The Bagthorpe Saga: Absolute Zero. Helen Cresswell

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СКАЧАТЬ Mr Bagthorpe was not comforted. “So what does she do now for kicks? Poisons people, perhaps – something like that?”

      “She is in a very interesting Phase at the present,” said Uncle Parker. “She is doing all kinds of things.”

      “Can she come, Father?” begged Rosie. “I think she’s really sweet. I’d look after her.”

      “I shouldn’t think the question will arise, Rosie,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “I should hardly think your uncle will have the gall to accept this prize.”

      “Why’s that?” enquired Uncle Parker, tipping back his chair with the air of careless ease that particularly aggravated Mr Bagthorpe.

      “It’s a moral issue,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “You have never eaten a SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALL in your life.”

      “I have not,” conceded Uncle Parker.

      “There you are then!” Mr Bagthorpe had the air of a man clinching an argument.

      “I don’t get your drift,” said Uncle Parker. “Nothing in the small print says anything about eating the wretched stuff. All one had to do was buy a packet and pick up a leaflet. I did both these things. It will, of course, be glorious for Celia and myself, cruising in the Caribbean. I expect, Henry, you wish you had the chance yourself.”

      “I wish no such thing!” snapped Mr Bagthorpe. “There is nothing I can think of I would hate more. Given the choice between the salt mines and the Caribbean, I’d plump for the former any time.”

      “Someone might be running a competition for the salt mines,” suggested Uncle Parker. “You must keep your eyes open.”

      “Luckily,” said Mr Bagthorpe, “I have work to do in life. Luckily, I have a service to give to my fellow men and do not have to fill in my pointless existence wafting round among palm trees drinking gin and tonic by the bucketful.”

      “Hallo, Uncle Parker.” William came in. “Jolly good work. What was the slogan?”

      “Tell him, Jack,” said Uncle Parker wearily.

      Jack told him. Even he was beginning to tire of repeating it, and could see how weak it sounded.

      “You’re joking,” said William after a slight pause.

      “No,” said Mr Bagthorpe, “he is not, unfortunately, joking. I often wonder whether we should have brought children into a world of such colossal triviality.”

      “Well, if you don’t mind my saying,” said William, with true Bagthorpian ruthlessness, “I should think the sales of SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS will plummet when that gets out. Go into a fatal nosedive, I should think.”

      “SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS will be bankrupt within the month,” affirmed Mr Bagthorpe.

      “When’re you going?” Jack asked. He was going to miss Uncle Parker. He got on well with him, and could feel equal in his company.

      “Next week, we thought,” Uncle Parker replied.

      Mr Bagthorpe rose.

      “I must get back to work,” he said witheringly, and went.

      “I saw that competition, Mr Parker,” said Mrs Fosdyke then. “And d’you know, I nearly went in myself. Worked a slogan out, and all, I did, and never got round to sending it off.”

      “What was the slogan?” asked Rosie.

      “Well…” Mrs Fosdyke cleared her throat, stood up straight and twitched her overall. “Not very good. Not like Mr Parker’s. What I thought of was: ‘Puffballs in fields is poisonous but out of packets is delicious.’”

      There was a puzzled silence.

      “Er – what exactly…?” William groped for an explanation without wishing to appear completely nonplussed.

      “There’s these things grow in fields, see, like mushrooms,” explained Mrs Fosdyke, quite pink with the interest she was creating. “Look a bit like mushrooms, but if you was to eat them they’d kill you, you’d die in agony, my ma used to tell me. Fact is, I look at every mushroom I cook, I do, to be on the safe side. So you see I thought my slogan would be quite a good one, to let people know it wasn’t that kind of puffball.”

      “Mmmmm. Yes.” William tried to sound enthusiastic but came nowhere near it. “I don’t think that would have got you far, though. Too long, for one thing. And I don’t think the breakfast cereal people would want the word ‘poisonous’ in their adverts.”

      “But they’re not poisonous!” cried Mrs Fosdyke. “That’s the whole point!”

      “Anyway, it was a good try,” Jack told her. “I don’t think I could have thought of that.”

      “Oh well!” She shrugged and turned back to the sink. “I don’t pretend to be clever.”

      She began to rattle dishes, which she could do with the best.

      “I’ll go and do my violin practice, I think,” Rosie said.

      William followed her, in a drifting kind of way, hands in his pockets. He had had this kind of look about him ever since the Danish au pair, Atlanta, had left the previous week. If his ears had been the drooping kind, like Zero’s, they would have drooped.

      “I am glad,” observed Uncle Parker, “that I do not live in this house. Everybody is always doing something. Does anybody ever do nothing?”

      “I do,” Jack told him. “And Zero.”

      “Of course. Good for you.”

“Not what they say,” said Jack glumly. “Sometimes I wish that being a Prophet and Phenomenon had come off, even if it would’ve been hard work.”^fn1

      “Rubbish!” said Uncle Parker briskly. “It would have made an old man of you. Where’s Grandma?”

      He wanted Grandma to know about his prize because she had a very low estimate of him. It had been very low indeed since the day, some five years previously, when he had run over Thomas, a cantankerous ginger tom who had, she declared, been the light of her life. He had been the light of no one else’s, having been given to scratching, biting and attacking from corners, and none of the other Bagthorpes held his extinction against Uncle Parker. Some of them actually thanked him for it.

      Uncle Parker had a secret admiration for Grandma and wanted her good opinion, though he would never have admitted this.

      “Grandma’s sitting in the dining-room,” Jack told him. “She’s feeling low and talking about Signs again. She’s going on about her Birthday Portrait and all that.”

      At Grandma’s Birthday Party the whole table had gone up in flames and burnt out the dining-room before the fire brigade got there. One of the first things to go up had been Rosie’s Birthday Portrait of Grandma, and ever since Grandma had taken this as a Sign, and thought it showed that the Fates, in some indefinable way, had it in for her. Every СКАЧАТЬ