Читать книгу The Secrets of Greystone House - Marcus Attwater - Страница 6

From their names I had assumed Ian’s cousins Rory and Jamie to be boys, but Jamie is a girl – it is short for Jemima. They are twins, though, and the same age as me. Rory is short and stocky, with untidy brown hair, Jamie is slighter and darker, and a bit of a tomboy. They come to Greystone House so often that they have bedrooms on the first floor which they regard as their own. Ian introduces us, careful of his manners, and then forgets all about me in his hurry to discuss with Rory everything that has happened to them since they last saw each other.

Mrs Knight, the twins’ mother, is Mr Hambleton’s sister. They live in Lincoln, and they are brought to Greystone House in a motor car by their father. He stays for tea before driving all the way back. ‘See you in ten days,’ he says to Rory and Jamie.

‘I thought you were to be here all summer?’

‘Yes, but father and mother will also come to stay here for a week, when it is his holiday,’ Jamie explains, ‘Shall we go outside? I’ve missed being here so, I want to say hullo to Biscuit and see the fish in the pond and there may be ripe plums and…’

I think Ian may forget about me now he has Rory to play with, but no one objects when I trail into the garden after them. With the twins’ arrival our games suddenly become more interesting and less predictable. At a moment’s notice the house turns into a palace or a stockade, the garden becomes a vast sea or a rolling prairie. Or, as today, Sherwood Forest.

Rory is Robin Hood, Ian is the Sheriff of Nottingham. Gwendolyn is King John and has consented to be robbed of the royal treasure chest (her workbasket), and I’m to be the merry men.

I don’t mind being given the less glamorous roles, knowing I’m not one of the family, and I like being on Rory’s side, he’s more fun to play with than his cousin. Rory-as-Robin mimics taking aim at the Sheriff, and complains that it’s no use being a crack archer without a bow and arrows. ‘We should make ourselves some.’

Jamie, fed up with being Maid Marian (none of us is entirely sure what she does in the story), points out that there are plenty of branches lying beside the potting shed from when Thompson pruned the fruit trees. We troop past the conservatory terrace, where Gwendolyn is sitting with the royal treasure chest at her feet, sorting her embroidery silks. She looks more like the Lady of Shalott than the King of England. ‘Am I going to be robbed or not?’

‘We’re going to make bows and arrows,’ Rory calls back.

‘Then I suppose it is not. Don’t be late for tea.’

When teatime arrives, I go to the kitchen while the others run upstairs. Aunt Helen and Gladys are preparing the trays, and as Nanny takes the one for the nursery she looks at my own tea, set on the kitchen table. ‘It’s ridiculous, really, him having the same tea down here as the other children have upstairs. Why don’t we let Jack eat with the others? It will be more fun for him and less work for you.’

Aunt Helen looks doubtful. ‘If you think madam won’t mind.’

‘Madam won’t even notice. And the children get along fine.’

There is something here which I do not understand. I would like to have my tea with the others, but Aunt Helen seems to think that wouldn’t quite do. And I recall Gwendolyn’s displeasure the other day, when Nanny suggested I accompany her and Ian. However, another tray is fetched, and I follow Nanny and Gladys upstairs.

‘Oh good, you’re eating with us,’ Rory says, ‘What do you think we’d better use for bowstrings?’

A day or two later Rory and I are ready to take our bows and arrows out to the bit of wood. The others come along to see the fun.

‘You’re not really going to shoot any rabbits, are you?’ Jamie asks, anxiously swinging on the gate of Five Willows Farm. Rory says boldly that of course we are, and carefully selects his straightest arrow (which isn’t very straight). We soon find there is no need for Jamie to worry, though, the rabbits are quite safe. Our bows may look impressive, but the arrows all flop to the ground only a few yards in front of our feet. I’m disappointed we can’t make them fly any distance, but also secretly relieved. I don’t really want to kill anything. Last week Bobby Erskine came to the kitchen door to offer Aunt Helen some rabbits he’d killed. I didn’t like to see their little limp bodies with the blood clotting in the pretty fur. But I can’t say that, of course. Jamie can because she’s a girl. I start puzzling over this, and forget all about hunting.

‘I’m going to make a catapult instead,’ Rory announces, ‘I don’t see how Robin Hood could shoot so far in a forest in any case. The trees are in the way.’

II

On Monday just after luncheon, a small dirty black motor car comes bowling up the drive.

‘Who’s that?’ Rory asks,

‘Must be the tutor,’ Ian says, making a face, ‘He’s called Braithwaite.'

I’d quite forgotten that Ian and Rory were supposed to have lessons in the holidays. We watch from the schoolroom window as Mr Braithwaite gets out of his car. He is young, and not at all what one would imagine a schoolmaster to be like (if we had still been playing Sherlock Holmes we would have got it wrong, and said he was an undergraduate, like Arthur). Dolly opens the front door, and Mr Matthews comes to take the car to the garage. Mr Braithwaite is shown to his room and has tea and dinner with the grown-ups, so we don’t meet him until next morning.

He comes into the schoolroom just as our breakfast things are being cleared away. Gwendolyn whispers ‘good luck’ and slips out quietly behind Gladys.

‘Good morning all, my name is Frank Braithwaite. Now, let me see. Mr Hambleton said he had two boys and two girls needing tuition in English, Latin and History.’ He looks us over. We are plainly one girl and three boys.

We tell him our names, and Ian explains that Gwendolyn is doing well enough at her school to be excused extra lessons.

‘I see. And you are moving up to the second form I understand, Ian?’

‘Yes. But Mr Overton said I would never keep up with second form Latin if I didn’t have coaching, and my marks for history were bad.’

‘Jamie and I have been going to the same day school,’ Rory explains in turn, ‘And we’re both bad at English. I’ll be going to Ian’s school next term, and Jamie is going to boarding school as well.’

‘Then we’d better have you do English and Latin.’

‘Do I have to do Latin as well?’ Jamie asks.

‘Will you be learning Latin at your new school? If that’s the case it will be nice for you to have a head start, just like your brother.’

Jamie shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. But I’m going to the same school as Gwendolyn.’

Mr Braithwaite nods. ‘Ian, perhaps you would like to ask Gwendolyn to come in here for a moment?’

Ian goes off in search of his sister and Mr Braithwaite turns to me. ‘And you?’

‘Jack is just staying here,’ Rory says, ‘He doesn’t need a tutor really.’

‘I’m going to grammar school next term,’ I explain, ‘I’d like to have Latin lessons, too, if I may.’ Surely my new school will be less daunting if I am already familiar with one of its strange new subjects.

‘Very well, you and Rory can begin at the beginning, and then Ian can help you with what he already knows. I’ll be giving you a test in English and History tomorrow to see where you stand.’

Gwendolyn, when consulted, explains that only girls in the classical school take Latin, and girls in the modern school like herself have Domestic Science. ‘My friend Penny who is coming to stay is in the classical school. But they don’t start Latin until the second form.’

Jamie heaves a sigh of relief, and is excused until the first History lesson tomorrow. Ian mutters mutinously that he doesn’t see the use of bally Latin – it’s not as if a businessman like father needs to know Latin. He doesn’t want to be a doctor or a professor.

Mr Braithwaite doesn’t take this in bad part. ‘That may be true, but it’s more useful than you think. If you know Latin, other languages like Spanish or Italian become a lot easier to learn.’

‘But we don’t have to learn Spanish or Italian,’ Rory exclaims, horrified at the idea.

‘No, but you’ll have to learn French. And you never know about the other languages. They are useful for international trade, for example. Imagine your father wanted to sell toffees in Italy or Spain, then it would be handy if you spoke the language.’

This argument doesn’t cut any ice with Ian. Sell toffees in Spain? Why would anyone want to do that? None of us has ever been out of England. Other countries are made up in our minds of their capitals, rivers, and principal exports, together with the imperfect knowledge gleaned from newspaper headlines. Italy is Rome and a man called Mussolini, Spain is Madrid and a man called Franco. They are not real to us in the way schoolmasters and Latin lessons are.

But Mr Braithwaite’s enthusiasm is undimmed. ‘I see you have Tales of Troy and Greece in the bookcase here. When you learn Latin (and later Greek) you will be able to read those stories as they were written. Wouldn’t you like to be able to do that?’

I would, but I’m not so sure about Ian and Rory.

There is an obvious rhythm to the week now the tutor has arrived. On Monday lessons start and the laundry comes. On Tuesday Thompson’s son Bill helps out in the garden ‘learning the trade’, and we are told to stay out of the way. Nanny has her half-day on Wednesday, when Felicity is looked after by her mother and consequently out of temper. On Thursday Mrs Hambleton’s friend Mrs Weir comes to tea, and at half past twelve on Friday lessons are done for the week. On Saturday Aunt Helen does her baking, and I write home every Friday, so dad will get my letter in time to take along when he goes to see mum on Sunday.

Sundays are different here. The whole household goes to church, the girls in hats and gloves and the boys in long trousers. In the afternoon the younger ones go to Sunday School, and in the evening all the children except Felicity sit down to dinner with their parents instead of having tea in the schoolroom. Since I’m now having my meals with the other children, Sunday is the only day when Aunt Helen actually looks after me. She says I don’t have to go to church if I don’t want to, and so after the first time I prefer to stay behind. It is nice to have a day on my own after a whole week of being with Ian and Gwendolyn and their cousins. I do some more exploring, or read upstairs in my room, and eat in the servants’ pantry.

It isn’t only going to church, though. The Hambletons do other things that are puzzling and unfamiliar to me. It is not just that they have servants, and a motor car, and a gramophone and a thousand things we don’t have at home. They behave differently. Mrs Hambleton never does any work like sewing or mending, but spends most of her time at her embroidery. I rarely see Mr Hambleton, but when I do he is usually smoking his pipe and perusing a periodical about the confectionary trade – his wife never works and he never stops working. Gwendolyn goes riding with Miranda Norwood most afternoons, and Ian wants to play tennis at least once a day (long-armed and agile, he is much better at it than his cousins and me). And perhaps strangest of all, Arthur is engaged in a lengthy game of correspondence chess.

The first time the telegraph boy comes I assume it to be bad news, but no one else appears to find it an extraordinary occurrence, nor the fact that he comes again twice the next week. The telegrams are always for Arthur, but I don’t understand why until one day I pick up a slip of paper he has dropped. Knight to KR5, I read.

‘What does that mean?’

He takes it back. ‘You shouldn’t read other people’s correspondence, you know,’ he says, but in a friendly way, ‘It’s a chess move. My opponent is moving his knight to field KR5 on the chessboard.’

‘And he sends you a wire every time he makes a move? Isn’t that terribly expensive?’ I am quite shocked at such extravagance.

‘Not as expensive as travelling all the way here.’

Mr Hambleton puts his head around the study door. ‘Arthur, if we must have cables at all hours, tell that boy to come to the back door, save me being disturbed by the bell.’

‘Yes, father.’

I’ve never yet heard Mr Hambleton utter something that isn’t a command, I think his children are a little afraid of him. Arthur goes quietly into his own room, and I repair to the schoolroom next door. Now I have been thoroughly assimilated into the household, Ian has promised to show me his stamp collection.

Most of the stamps apparently come to him through his father’s business connections, and as I look at the brightly coloured rectangles with foreign writing on them, I think that maybe Mr Braithwaite wasn’t so wide off the mark – Hambleton’s toffees are sold abroad. There are also stamps from an aunt in Canada, and from a friend of the family who has just returned from the army in India. My own cigarette card album looks humdrum by comparison, with its exclusively British monarchs and many gaps. The Hambleton children don’t collect cigarette cards.

‘Players?’ Ian says, ‘I don’t think we know anyone who smokes those. You could ask the servants. Father smokes a pipe, of course.’

I am well aware of that, its noxious fumes linger even when Mr Hambleton is not at home. Ian may think a pipe more gentlemanly than cigarettes, but I much prefer their homely smell. We put our albums away and look out of the window. It is raining, a steady downpour which makes even the bright garden look grey.

‘What shall we do now?’

III

The next day dawns clear and sunny, and Ian and Rory grumble about having to spend the morning in the schoolroom. I don’t mind, though. Mr Braithwaite’s Latin lessons are not at all what I expected. Instead of giving us words to learn and exercises to do, he mostly just talks to us.

‘Today, we are going to look at the opening line of a very famous poem, The Aeneid. When you have studied more you will have to do translations from it yourself, but for now we are just going to see what the first line can tell us.’

He writes it down: Arma virumque cano

‘This means ‘I sing about arms and the man’ – weapons, you know, not the things with hands on the ends. Now, you’ll notice that it takes fewer words to say this in Latin than in English. That is because there are parts of the Latin words which can change, and they work in the same way separate words do in an English sentence.’

Rory looks perplexed, and Mr Braithwaite patiently explains about the inflexions which do the job of ‘about’, ‘the’ and ‘I’.

‘The part at the back tells you what the word is doing?’ Ian asks.

‘Exactly.’

‘Then why didn’t Mr Overton say so?’

‘I suspect he is so used to it now that he has forgotten he himself once had to learn it.’

‘He didn’t ought to do that,’ Rory says, ‘He ought to find out what you don’t know, like you did on our first day.’

‘Yes, well, let’s not tackle educational reform just yet,’ Mr Braithwaite says, ‘To return to that sentence…’

I feel so at home with this casual new teaching method that I am confident enough to ask a question.

‘You said knowing Latin would help us when we have to learn French. But how does it help? You just have to remember more.’

Mr Braithwaite shakes his head. ‘No, in the long run there is less to remember. You see, there are many words in French (and Spanish, and Italian) which are almost the same as the Latin words. Like the word cano, which is chanter in French and cantare in Italian. So if you know the Latin word, it is easy to recognise the others.’

‘How can they be the same if they are different languages?’ Ian asks.

‘But they aren’t the same,’ Rory says, before Mr Braithwaite has a chance to reply, ‘They don’t sound at all alike.’

‘No, but they still look alike.’ Mr Braithwaite writes down some other examples for us: caballus - cavallo - cheval and rex - re - roi.

‘In the time of the Roman Empire, everyone spoke Latin. They continued to do so when the Empire fell apart, but they didn’t talk so much anymore to people from other parts of Europe. They spoke Latin in their own way in France, and in Spain, and in Italy, just like people in Scotland speak English differently than they do here. After a very long time, hundreds of years, the speech of these countries had grown so far apart that a man from Paris could no longer understand a man from Rome. And that is how French and Italian have descended from Latin.’

I am enthralled by this new insight. ‘But what about English?’

‘What about it?’

‘Some words are the same, but really English isn’t like Latin at all.’

‘No, English comes from another language which is called Germanic. Most Latin words you’ll find in English are French, brought here by the Normans.’

‘And I thought English by itself was bad enough,’ Rory says despondently.

Mr Braithwaite smiles. ‘Don’t despair – you still have years ahead of you to learn.’

I’m not sure Rory finds this a very cheering thought.

We soon settle into a daily routine with Mr Braithwaite. Ian and Rory and I start with Latin at nine, and at ten o’clock Jamie joins us for History. Then we have milk and biscuits at eleven, before moving on to English. We finish lessons at half past twelve and after luncheon our time is our own. We play in the garden most days, except when there is a lot of rain. Then we stay in the schoolroom building railways or doing jigsaws, or playing games with Felicity. Today it is Pelmanism. I didn’t know what that was at first – at home we call it the memory game.

We are on our third game, and I have won the other two. Rory is staring our of the window, probably thinking about bows or catapults. I am keeping an eye on the clock since I’m longing for tea. Jamie turns up a card, and another. They are completely different. ‘Bother.’

‘Your turn,’ Ian says.

I pick up two identical cards and add them to my collection. It looks like it will be three out of three for me. And suddenly Jamie has had enough. ‘It’s not fair! You’re cheating!’

‘Jemima, that is not a nice thing to say,’ Nanny says in a strict voice I have not heard her use before, ‘It is very serious to accuse someone without proof. Say sorry to Jack.’

Jamie scowls, and says nothing.

‘You can’t cheat at Pelmanism,’ I say reasonably, ‘You can see as much as I can.’

Although I think it unwise to say so, I don’t understand why anyone wants to play the game at all. The only thing you have to do is remember where you’ve seen the pictures. I couldn’t get it wrong if I tried.

‘You always win!’

Jamie throws her cards into my face and runs off. Rory and Ian sit there glaring at me as if it is all my fault. ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I wasn’t cheating, honest.’

‘Tidy up, boys, it is almost teatime,’ Nanny tells us. ‘Come on Felicity, we’ll go and look for Jamie.’

‘It’s a stupid game, anyway,’ Ian says.

After that, we do not play Pelmanism again.