The Bagthorpe Saga: Absolute Zero. Helen Cresswell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ her of Thomas,” said Jack, “and make her worse.”

      “It’s my belief,” remarked Mrs Fosdyke, who put her spoke into the wheels of anyone’s conversation if she felt like it, “that Mrs Bagthorpe Senior is too drawn into herself.”

      “Drawn into herself, you reckon?” said Uncle Parker.

      “All that Breathing, for one thing,” went on Mrs Fosdyke, encouraged by the interest in her diagnosis. “It’s time she stopped Breathing and went in for something else. Something that’d take her out of herself more.”

      It occurred to Jack that if Grandma were to stop breathing, she would most certainly be taken out of herself – permanently. He knew, however, that what was being alluded to was not the common or garden kind of breathing that keeps people alive, but the kind of Breathing she had been doing daily since she had read one of Mrs Bagthorpe’s books about Yoga.

      “What sort of thing had you in mind, Mrs Fosdyke?” asked Uncle Parker.

      Mrs Fosdyke, hugely flattered by the unaccustomed interest being shown in her opinions, turned from the sink and wiped her hands on her pinafore.

      “What I think,” she opined, with the gravity of a Harley Street Man delivering a long-awaited diagnosis, “is that Mrs Bagthorpe Senior should take up Bingo.”

      “Bingo, by Jove!” Uncle Parker was not easily put off balance, but he was now.

      “Should what?” said Jack incredulously.

      Grandma was a notorious cheat at anything from Scrabble to Ludo. Sometimes, at the end of a game of Dominoes, for instance, she would say that a domino with five pips on it had six on it, or even three, and would play it accordingly. She also, at Snakes and Ladders, moved her counter up snakes and ladders alike, and never came down anything. At Monopoly, if she saw funds were getting low, she would declare that the Bank had forgotten to pay her £200 for passing Go on the last five rounds, and would snatch two five-hundred-pound notes out of the Bank before anyone could stop her. She got away with it by being so old and obstinate, and by being able to keep up an argument longer than anyone else. Mostly when the Bagthorpes wanted to play games they went into quiet corners to do it, out of her way.

      Mrs Fosdyke had been with the Bagthorpes long enough to know about Grandma’s cheating, but was clearly not unduly perturbed.

      “She won’t be allowed to cheat,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not allowed.”

      “She will,” said Jack. “I bet she would.”

      “Can’t.” Mrs Fosdyke shook her head firmly. “They check up, see.”

      “She’d tell them they’d checked up wrong,” Jack said.

      “You can’t argue,” said Mrs Fosdyke. “There’s no arguing allowed. They’re ever so strict.”

      “I think that Grandma would like Bingo,” said Uncle Parker. “You’re absolutely right, Mrs Fosdyke. Spot on. The very thing.”

      “I could take her along with me.” Mrs Fosdyke was enchanted. “There’s ever such big prizes – there’s money, of course, and then there’s dinner services and blankets and non-sticks and all sorts. My sister at Pinxton won the Jackpot two weeks back on the day when they all have a link-up over the telephone, and she won 400 pound!”

      “Crikey!” Jack was impressed. “I wouldn’t mind a go. Though I’m not much good at numbers.”

      “Oh, you don’t have to be that,” Mrs Fosdyke assured him. “There’s no skill. No adding up, or anything. But it does take you out of yourself, you see, and that’s why I thought it’d be the very thing for Mrs Bagthorpe Senior.”

      “I shall go and tell her this minute,” announced Uncle Parker. “A million thanks, Mrs Fosdyke. An inspired thought.”

      Mrs Fosdyke glowed.

      “Come on, Zero,” said Jack, and followed Uncle Parker.

      Grandma was sitting on one of the new chairs that had been bought following the fire, contemplating the scene before her. The builders had been in and done some replastering and replaced some burned-up window frames and floorboards, but the room still looked like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. Everywhere was blacked up and charred-looking, and tatters of curtain still dangled from the buckled brass poles. Grandma looked as if she were reliving her Birthday Party in all its awful detail.

      “Hallo, Grandma,” said Uncle Parker cheerily. “Nice day.”

      She did not move her gaze.

      “I know you by your voice,” she said. “You ran over Thomas, that shining jewel of a cat. You cut him off in his glorious prime.”

      “Sorry about that, Grandma.” Uncle Parker apologised for at least the hundredth time. “I’d offer to get you another, but I knew he was irreplaceable.”

      “He was irreplaceable,” said Grandma mournfully. “No cat could equal him for beauty, grace and gentleness.”

      (This was a statement that needed challenging. Thomas had been ill-favoured to a degree, and inspired hate and terror in all who knew him. It was lucky that Mr Bagthorpe was not there to point all this out.)

      “I think a lot about Reincarnation these days,” Grandma went on to herself. “I like to think who I would like to be Reincarnated as. I can’t decide. I am bound to say I would prefer not to be a Bagthorpe again. I should like to think I would be promoted to a Higher Plane.”

      “Got a bit of a treat for you, Grandma,” said Uncle Parker, beavering away at the cheerfulness.

      “Life is but a dream,” remarked Grandma vaguely. “Like as the waves make to the pebbled shore so do our moments hasten to their ends.’”

      Uncle Parker was clearly batting on a sticky wicket.

      “Heard about my prize, Grandma?” he asked.

      “What prize?” said Grandma. “When you get old, you don’t get prizes.”

      “Ah!” Uncle Parker was triumphant. “But you do! There’s a way you could win prizes the whole time.”

      “When I was a little child, I once won a bag of macaroons at a party,” said Grandma wistfully. “Those days will never come again.”

      “They will, Grandma,” said Jack. “Honestly. That’s what he’s trying to tell you.”

      “I love macaroons,” she said. She seemed, marginally, to be coming back from wherever she had been.

      “What would you say,” asked Uncle Parker, “to a blanket? Or some non-sticks, whatever they are, or a dinner service? What would you say to four hundred pounds?”

      “Four hundred pounds? Where?” She was with them now all right.

      “Yours for the winning,” Uncle Parker told her with sublime confidence. “All you do, you play a game.”

      “Oh, I like playing games,” Grandma said. СКАЧАТЬ