Second Fiddle Read online

  “You only saw her back. But you know enough about her to think your mother would prefer her to you. Oh, Mags!”

  He’s always saying “Oh, Mags!” Come to think of it, a lot of people are always saying “Oh, Mags!” as if I were some sort of troublesome puppy. I’m not troublesome in the slightest. I don’t see why people think they have to throw their eyes up about me all the time.

  “Yemp. That’s about the size of it, Gramps.”

  I took a swig from my grandfather’s glass, to chase the cornery bit of apple down. He rolled his eyes.

  “Don’t call me Gramps,” he grumbled. “I’m not some old American codger. And don’t drink my gin.”

  “Y’are so an old codger.” I bit into the apple again, hard. “Anyways, it’s not gin. You can’t fool me.”

  “Of course it’s gin,” he said with mock grumpiness. Sometimes he does mock grumpiness so well I wonder if it’s not real grumpiness. “And I’m Irish.”

  “Well then,” I said, crunching carelessly.

  “You are a difficult child, do you know that, Mags Clarke?”

  “Hmph. Yemp.”

  “And you shouldn’t eat with your mouth full.”

  I laughed, revealing a mouthful of half-chewed apple. He doesn’t mind that sort of thing, because he is an old codger. It drives my mother wild.

  Gillian

  There is definitely someone hanging about the woods. She looks a bit like something the cat brought in, with her scruffy clothes and her hair all rats’ tails around her shoulders, like a Neanderthal. There’s a new family over the other side, someone said. She must be part of it. New people are usually better, because they haven’t known you all their life; they don’t think you couldn’t possibly amount to anything because they always knew your grandfather was a terrible farmer and as for that hopeless creature your father married, poor man.… Well, of course, she is hopeless, but that isn’t the point.

  Goodness knows, I didn’t choose for this to be the one thing I’m any good at. If I had a special gift for making apple tarts or hairdressing, I’d make apple tarts or cut hair till the cows came home. I wish I could. I’d like to work in a bank when I grow up, or open a coffee shop or set up a Montessori school, and then people would say, “Hasn’t she done well? Considering everything. You have to admire her spirit.” They like you to have spirit, but in manageable amounts, and you also have to use it in approved ways.

  (I don’t think Gillian would be capable of constructing this sentence, actually, but I have to give her adult-sounding things to say from time to time because she is a bit older than I am. You can’t just introduce a person and say, “She is a year and a half older than me,” even if it’s true, because that is too obvious. You have to have the satisfaction of picking up some things for yourself. Signed: Mags)

  Mags

  I saw Miranda again in the woods a few days later. She was just coming out onto the porch of the foresters’ hut. I was watching from behind the brambles, and on a sudden impulse I stepped forward and called up to her. I don’t know why I did it, because I definitely didn’t like the idea of this hut, this girl, all this activity in my forest.

  It isn’t really a forest. It’s only a scrap of woodland on the hillside, but I forested it with my dreams. (Sometimes I write down interesting ways of saying things, like this, in a notebook, but then I usually lose the notebook, so if, like me, you are planning to be a writer when you grow up, I don’t really recommend it as a writing technique, unless of course you are more organized than I am. I didn’t get this sentence in my notebook, because of course my notebook is lost. It just came to me as I was writing the story down. You can call it inspiration if you like. I call it just being good at writing.) I had a sort of a den in a clearing by the stream, and there I could Sherwood to my heart’s content. There was a smooth slab of slaty stone that made a good table, and I kept my water bottle cooling in the running river.

  “Hallo!” I called, stepping firmly out of the brambly undergrowth. “Hallo there! Hi!”

  The girl looked around, startled, clutching her walnut-colored violin by the neck. She made a sunshade over her eyes with her hand and peered into the greenery, searching for the source of the voice—me, in other words.

  “I’m Mags,” I shouted up. “I live over yonder.” I’d never used the word yonder before. It was part of my woodland vocabulary. I wondered if I was pronouncing it properly. “Who’re you?”

  “Gillian.” The girl’s voice was high and precise. A soprano, no doubt. Altos and sopranos never get along; it’s a well-known fact, like Scorpios and Geminis.

  “Suits you,” I said. There weren’t many names that were worse than “Miranda,” but “Gillian” definitely was.

  Gillian tossed her cloud of hair. She’d located me by now on the woodland path below her hut.

  “So does yours,” she shouted down to me. “Suit you. Mags. You’re a Mags all right.”

  I wasn’t sure that this was friendly information, but Gillian followed it with an invitation. “Come on up. My brother’s just making the tea. You can have a cup if you don’t mind powdered milk. We’ve got Kit Kats too. Only the fun size, though.”

  I nodded. Wasn’t it just typical of someone like Gillian to invite me for tea? Only grown-ups ever offer people tea. She looked older than me, but not very much older. I hoped she wasn’t going to be all big-sisterish.

  “Stairs are over this side,” Gillian called, pointing around the side of the hut.

  I followed the direction she pointed in and found that rough wooden steps, made out of cross sections of tree trunk, had been fitted at uneven intervals into the sloping bank. Clever, I thought, picking my way carefully from step to step. You’d hardly notice them, if you weren’t looking for them.

  “When I was small,” Gillian announced as I arrived on the porch, “my brother told me the woodland fairies had made the steps and disguised them so human beings wouldn’t notice them. I believed him, because it’s true the hut is very well hidden. I don’t know why people wanted to disguise it.”

  “Fairies, huh?” I said, careful to use my woodland voice.

  I noticed that Gillian’s face was too small for her neck and her eyes were not of an interesting color. That was something, anyway.

  “Well, I was only small,” Gillian said.

  “Well then,” I said in a slightly apologetic tone. Apparently I say this a lot. I haven’t noticed it myself, but people keep imitating me doing it, so I suppose it must be true, and for this reason, I drop it into the dialogue from time to time to give an authentic flavor. That’s a good tip, by the way, if you are interested in writing. Give your character a catchphrase.

  “Come in,” said Miranda. Gillian, I mean. The way her little head bobs on her long neck, and those pale eyes—pure Gillian.

  “This is my brother, Tim,” said Gillian. “Tim, this is Mags. She lives, er, over yonder.”

  Tim wasn’t what you’d expect of a brother. That is to say, he seemed almost grown up. More like an uncle. And tall, like a tree, with his brown-haired head a very long way from his elbows, which is about where I reached to.

  “We’re new,” I said helpfully. “We moved in last month. What’s the story with the violin?” I sat down on a paint-stained chair that Gillian pointed out.

  She handed me a mug of tea. It was strong and hot. The powdered milk formed curdy lumps in it and did nothing to cool it down. I stirred but the lumps wouldn’t dissolve.

  “It’s for making music on,” said Gillian’s brother. His voice boomed above my head.

  “Well, of course it is,” I said, to Gillian rather than to Tim. His ears were so far up I felt I’d have to shout to talk to him. “I know what a violin is. I mean, how come you play it, and why here?”

  “I play it because…,” Gillian began pertly. Then she stopped. “I don’t know why I play it.” She gave her brown cloud of hair another little toss.

  Lord preserve me from soulful persons! I bet she practices that tos
s of her head in the mirror.

  There was only one Kit Kat left, I noticed, in the rectangular lunch box they used as a sort of biscuit tin. But I was the visitor after all. Surely they’d offer it to me—they’d have to, if they had any manners.

  “Have a Kit Kat,” Gillian said, as if she’d heard me thinking. She offered me the almost empty box. She wore nail polish, I noticed, the see-through kind, no color. It made her fingers seem even smaller and pearlier than they were naturally. My mother wouldn’t dream of letting me wear nail polish. Not that I had ever wanted to.

  “Well then,” I said, taking the Kit Kat casually, as if there were dozens of them left. “But in the woods,” I went on. “Playing a violin in the woods. It seems strange. You’d think it would get … oh, warped or something.”

  “Warped?” Gillian seemed puzzled by this idea.

  I gave up on her. She struck me as not too bright.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” I said to Tim.

  “Because there are only two chairs,” he said. It seemed he’d heard me, in spite of the long-distance ears. I love that about Tim. He always answers exactly the question you ask, even if it’s not quite the question you mean.

  “Well then,” I said.

  That was true, about the chairs. It wasn’t exactly what you could call furnished, the foresters’ hut. It was full, but not furnished. The two chairs and the table weren’t even all in the same place. The table had a jar of teabags and a gas ring on it and a bottle of gas under it, and was at the back of the hut, under a tiny, cobweb-festooned window. One chair was plonked at random in about the middle of the room. Gillian sat on that. My chair was near the door. You couldn’t easily move the chairs, as there was so much junk on the floor.

  Of course, it mightn’t be junk if you were a forester. Coils of rope, tools, sacks of things tied with twine, dirty plastic bags bulging with nails and screws, piles of jackets and ragged pullovers, metal bars, bright hard hats looking a bit like fireman dress-ups from a toy box, and everywhere, resinous piles of wood shavings and sawdust. (You should look up resinous if you don’t know what it means, because I will be using it quite a lot since it is very apt for a book set partly in a forest. It isn’t all set in the forest, by the way, in case you are getting tired of leaves and trees and things.)

  I thought about offering Tim my chair. I’d rather he sat down and I stood up. That way we’d be about level and I could look at him and have a conversation. But he might think that was peculiar, so I didn’t in the end.

  “You mean, does it go out of tune?” said Gillian.

  I looked back at Gillian. “Do I?” I said. I couldn’t remember what we’d been talking about. And then I remembered about the violin. How it didn’t seem to get warped in the woods. Yes, I suppose that was what I had meant—that it might go out of tune.

  I expected that Gillian would tell me it did go out of tune, actually, and then go on to explain what she did to counteract that, or that it didn’t, as a matter of fact.

  But Gillian didn’t say either of those things. Instead, she put her mug down carefully at her feet, between two sawdust hillocks, and picked up the violin from where she’d laid it in its open case on one of the piles of jackets. The inside of the violin case was lined with red silk. It reminded me of the lining on a cloak that had belonged to a magician who’d performed at a birthday party when I was small.

  “Shall I play for you?” Gillian asked shyly. She was fingering the wood of the violin as if it were a pet that needed comfort and reassurance.

  I couldn’t remember what it had sounded like last time Gillian had played, but it couldn’t have been too bad, because I’d have remembered if it had been terrible.

  “Hmph,” I said, remembering my woodland voice again all of a sudden. “Yemp.”

  It was terrible. Truly terrible. Like a sick cat. I listened in horror as Gillian drew dreadful squawks from the strings. Her too-small face was all screwed up with concentration. She looked as if she was in pain. I certainly was. No wonder she had to play out in the woods where she couldn’t upset the neighbors!

  Suddenly Gillian stopped. “Right,” she said. “What’ll I play?”

  “Hmph,” I said. “What was that? What you just played there now, the first thing?”

  “Nothing. I was only tuning up.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hmph.”

  Gillian laughed. “You didn’t think that was music!”

  “’Sall the same to me,” I said grumpily. “’Sjust noise.”

  It wasn’t true. I can hold a tune as well as the next person. I used to be in the choir in my old school. Oh, I think I told you that already.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Gillian. “Listen to this. It’s a blackbird.”

  She stood up and went out onto the porch.

  “I can’t play in there,” she called through the open door. “Too stuffy, it makes the music go all limp. Now, listen. It’s a blackbird, I think.”

  Then she picked up her bow and did that listening thing again, just like the other day, only this time I could see her face. She’d closed her eyes so you didn’t have to think how pale and uninteresting they were, and her whole face was dreamy, creamy, hardly like a face at all, more like a picture of a face, all the features perfectly aligned and perfectly at rest. Her eyebrows made perfect arches. I hadn’t noticed that before. And her head didn’t look too small when she cradled it into the violin.

  I hardly heard when the music started. I could see the bow moving over the strings, but the sound was so soft, it was barely audible. Then gradually it began to swell and drift in from the porch and fill the dark and resinous little hut with melody.

  Suddenly the music stopped. I opened my eyes. I hadn’t realized I’d closed them.

  “’Snot a blackbird,” I said at last in my woodland voice. “I never ’eard a blackbird that sounded like that there.”

  “No, you’re not following me.” Well, that part was true enough. Gillian’s face looked small again, and bland, now that she’d taken the violin from her shoulder. She was like the overlooked mousy person in an Agatha Christie story who turns out to be the murderer. My mother has dozens of those books and I read them when I run out of library books. “I don’t mean it sounds like a blackbird sounds. It sounds like a blackbird.”

  Of course I didn’t follow. How could I? It doesn’t sound like a blackbird sounds, but it sounds like a blackbird. That doesn’t make sense.

  “It doesn’t sound like a blackbird sounds,” Gillian said again. “It sounds like a blackbird being a blackbird. Listen again.”

  She settled the instrument back in the hollow of her collarbone and played. Her bow glided over the strings, her eyebrows disappeared under her hair, her elbow almost scraped the floor.

  “Well then,” I said, and then I listened. I closed my eyes again and concentrated.

  And the blackbird—the blackbird swooped out of the trees, sailed right over the hut, and came to rest on the railing beside Gillian. Even with my eyes closed, I could see it, and something happened in my heart. I didn’t know there could be a connection between your ears and your heart, but I was sure, quite sure, that something moved in there, something I hadn’t known was there at all.

  Gillian

  That woodland creature, the girl who hangs around the woods—she looks as if she’s waiting for the hunter-gatherers to come home and throw her a bone. But the odd thing is, she got the music. Kids never get it. My mother says it’s because they haven’t got the training, their ears are ruined by rap and hip-hop, and maybe that is true, but even grown-ups hardly ever get it. They clap politely because they know that’s what they’re supposed to do, but you always know it’s hollow. But this scruffy Mags creature—she really heard it. It was like being showered with sunlight, watching her getting it. It was like watching something becoming human.

  Mags

  “What’s this about some girl you met in the woods?” my mother wanted to know. She tried to sound casual, but I knew she
was interested. My mother is always on the lookout for friends for me. It worries her that I spend so much time alone. Parents these days, I have noticed, think it is important for their children to be sociable. Something has changed since those books I like to read, where parents thought that packing their children off to grim boarding schools or to forbidding mansions on the Yorkshire moors with no friends or toys, or leaving them with cruel aunts who beat them and made them eat lumpy porridge, was an OK thing to do. I sometimes think I would have preferred to be a child in the olden days. It sounds like more fun, although also a bit scary, especially the porridge part.

  My mother was knitting a cardigan for the new baby. Lemon, in case it was a girl and wouldn’t like blue, or a boy, who would be permanently damaged if he wore pink.

  “White would work too,” I said, fingering the wool, “or green. Mint green, only very pale; it goes with babies’ skin. Or lavender.”

  “You’re changing the subject, Mags.” My mother managed to make changing the subject sound like a minor crime.

  It wasn’t our baby. It was a neighbor’s.

  “What was the subject? Oh yes, Mira— I mean, Gillian. Isn’t that a terrible name?”

  “No,” said my mother.

  “You always disagree with me,” I said sulkily.

  “You always disagree with me,” countered my mother with a sigh. Under her breath, she went on with her endless murmuration: “Knit one, purl one, knit one, slip one, knit one, pass the slipped stitch over the knit stitch, knit one.…”

  “Nobody knits these days,” I said. “Especially not at breakfast.”

  “Well, I must be nobody then,” my mother said, with that little nod she always gives when she thinks she’s made a point particularly well. “Purl one, knit one, slip one.…”