Читать книгу The Catnappers - Ann Pilling - Страница 10

Chapter Five

As she puffed up the steps to the front door it opened all by itself, as if by magic. But Miss McGee was standing just behind it, her face all swollen with red rage, and there was a sickening smell and a haze in the air, as if the house had recently been on fire.

“I’m sorry, McGee,” Kitty whimpered, knowing that her friend was about to explode about the pudding. “But I got held up in the garden. There really is a family with children at Number 26, well, there’s a child, a dear little boy called Timothy Joe. It’s wonderful.”

But Miss McGee took no notice. “You went out, Kitty,” she said, through gritted teeth, “and you left your timer behind you, and you forgot. My pudding’s boiled dry, my beautiful pudding that cost me all that time and effort and money. There’s a horrible mess all over the kitchen. It’s a tragedy.”

Kitty didn’t answer, there was no point. She had seen Miss McGee in this angry mood before. What she must do was to put matters right as quickly as possible. She walked past her friend and went down the basement stairs into the kitchen, to see what she could do.

The haze down below was worse than in the hall: it was like thick fog and the horrible burnt smell made Kitty cough. She pulled out a hanky, squashed it against her nose, and spluttered into it. Her eyes began to stream but she could see, though everything was rather blurred, McGee’s very best saucepan, all blackened with soot, and the pudding basin cracked right in half and, on the ceiling, a huge, dark ring, like a thundercloud.

“It’s a tragedy,” McGee repeated. “It’s a real tragedy.” Sagging down on to the nearest chair, she began to cry.

One part of Kitty was very sorry indeed but another part wasn’t. Yes, it was terrible that she had forgotten the pudding but it wasn’t the end of the world. She pointed this out to Miss McGee. “I’m really sorry, McGee,” she told her, “but I was so excited about the new family. Listen, I’ll paint the ceiling this afternoon; I’ll stand on the table and I’ll paint it, and I’ll buy you a new pan for Christmas. It’ll be an extra present. And I’ll make another pudding for us, I’ll do it right now.” Picking up a cookery book, she started to turn the pages, she even started to hum.

It was the humming that did it, the humming was the last straw to her friend McGee. “I don’t want you to make another pudding,” she wailed. “It’s a tragedy.”

It was Kitty’s turn to get cross now. “Don’t be silly, Florence,” she snapped. “If you call spoiling a silly old pudding a tragedy, what do you call it if something really awful happens? What do you call it if someone has a terrible accident, or even dies? Now that’s what I call a tragedy.”

McGee did not reply. Instead she snatched up the lid of the saucepan, which was lying on the kitchen floor, and hurled it at Kitty’s head. She missed and the lid hit a row of plates on a dresser and broke two of them. McGee, who had been sniffing miserably, now started to howl in earnest. In complete silence, like a person on television with the sound switched off, Kitty raised the cookery book she had been reading to find the pudding recipe, and threw it across the room in her friend’s direction. She missed, too, (neither of the old ladies was a very good shot), and the book plopped into the sink where the pages spread out like wings. “Now my best cookery book’s ruined as well!” McGee wailed, and she buried her face in her hands.

“You are RIDICULOUS!” screeched Kitty.

“Not so ridiculous as YOU,” screeched Miss McGee.

Then she threw a wooden spoon at Kitty, then a nutmeg grater, and Kitty threw another cookery book and an egg, and they both screeched and screeched.

In the middle of it all, Nicholas, who had come running in through his cat-flap for tea, ran out again, and pelted right along all four sides of Golden Square and away, and was gone all that night.

And in the morning, when the two rather shamefaced old ladies met in the kitchen for their breakfast, he was still missing.