The Harriet Bean 3-Book Omnibus (2 page)

My father wanted Veronica to enter, but there was one problem. They said that the competition was for strong men, not strong women, so girls couldn’t enter.

“Anyway,” said the man who was in charge, “whoever heard of a strong girl?”

This sort of thing seemed very unfair to my father, and so he made a plan with Veronica. They got a hold of some boys’ clothes and dressed her up in them. Then they tucked her hair up under a cap—the sort that all the farmhands wore—and there she was: a boy.

That year the strong men had to pick up pigs. There was an awfully fat pig in a pen, called Norman, and the contestants had to try to pick him up. So far, nobody had succeeded in lifting Norman. One man got two of
Norman’s feet off the ground, but then Norman gave him a nip on the ankle and he dropped him.

When Veronica went forward, all the spectators had laughed.

“You’re just a boy,” one farmer called out. “Come back in ten years’ time!”

Veronica paid no attention to all this. She paid her entrance fee and stepped into the pigpen. Then she went up to Norman and put her arms around his fat body. He really was the most enormous pig, and he must have weighed hundreds of pounds. She bent her knees and with a sudden heave, up went Norman into the air.

The pig was so surprised that he forgot to try to nip her. One moment he was enjoying a good guzzle of turnip scrapings and the next he was in the air, his feet pointing up toward the sky. He let out an awful squealing noise at first and then went absolutely silent. All the breath had been squeezed out of him by Veronica’s mighty grip.

Veronica held Norman there for at least a
minute. Then she gently lowered him back onto his feet. Norman gave a gasp, followed by a grunt, and finally he lurched away to a corner. He stood there, glaring at Veronica, every rasher of his bacon quivering in fear.

Veronica was very pleased. She stepped forward to receive her prize and gave Norman a friendly pat immediately afterward. He just squealed with fright, though, and my father said that he thought Norman would remember that day for the rest of his life.

I liked the sound of Aunt Veronica. I had always hated people saying that girls are weaker than boys, and the thought of Aunt Veronica proving that this was nonsense pleased me immensely. But what about the others?

“Get me another scone,” said my father, “and then I’ll tell you something about your other aunts.”

I buttered the largest scone I could find and set it in front of him. This seemed to put him in a very good mood, and over the next few minutes he told me all about Majolica. She was his bossy sister. She used to tell all
the others what to do from the moment she got up in the morning until the time she went to bed.

“She was always shouting, ‘
Do this! Do that! No! Not that way!
’ ” said my father. “And so on.

“She had ideas about everything. If she thought somebody walked the wrong way, she’d say something about it. If she didn’t like the way somebody brushed her hair, she’d tell her to change it. There was nothing she wasn’t prepared to boss people over.

“Can you just imagine how bossy she was?” asked my father. “Well, I played a trick on her once, and although it didn’t stop her bossing people around, it certainly kept her quiet for a day or so. It was a very good trick, and I don’t have time to tell you about it now, but I will later on.”

My father laughed at the memory of the mysterious trick. So far, though, he had only spoken about Veronica and Majolica, and I was eager to hear all about the others too.

“There were three others,” he went on,
counting the aunts on his fingers. “Veronica was the oldest. Then, after her came the twins, Japonica and Thessalonika. I can’t quite remember whether Harmonica was older than Majolica, although I do know that Japonica arrived two minutes before Thessalonika.”

Harmonica was the musical one, which suited her name, of course. They had no musical instruments then, but Harmonica had the most enchanting voice anybody could imagine. She sounded like a nightingale, and visitors to the farm would stand in wonder if they heard her singing.

And she could do something else too. She was a ventriloquist, which meant that she could throw her voice. She could throw her voice into a trunk and make it sound as if there were somebody inside. She could throw it behind a curtain and make you quite positive that there was somebody standing behind it. It was a marvelous gift.

Japonica and Thessalonika could do only one thing well. They could read minds. My
father supposed that it came from being twins. He said that if you have a twin, you get used to thinking about what the other person is going to do. Eventually you become able to read your twin’s mind, and once you can do that, it’s not so hard to read other people’s minds.

They could do the most extraordinary things as a result of this ability. They could tell if somebody was lying. In fact, they could tell if somebody was going to lie even before that person opened his mouth. As my father told me about this, I thought: what a very great talent to have!

I listened to what my father had to say about my aunts. He had never talked to me about his family before and I had always assumed that there had only been him. Now I found myself with a whole set of new relatives, all of whom sounded exciting. Naturally I wanted to meet them, and so I asked him where they lived and when we could go to see them. At this, his smile disappeared.

“I have no idea where they live,” he confessed. “I’ve got old addresses for one or two of them of course, but those are bound to be out of date. So where they are today—heaven knows!”

“But what happened?” I pressed. “You can’t have lost my aunts just like that.”

He nodded sadly.

“I did, I’m afraid. They’re all lost, every single one of them.”

I asked him how it happened and he told me the story.

“The farm we lived on really wasn’t very good. The soil was thin there, and the potatoes we grew were always very hard and tiny. The animals were thin too, just as we were. The cows all showed their ribs and it was a great effort for the hens to lay any eggs.

“At last my poor parents—your grandparents—decided that we just could not go on. They called us all together and told us the bad news that they would have to sell the farm. If they got enough money from the sale, they might be able to buy a small shop in town,
and we could live off that. I liked the idea at the time. For a boy who had spent all his life on a farm, the idea of living above a shop sounded very nice.

“But things did not work out that way. When the farm was put up for sale, quite a few people came out to see it, but nobody seemed prepared to buy it for the price my father set. One or two people actually laughed when they saw how thin the soil was and how hungry the animals looked. And so your grandparents were forced to sell it for next to nothing to a man who was going to use it for no other purpose than to ride his horses over it. Our house—the house in which we had all been born and had grown up—was to have a wider door fitted and was then to be used as a stable for the horses. Oh, the shame of it!

“What was worse, though, was that we could not afford to buy the shop after all. Your grandfather was now desperate. I saw him sitting in his chair near the kitchen stove, his head in his hands, thinking about the sad
fate that had befallen us. I longed to be able to help my parents, but what could I do? I couldn’t get a job—I was too young for that—and nobody seemed willing to take on the girls.

“At last, when the day came to leave the farm, your grandfather broke more bad news to us.

“ ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said. ‘We are all going to have to split up. I just can’t afford to keep the family together anymore.’

“It was a terrible, terrible blow, and I was so shocked by it that I almost did not hear what he then had to say. It seemed he had arranged for us to go and stay with various people all over the country. Some of the girls were to go to cousins; others were to go to live in a children’s home in a city a long way off.

As the youngest, I was given the best choice. I was to live with my grandparents. Even this was a terrible fate. I did not want to leave Majolica, Veronica, and Harmonica, not to mention Thessalonika and Japonica. But I really had no choice, and that day I said
good-bye to my sisters, fearing that I would never see them again. And I never have.”

It seemed to me to be one of the saddest stories I had ever heard. As my father spoke, I could picture the day when they all left the farm. I had no idea what it was to have a brother or a sister—I had none—but I imagined that a brother or a sister must be the very best of friends, and to see all your brothers and sisters going off to a new home must be like losing all your best friends at once.

My father ate the last crumb of his scone and sighed. I thought that he had come to the end of his story, but he suddenly looked up and went on.

“There’s something else I should tell you,” he said. “When they realized that the family would have to split up, your grandparents decided that they would have a portrait of all the children painted. They got in touch with a painter who lived nearby and asked him whether he would do it. The painter was a rather temperamental man, and nobody could ever tell when he was likely to be
difficult, but he agreed, and we had the first sitting.

“We dressed in our best clothes—which were all a bit threadbare, I’m afraid to say—and then we all stood in two rows, with Majolica in the middle. The painter, who was an enormous man with a handlebar mustache, fussed and fiddled with his canvas and seemed to take an awfully long time to do anything. It was difficult for us—we had to try to keep a straight face and not to move, while all the time we could hardly keep our eyes off his mustache, which went up and down whenever he moved.

“Your grandparents had hoped that the painting would be finished within three or four days, but unfortunately the painter took much longer than that. At the end of a week, as the painter was packing up and cleaning his brushes after the day’s work, your grandfather explained to him that he could no longer afford to pay him.

“ ‘It’s taken so long,’ he said apologetically. ‘And as we have to pay you at the end of
each day, I’m afraid we will have to stop today.’

“The painter was very upset and threw his arms up and down in the air to emphasize his displeasure. But there was no alternative. He was not prepared to work without payment, and we didn’t have the money to pay him any more. So he left us with an unfinished painting. All the bodies were painted, up to the shoulders. But he hadn’t gotten around to even starting the heads.”

I said nothing. I was trying to imagine what the painting must have been like. It must have looked very peculiar, with the six figures standing there, all with no heads.

“Would you like to see it?” my father asked.

“See what?”

“Why, the painting,” he said. “I have it upstairs, you see. It’s in the attic. It’ll be dusty after all these years, but it’s there all right.”

Now this was exciting news indeed! Together with my father I made my way up into the attic, a dark and dusty place full of all sorts of bits and pieces that had been stored away over the years. In spite of the confusion, though, my father seemed to know exactly where to look. Muttering to himself, he gave a tug at a large square object and there, covered, as he had warned, with a thick layer of dust, was the painting.

We took it downstairs and rubbed it down with a cloth. Clouds of dust flew up and slowly the picture on the canvas began to show itself. I peered at it as the figures
emerged. Yes! There they were, in two rows, surrounding the youthful figure of my father, my aunts! (Or, rather, parts of my aunts—up as far as their necks.)

I polished away at the painting until it was as clean as I could get it.

“Yes,” said my father. “There we are. And that’s one of the barns in the background. That’s me with the torn trousers. And that’s Veronica—can you see the strong arms? And that’s Thessalonika. She always wore that pink dress on Sundays although it had become very tattered.”

It made me sad to look at the picture. If only there had been enough money to pay the painter to finish it, then there would at least have been a good record of the family. There were the photographs, of course, but you can’t really put photographs on your wall, and when they’re tucked away in an album they’re rather out of mind.

“I wish it had been finished,” I said. “If only the painter had worked faster.”

My father nodded. “Now it will never be finished,” he mused. “And it’s no good as it is, with blanks where the heads should be.”

It was as he spoke that an idea occurred to me. Unfinished paintings
can
be finished, even if it’s years later. Perhaps I could trace my aunts. Perhaps I could get them all together again and we could have the painting finished at last. Although my grandfather was no longer alive, it would be a marvelous thing to finish off the one thing that he had wanted so much and that had not worked out for him.

I turned to my father.

“Couldn’t we get the painting finished?” I asked. “If we found my aunts again and got them together …”

My father thought for a moment. He looked doubtful.

“I’ve lost touch,” he said. “I’ve got one or two addresses somewhere, but it’s all so long ago.”

I was determined to persevere.

“Please, let’s try,” I said. “Please, let’s see if we can do it.”

“I’ll think about it,” my father said. “Maybe.”

Over the next few days, I thought about little else. My father, though, appeared to forget about it all and seemed rather surprised when I asked him for the addresses he had told me about.

“I want to write to my aunts,” I said to him. “Could you give me those addresses you had?”

He looked at me vaguely. “Aunts? Oh yes, of course, all those aunts.” He frowned. “I don’t think the addresses will be any use. They’re from about ten years ago.”

I insisted that I still wanted to try, and, grumbling under his breath about being disturbed, he went off to search in a drawer of his desk. His desk was always overflowing with bits of paper, and I was astonished that he ever managed to find anything there.