Free Castle Of Bone by Penelope Farmer Page A

hear anything that was said. Jean’s rowing was perfectly adequate, but she kept up a running commentary on the techniques involved, that he did not feel in the least like listening to. She fell silent at last out of weariness; but Hugh did not offer to take over the oars. Aware, without guilt, that he was being mean, he lay with his hands behind his head and simply enjoyed himself again, let the sun, the slight wind, the cool movement of water calm him, just as he had been calmed earlier in the willow grove.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    They went home as they had come, by bus and underground. In the tunnels, in the dark, the distances seemed interminable if you once began to count. But when the train broke out into the light, when the eye had something it could reckon by, even twice the distance might seem half the length. So time always was in part what you made of it, Hugh thought, a little comforted. It made the cupboard seem a shade less ruthless, a shade less arbitrary.
    They walked in at the front gate, hot and cross after the walk from the station.
    “Where’s Humbert?” Jean asked at once. Humbert was the cat, Jean’s in effect, because no one else took much notice of him, except, occasionally, their father who fondled him extravagantly before visitors, or when he felt some kind of need to show affection. In the summer, in the heat, Humbert’s favourite place was beneath the ash tree in the front garden – he had been sitting there when they went out, but was not on their return.
    “He’ll be somewhere. He could be anywhere. You know what cats are like.”
    It was odd that Jean worried so very soon. But when they did begin to look for him he was nowhere to be found. His dish of food had not been touched either.
    Jean was beside herself. She seemed at the moment too easily upset, who was normally quite calm and organized. She went all round the house, all round the garden, calling quietly, “Puss, puss, puss.” To no avail; by bedtime she was crying unashamedly.
    “We shouldn’t have gone out. We shouldn’t have left him. It’s all our fault.”
    “Don’t be silly; Ma was here.” And they’d often left him, Hugh pointed out, gently. He’d often gone off and then come back. Cats were like that, independent, solitary. “I’m dead sympathetic to cats,” Hugh said with feeling; remembering he’d hardly been left alone to paint for a week, and wishing, almost, that the cupboard had never happened.
    He went upstairs to bed still thinking of painting, not thinking about the cupboard at all. But there had been a tree in his most recent painting, somewhat abstract but a tree for all that, dominating it, and it was a tree he began to feel as he neared his room; an ash tree, he decided, because that was where they’d last seen the cat. He expected the cupboard to be a tree, to have taken root, to be growing in his room. He opened the door quite sure of that, to find only the ordinary shoddy-looking cupboard, marked by nails where there had been a mirror, and the ash tree as usual outside his window. Yet he had imagined an ash tree in his room, with a smooth trunk and sprays of little leaves.
    His mind kept on going back to it. Lying in bed he found himself in a boat, floating beneath the shade of a huge ash tree. Tonight he felt wholly as if in a dream. A boatman stood in the bows of the boat and poled it with a long grey pole. Hugh could not see the boatman’s face but this did not worry him – he seemed to know everything, somewhere in his mind.
    The castle lay ahead of them across the lake. Hugh looked for and found its reflection in the water, but under the lake he saw another world again, the castle surrounded by flowing grass and trees, trees with fruit on them and some with flowers, all greenish-tinged, all the other colours there but subordinate. Hugh longed for the castle, stretched out his hands to its reflection, the boat gentling and gliding under him. His hands touched the water, stirring it, and