Читать книгу The Classic Morpurgo Collection - Michael Morpurgo, Michael Morpurgo - Страница 32

“Who Gives a Fig, Anyway?”

Elizabeth looked up at me and smiled. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Miss Elizabeth Stanton. What’s the cat called?”

“Kaspar,” I told her.

“Is he yours?”

“Yes,” I said. “And this is my room too.”

“I knocked and there was no one in,” she went on. “So I thought it would be a good place to hide. I like hiding. Then I saw this cat lying on the bed, and he looked so sad. He’s very beautiful, but he’s very thin, you know, and he doesn’t look at all well. Look at him. He’s starving hungry. You should feed Kaspar more often, that’s what I think.”

“Your mother’s been looking for you. She thought you’d got lost,” I told her, trying my best to hide my growing irritation. To be honest, I didn’t much like being told by some hoity-toity little rich girl that Kaspar needed to eat more. Hadn’t I been trying for weeks on end now to get him to do just that? And although I was relieved to see Kaspar eating again, I have to confess I was more than a little upset that this little girl seemed to have succeeded so easily where I had failed. So the truth is that at our first meeting I was not at all disposed to like Miss Elizabeth Stanton. She seemed far too full of herself for my liking.

“You just wait till I tell Mama and Papa about Kaspar,” she went on. “Can I take him downstairs to show them?”

It hadn’t even occurred to me until that moment that this little girl could blow the whole secret. I crouched down so that we were face to face and put my hands on her shoulders. She had to know just how serious I was about this. “You can’t. You can’t say a word,” I told her. “The thing is, you see, I’m not allowed to keep pets up here. Against the rules, see? No pets in the servants’ quarters. If anyone finds out, I’ll get the sack, lose my position. I’ll have nowhere to live, and neither will Kaspar. No one else knows he lives up here. So you won’t tell anyone, will you? It’ll be our little secret, right?”

She was looking at me very intently all the while. She thought for a moment or two. Then she said: “I don’t like rules, especially unfair rules like not being allowed to keep a cat. So I won’t tell anyone, cross my heart and hope to die.” Then she added, “But you will let me come up and feed Kaspar again sometime, won’t you?”

I hadn’t any choice.

“I suppose so,” I said. “If you want to.”

“I do, I do,” she cried. “I like him so much, and he likes me, I know he does.”

It was true. Kaspar was looking up at her adoringly. He could hardly take his eyes off her. She grabbed my hand and shook it. “Oh thank you, thank you. But I don’t know your name, do I?”

“Johnny Trott,” I told her. She let out a peal of laughter. “Johnny Rot. Johnny Rot. That’s such a funny name. Bye Kaspar, bye Johnny Rot.” And still giggling she skipped off down the corridor and was gone. As I watched her go I remembered the last person who had found my name so funny. I was already disliking Elizabeth a little less.

I had no idea then and I still have no idea now how she managed to get Kaspar to eat his liver that morning. I asked her later on, once I’d got to know her better, and she gave me one of her infuriating shrugs. “S’easy when you know how,” she told me. “Animals always do whatever I want, because they know I’d do anything for them, and that’s because they know I love them, and that’s why they love me.” She had this way, as some children do, of making everything sound so simple and straightforward.

After that first surprise visit, Miss Elizabeth Stanton, or Lizziebeth as I discovered she liked to be called, came up to my room to feed Kaspar at least twice a day without fail. Sometimes I was there, sometimes I wasn’t. Whenever she’d been I’d find a little scribbled note on my pillow. It would say something like this:

“Dear Jonny Rot, I came to feed Caspa again. I stoll some smoked samon from my breakfast. He likes it a lot which I don’t because it smells of fish wich is horrible. I made your bed too which you didn’t. And you should too. Don worry your secrets safe. Promise. I like secrits because its like hidding and I like hidding. from your friend Lizziebeth.”

There’s no doubt at all in my mind that it was the arrival of Lizziebeth that saved Kaspar’s life. Somehow she brought joy into his life where there had only been sorrow. With her there beside him he was eating and drinking everything that was put in front of him. Within a week he was beginning to sharpen his claws, mostly on the curtains, but sometimes on my trousers, and when I was wearing them too. That hurt a lot. I didn’t mind much, though, because I was just so happy to see him getting better. His coat shone, his tail swished, and when one day he smiled up at me I knew for sure that Prince Kaspar Kandinsky was himself again. Lizziebeth had lifted his spirits, and she’d lifted mine too. But I was worried that one day she might “let the cat out of the bag”, so to speak. I kept reminding her that secrecy was everything.

“Remember, Lizziebeth, you’ve got to keep schtum,” I told her one evening, tapping my nose conspiratorially. She liked that. So whenever she left my room after that, she’d tap her nose. “Schtum,” she’d whisper. “I’ve got to keep schtum.”

Lizziebeth became quite a little mascot on our corridor, and quite a hero too on account of everything she’d done for Kaspar. She may have been a little bit on the talkative side, and could be quite mischievous too – she was a bundle of fun and she made us all laugh. But I couldn’t help wondering whether she might one day become too overexcited and blurt out our secret by mistake.

I took all the precautions I could, asking her to always check behind her before she climbed the stairs to our corridor, and I made it an absolute rule that she spoke in whispers whenever she came to see us. Those, it seemed, were the kind of rules she was quite happy with. Lizziebeth liked anything, I discovered, that involved some kind of conspiracy. It was during these long whispered conversations in my room that I got to know so much more about her. Actually, to begin with they weren’t conversations at all, not as such. They were more like monologues. Once Lizziebeth started one of her stories, there was no stopping her. “Do you know…” she’d begin, and on she’d go, on and on. She’d sit there cross-legged on the floor of my room with Kaspar on her lap and just talk and talk. And I’d be happy to listen, because she told me of a world I’d never seen inside before. For over a year now, ever since I’d left the orphanage, I’d served people like her at the Savoy; fetched and carried for them, polished their boots, brushed their coats, opened doors for them, bowed and scraped, as bell-boys have to do. But until now not one of them had ever really talked to me, unless they were snapping their fingers at me, or ordering me to do something.

It’s true that I wasn’t sure sometimes whether Lizziebeth was talking to me or to Kaspar. It didn’t much matter either way. Both of us would listen as entranced as the other, Kaspar gazing up into her eyes all the while, purring with pleasure, and me hanging on her every word.

Once she told us about the great ship she’d come over on from America, about the icebergs she’d seen, as tall as the skyscrapers in New York, which was where she lived, how one day when they were at sea she’d wandered off on her own to find somewhere to hide, and found herself right down below in the engine room. There was quite a kerfuffle, she said, because everyone thought she’d fallen overboard. When at last she was found and brought back to their cabin her mother had cried and cried, and called her “my little angel”, but her father had told her she was “the naughtiest girl in the whole world”. So she wasn’t sure what she was.

Afterwards they had taken her to the Captain of the ship who had a great, fat face and sad eyes, like a walrus she said, and they’d made her apologise for causing so much trouble to the crew who had been searching for her all over the ship for two hours before she was found, and to the Captain who’d had to stop the ship in mid-ocean, and had lookouts scanning the ocean with binoculars looking for her. She had to promise faithfully in front of the Captain never to go off on her own while they were on the ship. She promised with her fingers crossed behind her, she said, so it didn’t count. So when it got rough a day or two later and they were being tossed about in the biggest, greenest waves she’d ever seen, and everyone was as sick as dogs, she decided she’d do what one of the sailors had told her to do if it ever got rough, to go down to the very bottom of the ship where the boat doesn’t roll so much, and just lie down. The very bottom of the ship, she discovered, was full of cows and calves. So she lay down beside them in the straw, and that was where they found her, fast asleep, when the storm was over. This time they were both “mad” with her. So she was locked in the cabin as a punishment. She shrugged. “I didn’t care,” she told me. “Who gives a fig, anyway?”

Back at home in New York her governess was always sending her up to her room to make her do her writing all over again, or because her spelling wasn’t good enough. She was always being sent to her room by her mother too, for running around the house when she should walk, or making a noise when her father was working in his study. “I didn’t mind,” she said, with a shrug and a little laugh. “I didn’t give a fig, anyway.” In the holidays the family would sail up the coast to Maine in their three-masted yacht, which was called the Abe Lincoln, and they’d live in this big house on an island where there was no other house but theirs, and no one there except them, their guests and the servants. One day she decided to be a pirate, so she tied a spotted pirate’s scarf around her head and went off with a spade to look for buried treasure. And when they came calling for her she hid away in a cave, and she only came out when she was good and ready. She knew they’d be mad at her, but she really didn’t like anyone calling for her “like I was some kind of a dog”. So when she strolled back into the house that evening, she was sent straight up to bed without any dinner. “I didn’t want any dinner anyway,” she said, “so I didn’t give a fig, anyway, did I?”

Bit by bit, through these stories and dozens of others, I pieced together something of the lives of Lizziebeth and her family. I looked at them now with very different eyes whenever they walked by me on their way into breakfast, whenever I opened the door for them or wished them good morning. Lizziebeth would give me a great beaming smile whenever she saw me in the lobby, and Mr Freddie would wink at me from the front door, and sometimes he’d miaow softly as he passed me by. Such moments were enough to lift my spirits all day long. Life was suddenly good, and fun too. Kaspar was well again, we had both found a new friend, and our secret was safe. Everything was fine, or so I thought.