Step by Wicked Step Read online

  Pixie flicked over the page.

  ‘I’m not sure he even keeps that one very much longer.’

  Ralph reached for his drink.

  ‘Go on,’ he ordered Pixie. ‘Carry on reading.’

  ‘Yes,’ Colin said. ‘Go on. And just be sure you don’t miss out a single word.’

  Turning to find his sandwich, he missed the looks of sheer astonishment that came his way. Pixie picked up the album. Over the page, the writing became much tidier and easier to read. If even stare-round-the-room, pay-no-attention Colin was so taken up with the story he was determined to hear the end, she’d carry on.

  I shall not tire my reader with the details of my flight. Enough to tell you that it is easy to trade a brand-new school suit for old rags, and orphans are two-a-penny down at the docks. When a great ship strains at the tide, and needs a cabin boy, nobody asks the lad who speaks as roughly as a gardener’s son, and claims to be Dick Digby, whether his mother knows he’s off to sea. And, for the first time in my life, I wished I’d paid more attention to my lessons. If I’d had my stepfather’s globe more firmly in my mind back then, I might be better able now to chart for you the oceans I sailed across, the seas I saw, and our strange ports of call. Twice, in the next few years of dazzling sunrises and haunting sunsets, our ship came home. And twice, instead of doing my duty as a son and brother, and marching up the drive to face my stepfather’s wrath, my mother’s tears, and all my sister’s kisses, I stood like a trespasser in the shadow of the lime walk, and watched the house.

  House? Did I call it house? It was more like a tomb. For, as I watched, it seemed to me that all the light and life of my old home had drained from its very stones. Of my mother and sister there was no sign at all – not even the shadow of a dress billowing in front of a window. And in this silent mausoleum where now my stepfather would be at home (the perfect resting place for a black bat!), there was no glimpse of him. Lucy, I saw. But she was hurrying across the courtyard huddled and weeping against the wind; and knowing from early childhood her firm belief in ghosts, I dared not step out from the shadow of the trees, for fear of frightening her half-way to death.

  And Digby, too. A dozen times he stopped his digging and turned my way. The look on his face was hopeful – disbelieving. But, peering more closely at the dark dell in which I stood, he shook his grizzled head as if to tell himself he was a foolish old man dreaming of better times, and lowered his shoulders to his work.

  That was the last time I saw Old Harwick Hall before this very night. I crept away, back to sea, where fortune shone on me even through storms and shipwrecks. Seaman. Midshipman. Captain. I rose as swiftly as if I swarmed a rope. And it was idly sitting at my Captain’s table that my eye fell on the small square of print that brought me home.

  We seek news of Richard Clayton Harwick of Old Harwick Hall who is to write to Riddle & Flook (Solicitors) to learn something to his advantage.

  To my advantage! Shame on Riddle and Flook! Only such men of dust could think the deaths of three unhappy souls to my advantage! Oh, yes! Now I am owner of Old Harwick Hall. All of these lands are mine. And I am rich. And what’s the good of that? My mother died of heartbreak, my stepfather of fury when he first realized that no trick of his could keep the house from me. And, as for my dearest Charlotte! Read, if your tears will let you, this copy of the letter I found waiting for me in my tower room.

  My dearest, dearest Richard,

  For you are still dearest to me, though you have been so cruel. Better if you had found the courage to stay, and show patience, and take your part in our troubles, not heap on more by vanishing. Things have been hard with all of us since you left. First Mother spent a fortune seeking you, and all of us suffered Mr Coldstone’s anger as money slipped steadily away. ‘What! Yet another costly search! Let the ungrateful boy be lost for ever!’ ‘Lilith! Waste more of your dwindling fortune on this folly and I will make you pay for it twice over!’

  And so he did. Last year she died (of him too close, and you too far). And, from the day that she was buried, he would not give a penny to look for you. (‘Why hunt for such a knave?’) It fell to me to keep the search alive. I have no money of my own. And so, last year, upon my sixteenth birthday, I married Charles Devere. I do not love him as I know I should, and he cannot make me happy. But he is prosperous, and he has promised to keep up the search. Riddle and Flook, his solicitors, daily put notices in every paper. (Oh, Richard! Sometimes I think, not to have seen them, you must have fled half-way across the globe, to Alexandria, or Chittagong!)

  And perhaps you will never see them. Or this sad letter. But, if you do, take a moment to weep, for this will be the first and only letter you will receive from your loving sister Charlotte. If I should live, I’d not allow a shadow on your homecoming. But if I die in fever of childbirth, as so many do, then Charles will send this letter to our old home, to tell you why you return to cold, cold silence.

  Fare you well, brother,

  Your devoted,

  You cannot read her name for tears. First hers. Then mine. Oh, how I wept last night. And now, as morning breaks, I have to choose whether to stay and face the damage I have done by piling one wrong on another, till all I loved was broken from the strain; or whether to pick up my bags and disappear again, shutting this tower room for ever behind me, and leaving it to the spiders in their webs to quarrel whether I was right or wrong.

  I spin the globe, and memories of Charlotte fill the room. Daylight creeps over the sill, where the small broken cow stands so forlornly.

  Will I go or stay?

  ‘Go on.!

  Pixie laid down the album.

  ‘I can’t. That’s it.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes. That’s where it stops.’

  ‘Stops dead? Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  She raised the album, to show them.

  They sat in silence until Robbo said:

  ‘He must have gone, then.’

  ‘Picked up his bags, and slipped away,’ agreed Claudia. ‘How awful!’

  ‘Not just for him,’ Pixie reminded her sharply. ‘What about Lucy and Mr Digby? What do you think happened to them?’

  Once again, Colin astonished them by speaking up.

  ‘I expect, like his mother and sister, they just had to keep waiting and hoping,’ he said. ‘And, I can tell you, it isn’t very nice, just having to keep waiting and hoping.’

  He spoke with such a depth of feeling that it was obvious he’d had to do too much of both himself.

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Pixie fiercely after a moment, ‘that no one should make decisions that will change the lives of everyone round them without thinking about it for a very long time.’

  ‘I did once,’ Claudia said. ‘I made a decision in the time it took to blink.’

  ‘I bet it didn’t change everything round you.’

  Claudia said thoughtfully:

  ‘Not quite as much as if I’d run away to sea. But it certainly did change things.’

  Ralph stretched above his head and flicked off the light switch. Shadows filled the room.

  ‘Stories don’t have to be written,’ he reminded Claudia. ‘This is the night for stories. Off you go.’

  CLAUDIA’S STORY:

  Green Pyjamas

  Not long ago, my mum and dad split up. I didn’t see it coming. I knew that they quarrelled a lot. You couldn’t miss it. But I didn’t think it was anything special. I’d put on my headphones, or turn up the sound on the television, and they always seemed to make up again pretty quickly. One day my mum would be moaning about my dad:

  ‘I’m fed up with the way he spends all his time running that café. We hardly ever see him, and when we do, he’s too tired to be pleasant.’

  But the next day, if I said anything, she’d take a fit.

  ‘Don’t talk about Daddy like that, please!’

  And then, one day, he was gone. I came home from school, and everything in
the house was moved around. My bedroom radio was in the kitchen. My jackets and shoes were spread out more neatly in the downstairs cupboard because all his coats and boots had disappeared. The frog mug I gave him for his birthday wasn’t on its hook. And some of the photos round the house were gone – just ones of me and him.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Mum said. ‘It’s just that your father and I aren’t getting on very well at the moment, so he’s gone to Granny’s house while we calm down.’

  She tried to sound cheerful about it. But I knew it was worse than she was letting on. (Usually, he calms down working at the café, and she calms down on the phone to her sister. No one had ever gone to calm down at Granny’s before. And no one had ever taken a radio and wellies and photos.)

  He came back quite a lot at first. Not to stay. Just for tea (and more arguments). I’m not completely stupid. Sometimes I listened behind doors, and sometimes I switched my headphones up so loudly that they leaked, but didn’t put them in my ears properly, so Mum and Dad didn’t realize I was eavesdropping as I walked past them and up the stairs to my bedroom. And sometimes I asked the two of them:

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing,’ they kept saying. ‘Don’t worry. It will all be sorted out.’

  Then, suddenly, everything changed. There was a flood of phone calls late one night, and Mum was in a rage, and even Granny (who’d been very busy ‘not taking sides’) had a huge row with Dad. And that was the first time I heard the name ‘Stella’. Mum spat it down the phone to her sister so hard that I had to write it on a sheet of paper in curly felt-pen letters and stare at it, before it turned back from a swear word to a name again.

  And, after that, my dad hardly dared come near the house. (I think he thought Mum might kill him.) Sometimes he phoned to get to talk to me, and from the freezing way Mum went silent the moment she heard his voice, and held the phone away from her as if it were a bad smell, I’d know it was him. To try and stop her looking like that, I’d rush across so fast I’d trip on the rug, or tip over a milk bottle, or something stupid, and feel embarrassed when I spoke to him.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Good day at school?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Anything happen?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What, nothing?’

  I’d look over my shoulder. Mum would be busy wiping up the milk I’d spilled, or clattering dishes as if she wasn’t listening. But I knew she was.

  ‘Want to come over on Saturday?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘No,’ he’d say, getting irritated. ‘If you’d like.’

  I’d glance at Mum, who was still listening.

  ‘All right, then.’

  I’d try not to sound too keen, so as not to upset Mum. And after I’d put the phone down, I’d realize I wasn’t that keen, anyway. If I went over to Granny’s to visit Dad, I’d miss Natasha’s party, or going to the shops with Shreela, or working on my project with Flora. And Granny’s house was boring. No more boring than usual, but boring all the same. There isn’t much to do. None of my stuff is there. And Dad just seemed to sink in his armchair, even more bored than me, and ask impossible questions.

  ‘Are you all right, then?’

  Or:

  ‘How’s Mum?’

  What was I supposed to answer? They’re always on at you to tell the truth, but what was I supposed to say? ‘No, I’m not all right. I hate this, and it’s stupid! I don’t care how much you and Mum quarrel. I don’t even care about this mysterious Stella nobody will talk about. I just want things back the way they used to be, with you home first every Wednesday, and all the fuss about what time I had to go to bed, and you forever complaining about me not turning the hot tap off properly, and telling me to take more care over my homework. I want you back, picking the bits of mushroom off your pizza and dropping them onto my plate as if they were slices of fried slug. We had a pizza yesterday, Mum and me, and suddenly I missed you so much that I started crying, and Mum said, “Oh, please don’t start, I can’t bear it!” and I threw my slice of pizza on the floor and slammed upstairs, and locked my door on her. And then there was Mum one side of the door, and me the other, both of us howling our eyes out because of you. So don’t ask me “Are you all right, then?” and “How’s Mum?” or I might answer you! Don’t even ask!’

  Claudia broke off. Outside, the wind still whistled through the trees, but, in the room, the silence was palpable. Nobody even breathed.

  ‘Are you still listening?’

  Ralph’s voice came out of the darkness.

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Claudia. Of course we’re listening. Just carry on.’

  Dad stayed at Granny’s house till after Christmas. It was the first time we’d ever had a separate Christmas, and it was horrid. I had to choose between not having my presents from Dad on the right day, or not opening them in front of him. (He said he didn’t mind, but it was obvious he really did.) And then, on Boxing Day, I had to go to Granny’s. And that was horrid, too. Mum and Dad were icily polite to one another when I was dropped off. And Granny had insisted on saving the big meal for when we were all together, but I was already sick of turkey and Christmas pudding and cake, so I felt terrible, and so did they.

  And it was that night that I met Daddy’s Stella. She wasn’t in the least what I expected. Up till the moment he pointed her out, walking down the street on the other side, I hadn’t realized I had a picture of her in my brain at all. But when I saw her – sort of plain and mousy and dressed in a long brown coat – I realized that I’d been thinking all along that she was tall and blonde and glittery, with fluttering eyelashes and painted eyes. To be quite honest, I think my mum’s a whole lot better-looking than Stella, especially when she’s dressed to go out. But Stella was smiling and friendly, and she came over at once and said, ‘Hello, you must be Claudia,’ and started asking all that stuff about whether I’d had a nice Christmas, and what presents I’d been given, and how much longer I had off school.

  ‘Were you going anywhere special? Come for a walk with us,’ Dad said to her in a stagey, false way that made it obvious they’d fixed this whole little accidental meeting up between them. (They’d probably even synchronized watches.) And I was furious, because I hate being treated as if I’m an idiot, and can’t work out what’s going on behind my back. So I said nothing, and stared down at my feet. And I stopped answering her questions since I was so annoyed. Dad walked one side of me, and she walked the other (though I expect they’d have preferred to be arm in arm). And she kept talking brightly while I marched along as fast as I could, to make it clear I wanted the whole business over as soon as possible. I had to listen a bit, so I could answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ whenever she asked me a question. But most of the time I kept my head down and my eyes half closed, to make the frost on the pavement glitter and dance.

  And, in the end, Stella gave up.

  ‘I ought to be getting back now.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said, which was extremely rude because, as far as I could make out, we were miles from anywhere. Dad gave me a little dig in the ribs, to remind me of my manners; and I gave him a really vicious poke back, and muttered something under my breath.

  ‘What did you say?’

  But, when he saw my face, he knew better than to make me repeat it. Well, not in front of Stella, anyway.

  And she was bright red now, and just staring bravely ahead of her. She walked even faster than I did after that, and practically ran up the steps to her front door.

  Then she turned back to face us.

  ‘Goodnight, Claudia,’ she said.

  That’s all.

  And I knew then that she’d be seeing him later, to say goodnight. Either he’d fib to Granny and say he had to go back and check on things at the café. Or he’d make some excuse to go out for a while after I was asleep. And I felt cheated, because I’d only been persuaded to come to Granny’s house
because of him, and somehow, if he was slipping off to see Stella later, it made me sort of second-best, and not important, as if I really didn’t matter much, and might just as well have stayed home with Mum, where both of us would have been happier.

  And I hated him for it. I wouldn’t speak to him all the way back. When Granny asked us, ‘Did you have a nice walk?’ I burst out, ‘He did! I didn’t!’ and stormed off to bed. I thought Granny might come up to tuck me in, and tell me not to fret, everything would come out in the wash, and she bet I couldn’t even remember what I was worrying about last year, and all the other things she used to say to cheer me up, when I was younger. But she preferred to stay downstairs and have a row with Dad about his ruining my visit to their house with his impatience, and sneakily dragging me off to meet ‘that woman’ behind her back. If he couldn’t be trusted, she told him, maybe he’d better start looking for somewhere else to stay till things were sorted out.

  ‘I suppose you’d like me to go back!’ he shouted. ‘Well, maybe you haven’t grasped this yet, but her mother doesn’t want me!’

  That made me so furious I pulled my fingers out of my ears, scrambled out of bed and rushed to the top of the stairs.

  ‘Don’t call her that!’ I yelled.

  Dad came out in the hall and stared up at me.

  ‘Call her what?’

  ‘That!’

  I banged the door so hard the wardrobe shook. I hate it when they say that. ‘Your father…’ ‘Her mother…’ ‘Your daughter…’ As if, just because we’re all separated, we don’t even remember one another’s names any longer!

  Next day, my dad moved out of Granny’s house, straight in with Stella. Mum was as shocked as I was when she heard. But he made a point of telling her, next time he came to fetch me, that he had nowhere else to go. With the café doing so badly, how could he afford to pay rent while he was still coughing up for us in our house?

  ‘Maybe the café would do a bit better if you spent more time there.’