Island of the Aunts

Chapter 17

Meanwhile, in London, Minette’s parents had found a better way of making money than suing the police.

Mrs Danby thought of it first and Professor Danby didn’t hear about it till he saw a newspaper which the tea lady had brought into the University Common Room.

On the front page was a picture of Minette as a baby in her mother’s arms. Heartbreak Mother Mourns Lost Daughter said the headline, and underneath the picture were some terribly sad things that Minette’s mother had said, like there was no second of the day when she did not feel the pain of being without her daughter like a wound in her side. She was a little angel Mrs Danby had told the reporter, and she went on to say that a candle burnt night and day by Minette’s bed and would go on burning till she was safely returned.

As soon as he saw the newspaper, Professor Danby rang his wife.

“How much did they pay you for that?” he wanted to know.

“Twenty thousand,” said Minette’s mother, “and no more than I deserve with what I’ve been through.”

“I don’t know how you can bring yourself to talk to a filthy rag like the Daily Screech,” said the Professor and slammed down the phone.

But all day he was furious. Twenty thousand pounds! It wasn’t as though he wasn’t suffering just as much over his lost daughter. He didn’t light candles by her bed because of the fire risk but the housekeeper, who was fond of Minette, had bought a bunch of flowers and put them in her room. Of course the Daily Screech was out of the question — he wouldn’t be seen dead with his photograph in a rag like that — but if the Morning Gazette was interested he might say a few words about his sorrow and his loss. There was a photograph somewhere that the housekeeper had taken outside the university in which he was standing beside his daughter wearing his gown and hood. It had come out rather well and made it clear the kind of background that she came from.

Fabio’s grandparents were too snobby to talk to any kind of newspaper, but they appeared on a late night television panel to bleat about the lack of discipline in modern life and the feebleness of the police who still hadn’t returned their grandson.

And even as Minette’s parents were getting rich and Fabio’s grandparents were complaining, a helicopter was getting ready to take off from the Metropolitan Police pad outside London. It was a small machine manned only by one policeman and a policewoman — and their orders were clear.

“Remember, if you get a chance to land, it’s the two children we want. The aunts can wait. And don’t pick a fight with Sprott. We’re after the boy and the girl right now, and nothing else.”

As soon as they opened the door of the mermaid shed, Fabio and Minette realized that something serious had happened.

Loreen lay on the tiled floor, chewing mouthfuls of gum and weeping. In her sink in the corner, Oona looked stricken and pale. Old Ursula was shaking her head and muttering.

“It’s my fault,” Loreen wailed. “I’ve been a rotten mother and I deserve all I get.”

“What is it?” the children asked. “What’s happened?”

Loreen hiccuped and tried to speak but what with her gum and her sorrow no one could make out what she was saying and it was Old Ursula who said: “Queenie’s eloped. She’s swum off with that muscleman who came yesterday and tried to catch her.”

“What muscleman?”

“He came in the dinghy with Lambert’s father and Queenie went up to sing to him. We didn’t think she fancied him but she’s gone.”

A low croak came from Oona as she tried to speak. “She…didn’t…fancy him. She…said his biceps were silly.”

But the other mermaids took no notice of Oona, who was trying to make out that Queenie hadn’t gone of her own free will. Twins always stuck together and what had happened with Lord Brasenott made Oona think that all men were evil, which was silly.

“I spoiled her,” wailed Loreen. “She always had the best shells and the prettiest pearls for her hair.”

“Now don’t carry on so,” said Ursula. “It isn’t your fault Queenie turned out so flighty.”

“She didn’t—” began Oona — but Loreen only put another piece of gum in her mouth and went on wailing. “I’ve been a rotten mother, and it’s all my fault,” she said again, and she picked Walter out of the washing-up bowl and slapped his tail though he hadn’t done anything except grizzle and whine in his usual way.

“We must tell the aunts,” said Fabio.

“Oh dear, must we?” cried Loreen.

But Old Ursula said yes, it was best to own up. “Get some wheelbarrows and we’ll go up to the house,” she said.

So the children came back with three barrows and Art, because flopping about overland made the mermaids’ tails sore, and no one took any notice of Oona who went on croaking that her sister had not liked the muscleman.

The aunts were very much upset. Not because Queenie was flighty, which they’d known all along, but because it meant that Mr Sprott now knew that there were mermaids on the Island — and maybe other things too.

“I wonder if he knew before he came to lunch,” said Coral. “Do you think that was why he wanted to buy the Island?”

“Perhaps he’ll come back with photographers?” faltered Myrtle.

Fabio and Minette looked at each other. They had lived in the world outside long enough to know that Mr Sprott might come back with something much more serious than that.

A day passed, and half a night, and then they heard the sound they had been dreading: the noise of a boat coming into the bay. So Sprott was back already!

In an instant the aunts were out of bed. Etta ran for the Captain’s blunderbuss, Coral fetched Art’s catapult, Myrtle grabbed the long-handled brush she used to scrub her back.

Outside, the night was black and moonless but they could make out the boat nosing in beside the jetty. The engine died…the cargo was unloaded…and almost instantly the boat went into reverse and moved away.

The aunts, clutching their weapons, peered into the darkness. Then suddenly Etta broke the silence with a great shout and ran towards the jetty. And there, standing tall among her suitcases, was a woman in a long raincoat holding what seemed to be a frying pan.

“Dorothy! Oh my dear, how wonderful to see you!” She hugged her sister, unable to keep back her tears of happiness and relief.

It was only then, as the other aunts came forward, that Etta could make out two small figures standing behind the luggage.

“Good heavens, Dorothy, what have you got there?” she asked, shining her torch.

“You may well ask,” said Dorothy, and pushed Boo-Boo and the Little One forward into the light.

Having Betty’s children to stay would have been bad at any time. Now with Queenie gone and everyone so jittery, it was a nightmare.

They were awful children. Not awful like Lambert but awful all the same. It wasn’t their fault; they’d been brought up to behave like idiots. Boo-Boo (who was a boy called Alfred) wore a bow tie and kept asking Art for shoe polish.

“It’s got to be tan, not brown,” he said to poor Art, who was trying to prepare mash for the boobrie chicks and take the Captain his meals and cope with the extra people to feed.

The Little One (who was a girl called Griselda) began to cry straight away because Dorothy had forgotten to pack the hankie with a picture of a flower fairy on it which she kept under her pillow, and both the children were terrified of germs. Fortunately they were so wrapped up in their silly fusses about which pyjama case was which that they didn’t even notice the strange animals or the danger they might be in. They just went on dusting the chairs before they sat down in them and looking at themselves in mirrors and complaining because their underclothes hadn’t been ironed, exactly as if they were still in Newcastle upon Tyne. If Fabio hadn’t been so busy with the kraken his temper would certainly have got the better of him but as it was he hardly saw them.

But having Dorothy made up for everything.

Dorothy knew that there was evil in the world. She had-met people like Stanley Sprott and she had seen some dreadful things abroad—“monsters” that were supposed to be mermaids kept pickled in jars, or deformed beasts put in cages for people to gawp at — but she was not afraid. It was Dorothy who filled the Captain’s blunderbuss with carpet tacks and set up tripwires behind the house and showed them how to make a cosh.

But when at the end of the first day Etta took her sister down to see the kraken, the tough, hard-faced woman changed into someone very different.

“Oh Etta,” she breathed, looking down at the little creature as he slept, “that I should live to see this day!”

Queenie sat in Mr Sprott’s bathroom on the Hurricane up to her waist in scented water. The bath was a jacuzzi, with water bubbling up from all sorts of places. The taps were gold and so were the shower fittings and on shelves all round were cut-glass bottles full of wonderful things: coloured crystals and glittering hair sprays and creams for making the body firm and more creams for making it soft once it was firm and more creams still for making it not just soft and firm but also pink.

The creams belonged to Mrs Sprott, but she wasn’t there so Queenie had the bathroom to herself. It was exactly the kind of bathroom she had dreamt of when she heard stories about mermaids marrying princes and going to live in palaces, but as she splashed more water over her tail, the tears kept welling out of her eyes and she was shaken by terrible sobs. She had never in all her life been so unhappy and afraid.

For Oona had been right. Queenie had not swum away to be with the muscleman. Queenie had been most cruelly caught by Mr Sprott’s henchmen and this bathroom was as much her prison as any cell in a cold and dirty dungeon.

She had gone out for a moonlight swim and when she got to the end of the bay she found a net under the water stretched between two rocks. At first she thought the net had been put there by fishermen but as she tried to free herself it was pulled tighter and tighter still, and she was towed away behind the dinghy and hauled aboard the Hurricane like a slab of dead meat.

“Oh, why didn’t I listen?” cried poor Queenie. “My mother told me to stay out of the way of men.”

She would have given anything now to see Loreen chewing her gum or Old Ursula with her toothless smile; she even missed Walter. But the person she longed for most was Oona. She understood now how Oona had felt on board Lord Brasenott’s yacht; no wonder the poor girl had lost her voice. The round window of the bathroom had a curtain but Des and the two horrible men who guarded the boat had pulled it aside and every so often their faces leered in at her.

“Oh, what is to become of me!” cried poor Queenie, and felt so sad that she wanted to die.

And while Queenie wept in the bath, Lambert snivelled in his father’s cabin.

“I don’t want a mermaid for a stepmother,” he whined. “I don’t want a mermaid for a stepmother anyway and I certainly don’t want a mermaid for a stepmother who isn’t really there.”

“Don’t be silly, Lambert,” said Mr Sprott. “One doesn’t marry mermaids, and anyway your mother is still alive.”

But he sighed deeply as he said it for Queenie was much prettier than Mrs Sprott with her purple hair and her claw-like fingernails and her greedy eyes. Mrs Sprott was a kind of dung beetle, only instead of collecting balls of nice soft manure she collected clothes and shoes and jewels and furs and dumped them in his house before going out for more.

“They’ll laugh at me at school if I have a mermaid for a stepmother and I don’t like fish. Even half a fish I don’t like…even a fish that isn’t really there,” moaned Lambert.

“Oh be quiet, Lambert,” said Mr Sprott. “No one’s going to marry her. We’re going to show her off in a tank and make a fortune out of her. But first she’ll have to tell us where the other creepy-crawlies are to be found. I’m going to catch the lot of them and then—”

But he didn’t finish what he was going to say. Lambert couldn’t be trusted not to blab. Not till the weird beasts were on board and tied up and on their way across the Atlantic would he say anything. He had decided to set up his funfair on an island off the coast of Florida which belonged to a friend. Or rather to a business partner. A man like Stanley Sprott did not have friends.

But first he had to cross-examine Queenie and see how much of his son’s babble was true. He found Des ogling the mermaid through the bathroom window, while Casimir and Boris grumbled that it was their turn.

“I found her,” Des was saying. “So I get the longest turn. She’s mine really and the old man ought to—”

He turned to see Mr Sprott standing behind him. “If any of you lay a finger on this mermaid you’ll go straight overboard,” he said, and told Des to board up the window. Then he opened the door and drew up a stool beside the bath.

“Now, dear,” he said, “I’ve got a few questions to ask you. It’s about your family. You’re not alone, are you? You’ve got a mummy and a daddy?”

“I haven’t got a daddy,” said Queenie, pulling Aunt Myrtle’s bodice tighter round her top.

“But a mummy…and little brothers and sisters?”

“Only one of each and my great-grandmother.”

Queenie was too frightened to realize that she was being trapped.

“And of course there are the other…unusual creatures on the Island. Lambert told me about a worm. White, isn’t he?”

Queenie nodded. “He’s very clever,” she said.

“And what else is there on the Island?”

Now at last the mermaid saw where this was leading. “Nothing,” she faltered. “Just the aunts.”

“Oh, I think there are,” said Mr Sprott. “Perhaps if I take the plug out of the bath it will help you to think.”

“No! Oh please, no!”

To take water from a mermaid is the most terrible thing you can do. But Mr Sprott had already pulled it out; the water was draining away. Now he picked up the electric hairdryer.

“No!” she cried again, trying to protect her tail from the terrifying heat.

Mr Sprott turned it off.

“You’ve remembered something else?”

“There’s a big bird…a boobrie.” Surely he wouldn’t want the boobrie? What use would she be to him?

“And where is it to be found? Is there a nest?”

“No…I don’t know…It’s up on the hill. Oh please put the water back.”

But Mr Sprott did not put the water back — and now he put on the dryer again and let the ghastly heat play over her tail till the freshness of the silver became dull and dead…Queenie’s tail had been her pride and joy and now it looked as though it had been on a fishmonger’s slab for a week.

She held out as long as she could. Then she said pitifully: “There are some selkies. They’re just seals really. There’s nothing to them.”

But Mr Sprott wasn’t to be fobbed off so easily.

“What sort of seals?” He had dropped the hairdryer. Instead he had taken a pair of scissors and was holding a hank of her golden hair, ready to chop it off. “Go on — answer. Don’t keep me waiting. I don’t like to be kept waiting.”

“I don’t know,” whispered poor Queenie. “It’s just stories. People say they can turn into humans if someone drops seven tears into the water or if they’re touched with cold steel.”

Mr Sprott’s eyes glittered. He saw the circus ring…a seal on a tub…then a sharp pronged fork in its backside and lo, a woman jumps down. A transformation scene, better than a pantomime.

“Go on — what else is there? What else?”

But though he threatened her again with the hairdryer Queenie kept silent about the little kraken. For she knew that the end of the kraken meant the end of the sea as she knew it — and thus the end of her world — and Mr Sprott did not dare to hurt her any more or she wouldn’t be worth putting on show.

“I’ll speak to you again tomorrow,” he said, turning the water on again. “Don’t think I’ve finished with you, because I haven’t.”

But as he gave his orders — the hold to be cleared, reinforced nets and lifting gear to be got ready, and harpoon guns to stun the beasts before they were hauled aboard — he did not realize that the greatest prize on the Island was still unknown to him. Neither Queenie nor Lambert had mentioned the kraken’s son.