Black Maria - Diana Wynne Jones

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need help,” Mum said helplessly. “Where’s the electricity switch? And are there any candles?”

      There were two candles. Mum added “candles” to her list before she got into bed just now. Now she’s sitting there saying, “These sheets aren’t very clean. I must wash them tomorrow. She’s not got a washing-machine but there must be a launderette somewhere in the place.” Then she went on to, “Mig, you’ve written reams. Stop and come to bed now or there won’t be any of that notebook left.” She was beginning on, “There won’t be any of that candle left either—” when Chris came storming in wearing just his pants.

      He said, “I don’t know what this is. It was under my pillow.” He threw something stormily on the floor and went away again.

      It is pink and frilly and called St Margaret. We think it is probably Lavinia’s nightdress. Mum has spent the last quarter of an hour marvelling about it. “She must have been called away in a hurry after all,” she said, preparing to have more agonies of guilt. “She’d already moved down to the little room to make room for us. Oh, I feel awful.”

      “Mum,” I said, “if you can feel awful looking at someone’s old nightie, what are you going to feel if you happen to see Chris’s socks?” That made her laugh. She’s forgotten to feel guilty now and she’s threatening to blow out the candle.

       There is a ghost in Chris’s room.

      I wrote that two days ago. Since then events have moved so fast that snails are whizzing by, blurred with speed. I am paralysed with boredom, Mum has knitted three sleeves for one sweater for the same reason, and Chris is behaving worse and worse. So is Aunt Maria. We all hate Elaine and the other Mrs Urs.

      How can Aunt Maria bear living in Cranbury with no television? The days have all gone the same way, starting with Mum leaping out of bed and waking me up in her hurry to get breakfast as soon as Aunt Maria begins thumping her stick on the floor. While I’m getting up, Aunt Maria is sounding off next door. “No, no, dear. It’s quite fun to eat runny egg for a change – I usually tell Lavinia to do them for five and a half minutes, but it doesn’t matter a bit.” That was the last two days. Today Mum must have got the egg right, because Aunt Maria was on about “how interesting to eat flabby toast, dear.” The noise wakes Chris up and he comes forth like the skeleton in the cupboard. Snarl, snarl!

      Chris is not usually like this. The first morning, I asked him what was the matter and he said, “Oh nothing. There’s a ghost in my room.” The second morning he wouldn’t speak. Today I didn’t speak either.

      Mum has just time to drink a cup of coffee before Aunt Maria is thumping her stick again, for us to get her up. We have to hook her into a corset-thing which is like shiny pink armour, and you should just see her knickers. Chris did. He said they would make good trousers for an Arabian dancing girl, provided the girl was six feet tall and highly respectable. I thought of Aunt Maria with a jewel in her tummy button and was nearly sick laughing. Aunt Maria made me worse by saying, “I have a great sense of humour, dears. Tell me the joke.” That was while Chris and I were helping her downstairs. She was in full regalia by then, in a tweed suit and two necklaces, and Mum was trying to make Aunt Maria’s bed the way Lavinia is supposed-to-do-it-but-it-doesn’t-matter-dear.

      She comes and sits in state in the living-room then. It is somehow the darkest room in the house, though sun streams in from the brown garden. One of us has to sit there with her. We found that out the first day when we were all getting ready to go shopping for the things on Mum’s huge list. Chris was saying sarcastically that he couldn’t wait to see some of the hot spots in town, when Aunt Maria caught up with what we were talking about.

      She said, in her special urgent scandalised way, “You’re not going out!”

      “Yes,” said Chris. “We are on holiday, you know.”

      Mum shut him up by saying, “Christian!” and explained about the shopping.

      “But suppose I fall!” said Aunt Maria. “Suppose someone calls. How shall I answer the door?”

      “You opened the door to us when we came,” I said.

      Aunt Maria promptly went all gentle and martyred and said none of us knew what it was like to be old, and did we realise she sometimes never saw a soul for a whole month on end? “You go, dears. Get your fresh air,” she said.

      Naturally Mum got guilty at that, and, just as naturally, it was me that had to stay behind. I spent the next three hundred hours sitting in a little brown chair facing Aunt Maria. She sits on a yellow brocade sofa with knobs on and silk ropes hooked around the knobs to stop the sofa’s arms falling down. Her feet are plonked on the wine-coloured carpet and her hands are plonked on her sticks. Aunt Maria is a heavy sort of lady. I keep thinking of her as huge and I keep being surprised to find that she is nothing like as tall as Chris, and not even as tall as Mum. I think she may only be as tall as me. But her character is enormous – right up to the ceiling.

      She talks. It is all about her friends in Cranbury. “Corinne West and Adele Taylor told Zoë Green – Zoë Green has a brilliant mind, dear: she’s read every book in the library – and Zoë Green told Hester Bayley – Hester paints charming water colours, all real scenes, everyone says she’s as good as Van Gogh – and Hester said I was quite right to be hurt at what Miss Phelps had been saying. After all I’d done for Miss Phelps! I used to send Lavinia over to her, but I wonder if I should any more. We told Benita Wallins, and she said on no account. Selma Tidmarsh had told her all Miss Phelps had said. Selma and Phyllis – Phyllis Forbes, that is, not Phyllis West – wanted to go round and speak to Miss Phelps, but I said No, I shall turn the other cheek. So Phyllis West went to Ann Haversham and said …”

      On and on. You end up feeling you are in a sort of bubble filled with that getting-a-cold smell, and inside that bubble is Cranbury and Aunt Maria, and that is the entire world. It is hard to remember there is any land outside Cranbury. I got into a kind of daze of boredom. It was humming in my ears. When you get that way, the most ordinary things get violently exciting. I know when I looked round and saw a cat on the living-room windowsill it was like Christmas or my birthday, or when Chris’s friend Andy notices me. Wonderful! And it was one of those grey fluffy cats with a flat silly face that are normally utterly boring. It was staring intensely in at us through the glass, opening its mouth and dribbling down its grey ruff, and I stared back into its flat yellow eyes – they were slightly crossed – as if that cat was my favourite friend in all the world.

      “You’re not attending, dear,” said Aunt Maria, and she turned to see what I was staring it. Her face went red. She levered herself up on one stick and stumped towards the window, slashing the air with her other stick. “Get off! How dare you sit on my windowsill!” The cat glared in stupid horror and fled for its life. Aunt Maria sat back down, puffing. “He comes in my garden all the time,” she said. “After birds. As I was saying, Ann Haversham and Rosa Brisling were great friends until Miss Phelps said that. Now you mustn’t think I’m annoyed with Amaryllis Phelps, but I was hurt—”

      I thought she was horrid to that cat. I couldn’t listen to her after that. I sat and wondered about Chris’s ghost. It could have been a joke. But if it wasn’t – I didn’t know whether I wanted it to be Dad’s ghost trying to tell Chris where his body was, or not. The idea made my teeth want to chatter, and I had a sort of ache of fear and excitement.

      “Do attend, dear,” said Aunt Maria. “This is interesting.”

      “I am,” I said. She had been talking about Elaine-next-door. I had sort of heard. “We met Elaine,” I said. “She came in last night with a torch.”

      “You mustn’t call her Elaine, dear,”

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