fosdyke. “That’s the whole point!”
“Anyway, it was a good try,” Jack told her. “I don’t think I could have thought of that.”
“Oh well!” She shrugged and turned back to the sink. “I don’t pretend to be clever.”
She began to rattle dishes, which she could do with the best.
“I’ll go and do my violin practice, I think,” Rosie said.
William followed her, in a drifting kind of way, hands in his pockets. He had had this kind of look about him ever since the Danish au pair, Atlanta, had left the previous week. If his ears had been the drooping kind, like Zero’s, they would have drooped.
“I am glad,” observed Uncle Parker, “that I do not live in this house. Everybody is always doing something. Does anybody ever do nothing?”
“I do,” Jack told him. “And Zero.”
“Of course. Good for you.”
“Not what they say,” said Jack glumly. “Sometimes I wish that being a Prophet and Phenomenon had come off, even if it would’ve been hard work.”
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“Rubbish!” said Uncle Parker briskly. “It would have made an old man of you. Where’s Grandma?”
He wanted Grandma to know about his prize because she had a very low estimate of him. It had been very low indeed since the day, some five years previously, when he had run over Thomas, a cantankerous ginger tom who had, she declared, been the light of her life. He had been the light of no one else’s, having been given to scratching, biting and attacking from corners, and none of the other Bagthorpes held his extinction against Uncle Parker. Some of them actually thanked him for it.
Uncle Parker had a secret admiration for Grandma and wanted her good opinion, though he would never have admitted this.
“Grandma’s sitting in the dining-room,” Jack told him. “She’s feeling low and talking about Signs again. She’s going on about her Birthday Portrait and all that.”
At Grandma’s Birthday Party the whole table had gone up in flames and burnt out the dining-room before the fire brigade got there. One of the first things to go up had been Rosie’s Birthday Portrait of Grandma, and ever since Grandma had taken this as a Sign, and thought it showed that the Fates, in some indefinable way, had it in for her. Every now and then she would go and sit on her own in the devastated dining-room and brood about this.
“I’ll go and cheer her up,” said Uncle Parker.
“You’ll only go and remind her of Thomas,” said Jack, “and make her worse.”
“It’s my belief,” remarked Mrs Fosdyke, who put her spoke into the wheels of anyone’s conversation if she felt like it, “that Mrs Bagthorpe Senior is too drawn into herself.”
“Drawn into herself, you reckon?” said Uncle Parker.
“All that Breathing, for one thing,” went on Mrs Fosdyke, encouraged by the interest in her diagnosis. “It’s time she stopped Breathing and went in for something else. Something that’d take her out of herself more.”
It occurred to Jack that if Grandma were to stop breathing, she would most certainly be taken out of herself – permanently. He knew, however, that what was being alluded to was not the common or garden kind of breathing that keeps people alive, but the kind of Breathing she had been doing daily since she had read one of Mrs Bagthorpe’s books about Yoga.
“What sort of thing had you in mind, Mrs Fosdyke?” asked Uncle Parker.
Mrs Fosdyke, hugely flattered by the unaccustomed interest being shown in her opinions, turned from the sink and wiped her hands on her pinafore.
“What I think,” she opined, with the gravity of a Harley Street Man delivering a long-awaited diagnosis, “is that Mrs Bagthorpe Senior should take up Bingo.”
“Bingo, by Jove!” Uncle Parker was not easily put off balance, but he was now.
“Should what?” said Jack incredulously.
Grandma was a notorious cheat at anything from Scrabble to Ludo. Sometimes, at the end of a game of Dominoes, for instance, she would say that a domino with five pips on it had six on it, or even three, and would play it accordingly. She also, at Snakes and Ladders, moved her counter up snakes and ladders alike, and never came down anything. At Monopoly, if she saw funds were getting low, she would declare that the Bank had forgotten to pay her £200 for passing Go on the last five rounds, and would snatch two five-hundred-pound notes out of the Bank before anyone could stop her. She got away with it by being so old and obstinate, and by being able to keep up an argument longer than anyone else. Mostly when the Bagthorpes wanted to play games they went into quiet corners to do it, out of her way.
Mrs Fosdyke had been with the Bagthorpes long enough to know about Grandma’s cheating, but was clearly not unduly perturbed.
“She won’t be allowed to cheat,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not allowed.”
“She will,” said Jack. “I bet she would.”
“Can’t.” Mrs Fosdyke shook her head firmly. “They check up, see.”
“She’d tell them they’d checked up wrong,” Jack said.
“You can’t argue,” said Mrs Fosdyke. “There’s no arguing allowed. They’re ever so strict.”
“I think that Grandma would like Bingo,” said Uncle Parker. “You’re absolutely right, Mrs Fosdyke. Spot on. The very thing.”
“I could take her along with me.” Mrs Fosdyke was enchanted. “There’s ever such big prizes – there’s money, of course, and then there’s dinner services and blankets and non-sticks and all sorts. My sister at Pinxton won the Jackpot two weeks back on the day when they all have a link-up over the telephone, and she won 400 pound!”
“Crikey!” Jack was impressed. “I wouldn’t mind a go. Though I’m not much good at numbers.”
“Oh, you don’t have to be that,” Mrs Fosdyke assured him. “There’s no skill. No adding up, or anything. But it does take you out of yourself, you see, and that’s why I thought it’d be the very thing for Mrs Bagthorpe Senior.”
“I shall go and tell her this minute,” announced Uncle Parker. “A million thanks, Mrs Fosdyke. An inspired thought.”
Mrs Fosdyke glowed.
“Come on, Zero,” said Jack, and followed Uncle Parker.
Grandma was sitting on one of the new chairs that had been bought following the fire, contemplating the scene before her. The builders had been in and done some replastering and replaced some burned-up window frames and floorboards, but the room still looked like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. Everywhere was blacked up and charred-looking, and tatters of curtain still dangled from the buckled brass poles. Grandma looked as if she were reliving her Birthday Party in all its awful detail.
“Hallo, Grandma,” said Uncle Parker cheerily. “Nice day.”
She did not move her gaze.
“I know you by your voice,” she said. “You ran over Thomas, that shining jewel of a cat. You cut him off in his glorious prime.”
“Sorry about that, Grandma.” Uncle Parker apologised for at least the hundredth time. “I’d offer to get you another, but I knew he was irreplaceable.”
“He was irreplaceable,” said Grandma mournfully. “No cat could equal him for beauty, grace and gentleness.”
(This was a statement that needed challenging. Thomas had been ill-favoured to a degree, and inspired hate and terror in all who knew him. It was lucky that Mr Bagthorpe was not there to point all this out.)
“I think a lot about Reincarnation these days,” Grandma went on to herself. “I like to think who I would like to be Reincarnated as. I can’t decide. I am bound to say I would prefer not to be a Bagthorpe again. I should like to think I would be promoted to a Higher Plane.”
“Got a bit of a treat for you, Grandma,” said Uncle Parker, beavering away at the cheerfulness.
“Life is but a dream,” remarked Grandma vaguely. “Like as the waves make to the pebbled shore so do our moments hasten to their ends.’”
Uncle Parker was clearly batting on a sticky wicket.
“Heard about my prize, Grandma?” he asked.
“What prize?” said Grandma. “When you get old, you don’t get prizes.”
“Ah!” Uncle Parker was triumphant. “But you do! There’s a way you could win prizes the whole time.”
“When I was a little child, I once won a bag of macaroons at a party,” said Grandma wistfully. “Those days will never come again.”
“They will, Grandma,” said Jack. “Honestly. That’s what he’s trying to tell you.”
“I love macaroons,” she said. She seemed, marginally, to be coming back from wherever she had been.
“What would you say,” asked Uncle Parker, “to a blanket? Or some non-sticks, whatever they are, or a dinner service? What would you say to four hundred pounds?”
“Four hundred pounds? Where?” She was with them now all right.
“Yours for the winning,” Uncle Parker told her with sublime confidence. “All you do, you play a game.”
“Oh, I like playing games,” Grandma said. “I always win at games.”
Uncle Parker and Jack exchanged glances. Grandma was evidently right back on the ball again now, because she said:
“I have a natural aptitude for games.”
“You certainly have a natural aptitude for winning them,” conceded Uncle Parker. “One way or another. I’m bound to say none of us are any match for you.”
“This game would be a new challenge, though, Grandma,” said Jack. This was a guileful statement. Grandma rarely could resist a challenge.
“Whatever it is,” she replied, “I shall expect to win.”
“That’s the spirit, Grandma!” Uncle Parker told her. “So you’re on, then? Bingo tonight, is it?”
“Bingo?” repeated Grandma. “Is that a game? Why do the Parkinsons call their dog after a game? I thought it was a name for a dog.”
“Because it’s a good game,” Uncle Parker told her. “You’ll find out. And by the way, I might as well just mention it – I’ve just won a cruise for two in the Caribbean. I won it writing a slogan for SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS.”
