The Time of the Ghost. Diana Wynne Jones

twinkling on either cheek.

      Fenella pushed at Oliver’s nose. “Go away. Imogen’s grieving.” Oliver took no notice. He simply shouldered Fenella aside and rolled into the room, growling lightly, like a heavy lorry in the distance. Where Oliver chose to go, Oliver went. He was too huge to stop. And he had detected that the peculiar Sally was here again. He shambled past Imogen to the foot of the stairs, alternating growls with whining.

      “Sorry,” Fenella said to Imogen, and went out.

      Sally hung at the top of the stairs, looking down at Oliver. He filled the first four steps. She did not think he would come up any farther. Oliver was so heavy and misshapen that his feet hurt him most of the time. He did not like going upstairs. But she wished he would not behave like this. It was alarming.

      “Imogen’s grieving again,” Fenella said to Cart in the kitchen.

      “Damn,” said Cart.

      Sally gave Oliver what she hoped was a masterful look. Go away. The result was alarming. Oliver growled until Sally could feel the vibrations in the stairs. The hair on his back came pricking up. Sally had never seen that happen before. It was horrifying. He looked as big as a bear. Sally turned and fled to the bathroom, where Oliver’s growls followed her but, to her relief, not Oliver himself.

      The bathroom was in its usual mess, with a bright black line round the bath and dirty towels and slimy facecloths everywhere. Sally retreated from it in disgust, into the bedroom. Here, as seemed to keep happening, she found herself being startled by something she should have known as well as the back of her hand. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t got a back to my hand at the moment, she thought, trying to make a joke out of it.

      The bedroom was airless and hot, from being up in the roof. It was the size of the kitchen and sitting room downstairs, with a bite out for the bathroom, but that space did not seem very big with four beds in it. Three of the beds were unmade, of course, with covers trailing over the floor. The fourth bed, Sally supposed, must be hers. It had a square, white, unfamiliar look. There was no personality about it at all.

      Another reason why the room looked so small was that it was as high as it was long. Three black bending beams ran overhead. You could see they had all been cut from the same tree. The twists in them matched. Above them was a complex of dusty rafters, reaching into the peak of the roof, which was lined with greyish hardboard. Sally found herself knowing that this part, where they lived, was the oldest part of School House. It had been stables, long before the red buildings went up beside it. She also knew it was very cold in winter.

      She turned her attention from the roof and found that the walls were covered with pictures. By this time, from under the floor, through the rumbles from Oliver, she could hear Cart in the sitting room. Cart was beginning on another unsuccessful attempt to stop Imogen grieving. “Now look, Imogen, it’s not your fault you keep being turned out of the music rooms. You ought to explain to Miss Bailley.”

      Sally paid no attention, because she was so astonished by the number of pictures. There were pen and ink sketches, pencil drawings, crayoned scenes, water colours, poster paintings, stencils, prints – bad and wobbly, obviously done with potatoes – and even one or two oil paintings. The oil paints and the canvases, Sally knew guiltily, had been stolen from the school Art Room. Most of the rest were on typing paper pinched from the school office. But there were one or two paintings on good cartridge paper. That brought a dim memory to her of the row there had been about the typing paper and the oil paints. She remembered Himself roaring, “I shall have to pay for every hair of every paintbrush you little bitches have thieved!” Then afterwards came a memory of Phyllis, desperately tired and terribly sensible, saying, “Look, I shall give you a pound between you to buy some paper.” A pound did not seem to buy much paper, by the look of it.

      This was supposed to be an Exhibition. Sally discovered, round the bathroom corner, first a bell-push, labelled FOR EMERGENCY ONLY, and then a notice: THIS WAY TO THE EXHIBITION. The notice was signed “Sally”. But Sally had not the slightest recollection of writing it. Why was that? After staring at it in perturbation for a minute, she thought that it must have been written very recently, perhaps just after the end of term – and it was always the things in the last few days she seemed to have the greatest difficulty in remembering.

      She followed her own arrows round the walls, drifting through beds and a chair in order to look closely at the pictures. Cart had signed all hers with a flourishing “Charlotte”. Imogen had signed some of hers neatly, “I. Melford”, but not all. Sally could not tell which of the rest were Imogen’s, or which were her own – if any. Then there were three signed “WH”, including one of the oil paintings, and several labelled simply “N”. N’s pictures leapt off the page at you, even though N could not draw. There was a drawing of Oliver N had done, which was a bad drawing of a bad drawing. But it was Oliver to the life, in spite of it.

      I simply don’t remember any of these! Sally said. A view of the shop-cottage, unsigned. The dead elms, with blodgy rooks, also unsigned. A splendidly dismal dream-landscape by Cart. Cart went in for funereal fantasies: a coffin carried past a ruined castle in a black storm; cowled monks burying treasure; and a horrendous one of a grey, bulky maggot-like thing rising out of mist in a meadow. That one made Sally shudder and pass on quickly. Imogen, on the other hand, seemed to paint more strictly from life: flower studies, fields of wheat, and a careful drawing of the kitchen sink, piled full of thick crockery. That seemed very like Imogen. She could hear Imogen at that moment: “But I must face facts, Cart. It doesn’t matter how unpleasant they are. I can’t turn my back on reality.”

      “Why can’t you?” Cart demanded. “It seems to me that enough facts come up out of life and hit you, without you going and facing all the other ones. Why can’t you turn your back on a few?”

      “Don’t you see? It’s a matter of Truth and Art!” Imogen declared. The strong note of hysteria was in her voice.

      Sally signed and turned to the next picture in the row. And laughed. Oliver seemed to hear her. He rumbled hard from the bottom of the stairs. Sally was laughing too much to care. The picture was signed “And Fenella did just this one awful one”. The picture was a terrible wicked jumble of everyone else’s. N’s badly drawn Oliver snuffled at Cart’s cowled monk, who fled for protection past WH’s spaceship to Imogen’s sink piled with crockery, where – Sally found she remembered this one all right. It was a large, simpering Mother figure, stretching out both arms towards the sink.

      She made tracings, the little beast! Sally said.

      The Mother was the next painting. She was stretching out her arms, not to a sink, but to a fat simpering baby. Sally could remember painting this. And it was awful. It embarrassed her, it was so bad. The faces simpered, the colours were weak and bad, and the shapes were floppy and pointless. The Mother was like an aimless maggot with a pretty face on top. Sally could even remember the row she and Cart had had over it. “Oh leave it out, for goodness sake!” Cart had yelled. “It’s fat and squishy! It’s absolutely yuk!”

      And Sally had yelled back, “You’re the one who’s yuk! You don’t know a tender emotion when you see one. You’re afraid of feelings, that’s your trouble!” That was true in a way, about Cart. Cart’s body may have been large and blurred, but she tried to keep her mind like a small walled garden. She would let no wild things in – though she was ready enough to let them out if it suited her. Sally’s talk of tender emotions drove Cart wild at once.

      “Don’t give me that sentimental drivel!” she roared, and she had chased Sally round the bedroom, waving a coat-hanger.

      Cart was saying much the same at the moment to the sobbing Imogen, though she said it in a kinder way. “Imogen, really, I do think you’re working all this up out of nothing.”

      “No, I’m not! What good would a letter do? A letter, when my whole personality is at stake!” Imogen rang out dramatically.

      Oh! said Sally. She had quite forgotten she was looking for a letter. It was awful the way her mind seemed to point to only one thing at once. It was like the narrow beam