The Eddie Dickens Trilogy Page 20
Eddie, meanwhile, grew up amongst sailors on a cargo ship. It was obvious to the sailors that Eddie wasn’t a trunk – except for someone called the purser who said that if Eddie was down on the ship’s inventory as a trunk then that’s exactly what he was – but they were out at sea and they weren’t going back just to put Eddie ashore. So Eddie spent his early years amongst the creaking rigging and was used to sleeping in a hammock, having the salty spray of the sea in his face and living off the toughest beef imaginable, which was packed in salt and stored in barrels. For some reason, it was full of maggots or weevils or maggots and weevils, but they added a bit of variety to the flavour as well as giving extra protein.
Eddie never reached America – the intended destination for the now well-educated trunk – but he did learn to love a life on the ocean waves. He spent about eight years aboard ship in total and, by the end of it, could do some pretty impressive knots; could read a compass; had scrubbed the decks more hours than you’ve watched television in your entire life so far; and knew the workings of a ship from the tip of the main mast to the bilges below the waterline.
By one of those strange quirks of fate that God or Mother Nature throws up to show that He or She has a great sense of humour, Eddie finally landed back on English soil just as the trunk finished its schooling for extremely-young young gentlemen, and they both arrived back at home about the same time. Eddie was very excited and told his parents (who were pretty much strangers to him) about his exciting life on board ship. Being grown-ups, they only half-listened and, knowing full well that he’d actually been at school all this time, simply assumed that their only child had an overactive imagination.
They were puzzled by the trunk’s return because they’d assumed it was lost at sea. Mr Brockenfeld, the editor of the Terrible Times, had sent a message saying that the inks had never arrived and now, all this time later, they’d somehow found their way back to their house (which later burnt down in the events outlined in Awful End).
One other side-effect of this strange mix-up was that, later in life, Eddie was to meet a few pupils of Glumberry School For Young Boys who assumed that they’d been at school with him – the trunk was always referred to as Edmund Dickens, remember – and were surprised how different he’d become.
‘I remember you being much squarer shouldered when you were younger,’ one Old Glumberry told him, for example.
A trip to America now, to try to find out what was going on at the Terrible Times offices, meant that Eddie would have a chance to re-acquaint himself with life at sea. (In those days, with the wind in your favour and no unexpected hitches or cock-ups, it took a clipper – a fast-sailing cargo ship – about two weeks to sail from England to the shores of North America. Steam ships were often slower, more expensive and, once in a while, blew up.) Eddie was really, really, really looking forward to it! He found an old atlas in Awful End’s library and pored over it to try to work out the route the ship would be taking.
Eddie felt something jab him in the back. He turned to find that it was Malcolm the stuffed stoat’s nose. Even Madder Aunt Maud had him tucked under her arm. She was dressed in her nightclothes and her slippers were covered in snow which was melting on the library floor.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.
‘Trying to see what route the ship will take that’s carrying me to America,’ he explained, holding up the huge atlas with enthusiasm.
‘You’re being carried to America?’ asked Even Madder Aunt Maud.
‘Not by a person,’ Eddie explained. ‘By ship.’
‘We’re on board ship?’ asked Even Madder Aunt Maud, looking a little confused.
‘No,’ said Eddie. ‘But I will be soon.’
‘Then why lie to me?’ his great-aunt demanded. ‘I suppose you think it’s clever to try to muddle an old lady?’
‘I’m sorry if I didn’t make myself clear,’ said Eddie. ‘I didn’t mean to –’
Even Madder Aunt Maud raised Malcolm in the air by his tail. The meaning was obvious. It meant: Silence, young man, or I might hit you over the head with this here stuffed stoat.
‘I don’t like tricks,’ she said. ‘I haven’t forgotten the time you dressed as a tree and jumped out at me!’
Eddie had certainly forgotten it. Or, to be more accurate, had no recollection of this event and rather suspected that (if it really had happened) it had been nothing to do with him.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever dressed as a tree, Even Madder Aunt Maud,’ he protested.
‘Exactly!’ cried his great-aunt, her voice like someone drilling through a wall. ‘You don’t think! You don’t think. Well, perhaps if you did think before you went and covered yourself in bark and leaves and jumped out on a poor old lady, then you wouldn’t have done it.’ She turned on her heels. ‘Come, Malcolm,’ she said, and left the library.
Eddie knew better than to try and protest his innocence any further, and went back to studying the atlas. After a while, he had the feeling that he was being watched, and looked around to see who, if anyone, was there. Framed in the doorway stood a complete stranger: a woman dressed in the finest of clothes.
‘Master Dickens?’ she enquired. (If you were that posh you didn’t ask, you made enquiries.)
‘Yes?’ he said, politely.
‘My name is Bustle, Lady Constance Bustle,’ she said. ‘Your father has asked me to act as your companion upon the upcoming voyage.’
Companion? It hadn’t occurred to Eddie that his parents might worry about him travelling to America alone. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t used to a life at sea but, then again, there was still that confusion in his parents’ minds.
‘I’m delighted to meet you, Lady Constance,’ said Eddie. She put out her gloved hand, and he strode across the library floor and kissed it. ‘You’ve spoken to my father, you say?’
‘Yes,’ said Lady Constance. ‘I’ve just come down from the scaffolding. He’s currently painting an angel playing the harp, though I have to confess that, to me, it looks as if the angel is clutching an enormous vegetable and appears to be sitting on a large liver sausage.’
‘That sounds like one of his clouds,’ said Eddie.
‘I suspected as much,’ said Lady Constance. She had striking features (which doesn’t mean that one wanted to hit her but that her face would stand out in a crowd, even though it would be a whopper to call her conventionally beautiful).
‘My father isn’t the world’s greatest painter,’ Eddie confessed. ‘But he is most enthusiastic. What kind of vegetable, by the way?’
‘A sprout,’ said Lady Constance, ‘though if it were that large in real life it would probably feed a family of four!’ She laughed at her own joke in a snorty, horsy kind of way.
Eddie grinned. If he was going to have to have a companion on a long sea voyage, he could do worse than Lady Constance Bustle. Or so he thought.
‘How did my father come to ask you to be my companion?’ he asked. He’d never heard anyone mention her.
‘I answered an advertisement,’ she said. ‘I was recently a companion to an elderly lady but she died.’
‘I am sorry,’ said Eddie, because that was the kind of thing you were expected to say when someone mentioned a death.
‘I’m not,’ replied Lady Constance. ‘She was as sour as a bag of lemons … It was quite a relief when the railings on the edge of the ferry gave way and her bath chair tipped into the rapids.’
A bath chair’s a kind of wheelchair. The one the old lady had been in was made of wicker. Her name had been Winifred Snafflebaum and her death caused quite a splash, both in the river and the local newspaper. The report said that Lady Constance had had to be restrained from jumping in after her employer to try to save her, though another eye-witness said that someone looking very like Lady Constance had brushed past him with a spanner in her hand not ten minutes before the ferry’s railing had mysteriously ‘given way’!
‘So you’re a companion by profession?’ Eddie asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she nodded. ‘Before the old lady, I was companion to a French woman. Sadly, she choked to death on a door handle.’
‘How dreadful!’ said Eddie.
‘Most inconvenient,’ Lady Constance agreed. ‘I did so like living in Paris.’
‘You must get to meet lots of different people,’ said Eddie.
She nodded again. ‘Though titled –’ by which she meant being a ‘lady’, ‘– my family is a large one and the family fortune is small. In truth, it’s not so much a fortune now as a large sock full of pennies under my father’s bed. It has, therefore, been up to my eleven sisters and I to make our own way in the world. I could, of course, try to find some rich duke or baronet to marry, but I’d far rather travel the world as a companion. There’s so much more freedom. It was simply bad luck that I was lumbered with such an objectionable old duck. She did leave me all her money though, which was nice.’
‘I’m sure we’ll have plenty of fun on the way to America and back,’ said Eddie. He was a very well-mannered lad.
‘There is one thing I should tell you whilst I remember,’ said Lady Constance. ‘I suffer from Dalton’s Disease. Have you heard of it?’
Eddie had.
Dalton is probably famous for three things. Firstly, his Atomic Theory of 1808. In it, he claimed that if you kept cutting up something smaller and smaller and smaller you’d eventually come to something so small that it couldn’t be cut up any more, and he called these smallest-of-small things atoms. Actually, he was wrong, because atoms can be cut up into sub-atomic particles and these can probably be broken up into sub-sub-atomicparticles. Still awake? Excellent. But Dalton’s Atomic Theory was almost right and way ahead of its time. It changed the way that everyone who thought about such things thought about such things, except for a small man in Alfriston, East Sussex, who stuck a finger in each ear and hummed loudly, stopping only occasionally only to shout: ‘I’M NOT LISTENING!’
The second thing Dalton is famous for is keeping records of the local weather for just about every day of his adult life. Don’t ask me why he did it. He just did. If he wanted to find out if it’d been raining in his back garden on a Wednesday twenty-five years previously, he could just look it up.
Thirdly, Dalton studied the problem he had with his vision. He was what we now call ‘colour blind’, and he did much to spread awareness of the condition. He even donated his eyeballs to science … for study after he died, of course. And that’s why, in Eddie’s day, colour-blindness was called Dalton’s Disease. See? You pick up a book because of the funny picture on the cover and end up learning about some strange bloke who died in 1844. Isn’t life just full of surprises?
Episode 6
Going … Going …?
In which Eddie and the reader are almost halfway through the book and neither is sure whether he is ever going to get to America
The following Thursday, Mad Uncle Jack held a family meeting inside Marjorie the hollow cow. It was to have been in the library up at the main house, rather than inside a converted carnival float amongst the rose bushes, with onions hanging from the ceiling on strings, but Even Madder Aunt Maud had caught a cold from all that romping about in the snowdrifts after her shiny bauble, and was now in bed, and her husband had felt it important that she attend.
Also present were: Mad Uncle Jack himself, Mr and Mrs Dickens, their son Eddie, Lady Constance Bustle – who’d never been inside a hollow cow before – and Dawkins the gentleman’s gentleman who was there to provide drinks … oh, and Malcolm, of course, if you count stuffed stoats. Jane, the failed chambermaid, was up in the house on her own, gibbering under the stairs, no doubt.
‘This meeting is now in order!’ Mad Uncle Jack announced, beating Even Madder Aunt Maud’s bed with his dried swordfish for silence.
It hit her knees under the woolly blankets and she let out a cry: ‘There’s a dog on the bed! There’s a dog on the bed!’ Her cold had turned to a fever and she was slightly delirious. Make someone already as mad as Even Madder Aunt Maud slightly delirious and you get what by normal standards is very delirious.
‘Where?’ said MUJ, lifting the blankets to try to find the dog.
Eddie’s father raised his hand, stiffly. ‘Please ignore poor Aunt Maud, Uncle,’ he said. ‘And let’s get on with the meeting, shall we?’
‘What? Er, oh yes …’ said MUJ. ‘I wanted us to discuss plans for Eddie’s voyage to America and visit to the offices of the Terrible Times. I’d like you to meet Eddie’s travelling companion Lady Constance Bustle.’
Lady Constance stepped forward, parting the onions-on-strings above her head, as though pushing aside the leaves of an overhanging branch. ‘I’m delighted to meet you all,’ she said.
Even Madder Aunt Maud sat bolt upright in bed. ‘You’re pug ugly!’ she gasped, which is another way of describing someone with striking or memorable features; a pug being a not-so-handsome breed of dog.
‘Forgive my wife,’ laughed Mad Uncle Jack. ‘She’s inclined to say what she thinks.’
Lady Constance wasn’t sure what to say to that.
‘A walking pair of nostrils!’ cackled Even Madder Aunt Maud.
Mr Dickens was positioned between his aunt in bed and Eddie’s travelling companion. ‘Enchanted to meet you, Lady Constance,’ he said, trying to lean forward to kiss her gloved hand but missing the target.
‘Stay back, lady!’ cried Even Madder Aunt Maud, with a barely suppressed guffaw. ‘You’ll frighten the stoat!’ She waved Malcolm high above her head.
‘I’m so pleased to know that my boy will be in your capable hands,’ said Eddie’s mother, Mrs Dickens. When Maud had started saying those embarrassing things to the titled newcomer, Mrs Dickens had become agitated and comforted herself by filling her mouth with the nearest thing to hand – the tassel of Even Madder Aunt Maud’s dressing-gown – so what she actually said was: ‘Um thow pweed cha now vat my bow wiw be inyaw caypabuw ands.’
Eddie’s father was well used to understanding his wife when she had a mouth full of ice-cubes shaped like famous generals or anti-panic pills or acorns, for example, but no one else had the slightest idea what she’d just said, the corner of EMAM’s dressing-gown cord trailing from the edge of her mouth, like a half-eaten snake.
If Lady Constance Bustle wished that she was anywhere except inside a cow-shaped carnival float with a bunch of misfits, she hid it very well. Perhaps it was her good breeding. Perhaps it was something else.
‘Lady Constance comes to me with impeccable references,’ said Eddie’s father. ‘I’m sure if they hadn’t all died, each and every one of her previous employers would have been reluctant to let her go.’
Her list of previous employers was, indeed, impressive. They included: Sir Adrian Carter, the author, who died during a visit to the Royal Zoological Gardens when Lady Constance slipped on a discarded banana skin and pushed him into the gorilla cage; the philosopher and forward-thinker John Knoxford John, who drowned in game soup during a visit to the famous Barnum Soup Factory when an apparently involuntary spasm in the leg, possibly brought on by the cooking fumes, caused Lady Constance to kick him off a viewing platform and into a giant vat; the Duchess of Underbridge, who fell to her death in her own home, unaware that Lady Constance had had the stairs removed that night ‘for cleaning’. The list was a long one.
As well as being well-known or wealthy people, they all had something else in common. According to the letters and wills presented by the distraught Lady Constance after their untimely deaths, they all left their money – often small fortunes, sometimes not so small – to their devoted companion, Lady Constance. Oh yes, and there was one other thing they all had in common, judging from these letters and wills: surprisingly similar handwriting.
‘I feel sure that Eddie is in safe hands,’ said Mad Uncle Jack.
‘Pug ugly hands!’ cried Even Madder Aunt Maud from her bed.
‘Should somebody fetch the doctor?’ suggested Lady Constance.
> ‘Should somebody fetch a bag for your head?’ suggested Even Madder Aunt Maud, which would be considered rude even by today’s standards but in Eddie’s day such a comment would have been considered OUTRAGEOUS.
‘I really must apologise for my husband’s aunt’s behaviour,’ said Mrs Dickens. ‘She’s not a well woman.’ If only life were that simple because, of course, what she actually said was: ‘Oy weierwy muscht apowoguys faw mow hushbangs awunts beavyvaw. Sheech nowtta weow woomang.’
On the word ‘woman’, or ‘woomang’, the tassel of Even Madder Aunt Maud’s dressing-gown shot out of Eddie’s mum’s mouth and hit Lady Constance slap bang/slam bam/full-square in her striking (and/or pug ugly) face.
Her ladyship snarled – yes snarled – like a cornered cat and hit Mrs Dickens across her face with her muffler.
Those of you wondering why Lady Constance was holding a car component designed to keep exhaust pipes from being too noisy have got the wrong end of the stick … It wasn’t that kind of muffler, which some folk call ‘silencers’. Let me turn the stick around the other way so that you can hold the right end. The kind of muffler Eddie’s mother was hit with was a piece of fur sewn into an open-ended cylinder in which well-to-do ladies stuck a hand into either end to keep them warm.
This meant that Mrs Dickens wasn’t actually hurt by Lady Constance’s attack, but was deeply shocked by it. She’d been apologising to her for her husband’s aunt’s rudeness and the spitting out of the dressing-gown tassel had obviously been an accident. And what did she get by way of thanks? A literal as well as a metaphorical slap in the face with a muffler!