Witch Week

Everyone laughed again. But the laughter was short and guilty, because everyone knew Theresa was not to be laughed at.

Mr Wentworth seemed unaware that he had performed a miracle and made everyone laugh at Theresa, instead of the other way round. He cut the laughter even shorter by telling Dan Smith to come out to the blackboard and show him two triangles that were alike. The lesson went on. Theresa kept muttering, “It’s not funny! It’s just not funny!” Every time she said it, her friends nodded sympathetically, while the rest of the class kept looking at Nan and bursting into muffled laughter.

At the end of the lesson, Mr Wentworth uttered a few unpleasant remarks about mass punishments if people behaved like this again. Then, as he turned to leave, he said, “And by the way, if Charles Morgan, Nan Pilgrim and Nirupam Singh haven’t already looked at the main notice board, they should do so at once. They will find they are down for lunch on high table.”

Both Nan and Charles knew then that this was not just a bad day – it was the worst day ever. Miss Cadwallader sat at high table with any important visitors to the school. It was her custom to choose three pupils from the school every day to sit there with her. This was so that everyone should learn proper table manners, and so that Miss Cadwallader should get to know her pupils. It was rightly considered a terrible ordeal. Neither Nan nor Charles had ever been chosen before. Scarcely able to believe it, they went to check with the notice board. Sure enough it read: Charles Morgan 2Y, Dulcinea Pilgrim 2Y, Nirupam Singh 2Y.

Nan stared at it. So that was how everyone knew her name! Miss Cadwallader had forgotten. She had forgotten who Nan was and everything she had promised, and when she came to stick a pin in the register – or whatever she did to choose people for high table – she had simply written down the names that came under her pin.

Nirupam was looking at the notice too. He had been chosen before, but he was no less gloomy than Charles or Nan.

“You have to comb your hair and get your blazer clean,” he said. “And it really is true you have to eat with the same kind of knife or fork that Miss Cadwallader does. You have to watch and see what she uses all the time.”

Nan stood there, letting other people looking at the notices push her about. She was terrified. She suddenly knew she was going to behave very badly on high table. She was going to drop her dinner, or scream, or maybe take all her clothes off and dance among the plates. And she was terrified, because she knew she was not going to be able to stop herself.

She was still terrified when she arrived at high table with Charles and Nirupam. They had all combed their heads sore and tried to clean from the fronts of their blazers the dirt which always mysteriously arrives on the fronts of blazers, but they all felt grubby and small beside the stately company at high table. There were a number of teachers, and the Bursar, and an important-looking man called Lord Something-or-other, and tall, stringy Miss Cadwallader herself.

Miss Cadwallader smiled at them graciously and pointed to three empty chairs at her left side. All of them instantly dived for the chair furthest away from Miss Cadwallader. Nan, much to her surprise, won it, and Charles won the chair in the middle, leaving Nirupam to sit beside Miss Cadwallader.

“Now we know that won’t do, don’t we?” said Miss Cadwallader. “We always sit with a gentleman on either side of a lady, don’t we? Dulcimer must sit in the middle, and I’ll have the gentleman I haven’t yet met nearest me. Clive Morgan, isn’t it? That’s right.”

Sullenly, Charles and Nan changed their places. They stood there, while Miss Cadwallader was saying grace, looking out over the heads of the rest of the school, not very far below, but far enough to make a lot of difference. Perhaps I’m going to faint, Nan thought hopefully. She still knew she was going to behave badly, but she felt very odd as well – and fainting was a fairly respectable way of behaving badly.

She was still conscious at the end of grace. She sat down with the rest, between the glowering Charles and Nirupam. Nirupam had gone pale yellow with dread. To their relief, Miss Cadwallader at once turned to the important lord and began making gracious conversation with him. The ladies from the kitchen brought round a tray of little bowls and handed everybody one.

What was this? It was certainly not a usual part of school dinner. They looked suspiciously at the bowls. They were full of yellow stuff, not quite covering little pink things.

“I believe it may be prawns,” Nirupam said dubiously. “For a starter.”

Here Miss Cadwallader reached forth a gracious hand. Their heads at once craned round to see what implement she was going to eat out of the bowl with. Her hand picked up a fork. They picked up forks too. Nan poked hers cautiously into her bowl. Instantly she began to behave badly. She could not stop herself. “I think it’s custard,” she said loudly. “Do prawns mix with custard?” She put one of the pink things into her mouth. It felt rubbery. “Chewing gum?” she asked. “No, I think they’re jointed worms. Worms in custard.”

“Shut up!” hissed Nirupam.

“But it’s not custard,” Nan continued. She could hear her voice saying it, but there seemed no way to stop it. “The tongue-test proves that the yellow stuff has a strong taste of sour armpits, combined with – yes – just a touch of old drains. It comes from the bottom of a dustbin.”

Charles glared at her. He felt sick. If he had dared, he would have stopped eating at once. But Miss Cadwallader continued gracefully forking up prawns – unless they really were jointed worms – and Charles did not dare do differently. He wondered how he was going to put this in his journal. He had never hated Nan Pilgrim particularly before, so he had no code-word for her. Prawn? Could he call her prawn? He choked down another worm – prawn, that was – and wished he could push the whole bowlful in Nan’s face.

“A clean yellow dustbin,” Nan announced. “The kind they keep the dead fish for Biology in.”

“Prawns are eaten curried in India,” Nirupam said loudly.

Nan knew he was trying to shut her up. With a great effort, by cramming several forkfuls of worms – prawns, that was – into her mouth at once, she managed to stop herself talking. She could hardly bring herself to swallow the mouthful, but at least it kept her quiet. Most fervently, she hoped that the next course would be something ordinary, which she would not have any urge to describe, and so did Nirupam and Charles.

But alas! What came before them in platefuls next was one of the school kitchen’s more peculiar dishes. They produced it about once a month and its official name was hot-pot. With it came tinned peas and tinned tomatoes. Charles’s head and Nirupam’s craned towards Miss Cadwallader again to see what they were supposed to eat this with. Miss Cadwallader picked up a fork. They picked up forks too, and then craned a second time, to make sure that Miss Cadwallader was not going to pick up a knife as well and so make it easier for everyone. She was not. Her fork drove gracefully under a pile of tinned peas. They sighed, and found both their heads turning towards Nan then in a sort of horrified expectation.

They were not disappointed. As Nan levered loose the first greasy ring of potato, the urge to describe came upon her again. It was as if she was possessed.

“Now the aim of this dish,” she said, “is to use up leftovers. You take old potatoes and soak them in washing-up water that has been used at least twice. The water must be thoroughly scummy.” It’s like the gift of tongues! she thought. Only in my case it’s the gift of foul-mouth. “Then you take a dirty old tin and rub it round with socks that have been worn for a fortnight. You fill this tin with alternate layers of scummy potatoes and cat-food, mixed with anything else you happen to have. Old doughnuts and dead flies have been used in this case—”

Could his code-word for Nan be hot-pot? Charles wondered. It suited her. No, because they only had hot-pot once a month – fortunately – and, at this rate, he would need to hate Nan practically every day. Why didn’t someone stop her? Couldn’t Miss Cadwallader hear?

“Now these things,” Nan continued, stabbing her fork into a tinned tomato, “are small creatures that have been killed and cleverly skinned. Notice, when you taste them, the slight, sweet savour of their blood—”

Nirupam uttered a small moan and went yellower than ever.

The sound made Nan look up. Hitherto, she had been staring at the table where her plate was, in a daze of terror. Now she saw Mr Wentworth sitting opposite her across the table. He could hear her perfectly. She could tell from the expression on his face. Why doesn’t he stop me? she thought. Why do they let me go on? Why doesn’t somebody do something, like a thunderbolt strike me, or eternal detention? Why don’t I get under the table and crawl away? And, all the time, she could hear herself talking. “These did in fact start life as peas. But they have since undergone a long and deadly process. They lie for six months in a sewer, absorbing fluids and rich tastes, which is why they are called processed peas. Then—”

Here, Miss Cadwallader turned gracefully to them. Nan, to her utter relief, stopped in mid-sentence. “You have all been long enough in the school by now,” Miss Cadwallader said, “to know the town quite well. Do you know that lovely old house in the High Street?”

They all three stared at her. Charles gulped down a ring of potato. “Lovely old house?”

“It’s called the Old Gate House,” said Miss Cadwallader. “It used to be part of the gate in the old town wall. A very lovely old brick building.”

“You mean the one with a tower on top and windows like a church?” Charles asked, though he could not think why Miss Cadwallader should talk of this and not processed peas.

“That’s the one,” said Miss Cadwallader. “And it’s such a shame. It’s going to be pulled down to make way for a supermarket. You know it has a king-pin roof, don’t you?”

“Oh,” said Charles. “Has it?”

“And a queen-pin,” said Miss Cadwallader.

Charles seemed to have got saddled with the conversation. Nirupam was happy enough not to talk, and Nan dared do no more than nod intelligently, in case she started describing the food again. As Miss Cadwallader talked, and Charles was forced to answer while trying to eat tinned tomatoes – no, they were not skinned mice! – using just a fork, Charles began to feel he was undergoing a particularly refined form of torture.

He realised he needed a hate-word for Miss Cadwallader too. Hot-pot would do for her. Surely nothing as awful as this could happen to him more than once a month? But that meant he had still not got a code-word for Nan.

They took the hot-pot away. Charles had not eaten much. Miss Cadwallader continued to talk to him about houses in the town, then about stately homes in the country, until the pudding arrived. It was set before Charles, white and bleak and swimming, with little white grains in it like the corpses of ants – Lord, he was getting as bad as Nan Pilgrim! Then he realised it was the ideal word for Nan.

“Rice pudding!” he exclaimed.

“It is agreeable,” Miss Cadwallader said, smiling. “And so nourishing.” Then, incredibly, she reached to the top of her plate and picked up a fork. Charles stared. He waited. Surely Miss Cadwallader was not going to eat runny rice pudding with just a fork? But she was. She dipped the fork in and brought it up, raining weak white milk.

Slowly, Charles picked up a fork too and turned to meet Nan’s and Nirupam’s incredulous faces. It was just not possible.

Nirupam looked wretchedly down at his brimming plate. “There is a story in the Arabian Nights,” he said, “about a woman who ate rice with a pin, grain by grain.” Charles shot a terrified look at Miss Cadwallader, but she was talking to the lord again. “She turned out to be a ghoul,” Nirupam said. “She ate her fill of corpses every night.”

Charles’s terrified look shot to Nan instead. “Shut up, you fool! You’ll set her off again!”

But the possession seemed to have left Nan by then. She was able to whisper, with her head bent over her plate so that only the boys could hear, “Mr Wentworth’s using his spoon. Look.”

“Do you think we dare?” said Nirupam.

“I’m going to,” said Charles. “I’m hungry.”

So they all used their spoons. When the meal was at last over, they were all dismayed to find Mr Wentworth beckoning. But it was only Nan he was beckoning. When she came reluctantly over, he said, “See me at four in my study.” Which was, Nan felt, all she needed. And the day was still only half over.

CHAPTER THREE (#u69483a27-a89e-5ee5-a135-aa68f23603ac)

That afternoon, Nan came into the classroom to find a besom laid across her desk. It was an old tatty broom, with only the bare minimum of twigs left in the brush end, which the groundsman sometimes used to sweep the paths. Someone had brought it in from the groundsman’s shed. Someone had tied a label to the handle: Dulcinea’s Pony. Nan recognised the round, angelic writing as Theresa’s.