The Changeover Read online

  Janua Caeli said the gates of the old Carlisle home in a single iron voice. They were locked, but not with a padlock and chain. Shaking them furtively to find the pattern of their resistance, Laura determined that they were bolted and spoke the name of the house like a magic spell as she wrestled with the bolt.

  "Janua Caeli," she said as the bolt yielded, and pinched her hand painfully. She slipped through, bolted the gates behind her and went on up a dark, shingled drive, sucking her fingers to help them recover from their sufferings.

  The smell of untamed trees immediately surrounded her and with the smell came the conviction that wild beasts might spring out of the shadows at her... that she might have to run for her life at any moment. Still, she did not mind this feeling, for it had an edge of poetry to it that had not been part of the chilly anxiety of the street outside the gate. Better to be eaten by a tiger with golden eyes than beaten and raped by the savages of the Gardendale subdivision. Yet, after all, the world was ferocious one way or another, Laura thought, and could be just as savage behind the curtained windows of a family home.

  For a moment she lost the path and, as she stood still trying to make it out, something soft and electric with life touched her leg, making her gasp with alarm. A moment later she realized it was the tiger's little cousin, a cat so indistinguishable from the shadows it could only be a black one. She saw then that the drive had actually swung to the left and she followed the faint clues of light which became stronger as she came out of the trees and into a courtyard that appeared to be full of giant chessmen and barnyard roosters. She was accompanied now by two shadows, a faint, grey moon shadow and a much blacker one flowing away behind her, cast by a welcoming light over the door. As she approached this door the moon shadow ignored it, but the lamp shadow shifted and shrank around her like a nervous dog.

  The population of shapes in the courtyard was something Laura had read about but never seen before — a topiary company, trees, some of them in tubs, clipped into shapes they would not have chosen, left to their own devices. Laura walked between them nervously. It was easy to believe that one of the giant roosters might be real, might even now be twisting its head to look down at her passing under its beak, but she arrived at the door safely and noted with pleasure that it was made of heavy planks, very thick, old and secure, well able to keep unfriendly forces at bay. For a moment she thought that a face looked at her out of the depths of the wood, but it was only a door knocker, an iron gargoyle obligingly holding a ring in its mouth. Laura knocked boldly, for she had not pursued this

  dark, half-enchanted journey to be hesitant at the end.

  Sorry's mother, Miryam Carlisle, opened the door. She could not have been much older than Kate, but her hair was quite white. She was very tall, perhaps as much as six feet in height, and though Laura could not see her face clearly she found she could fill it in from memory — very cool and calm and always about to change to another less ordered expression, but never quite doing so.

  "Mrs Carlisle," Laura said, "I'm sorry to come so late but I wondered if I could have a word with Sorry— with Sorensen, that is."

  "Laura Chant!" exclaimed Miryam Carlisle, astonishing Laura who had certainly not expected to be recognized. "Do come in. We've been hoping you would come and see us some day."

  Laura stepped into a hallway that smelt of flowers, light falling softly through a big arch opposite the entrance and revealing wonders: a carved chest, a slender table inlaid with scrolls of ivory and pearl, a huge vase of mixed flowers, the purple and pink spires of foxgloves standing out against the white wall, and a shallow bowl on a second glass-topped table filled with pot pourri and embossed with blue and green hummingbirds. All these objects spoke of people with a different sort of time in their lives from that available to Kate and Laura. No wild searching in the morning for missing shoes, no racing down the path, or pushing a car into life so that school and work could be reached at the appropriate time. These people had time to make pot pourri and arrange flowers. They might be better organized than Kate — Laura was fair enough to acknowledge this— but she realized, too, that this hall spoke of the advantages that money could confer, and one of these was time. It might be fair to love Sorry for his riches because one loved the chance they offered to become harmonious and beautiful.

  A figure appeared in the lighted arch — old Mrs Carlisle, quite as tall as Miryam if she were to straighten herself, but pillowy in shape, head pushed forward like an elegant tortoise. She watched Miryam and Laura in silence as they stopped outside one of the doors leading out of the hall.

  "This is Sorensen's study," Miryam explained, knocking on the door, and Laura tried to imagine having a door that people actually knocked at— a door behind which she too, could be silent and mysterious.

  "What is it?" asked a voice behind the door—Sorry Carlisle's voice, no doubt about that, not deeper, but darker than it was at school.

  "It's Laura Chant," said Miryam, opening the door for her, and Laura noted with astonishment the familiarity with which her name was used. She was known here, singled out from the rest of the population of Gardendale, though she had never visited the house before. Out of sudden and unanticipated embarrassment she looked at the room beyond Sorry who was half-rising from his desk to meet her. She saw, first of all, real bookcases filled with books, few, if any of which had been acquired out of the 'Cancelled' box at his local public library. She would have expected books, however. Sorry also had an old leather settee, battered but still good, brightened with patchwork cushions, and real pictures on the wall, the marks of the painter's brush giving its texture to the painted surface. Among the pictures was a large poster of a naked woman and beside it, standing in its own wooden frame, a complete human skeleton, yellowish white, shining and smiling. Directly above this was a painted mask, funny — and frightening because it was funny even though it was so still. Laura felt a sigh trying to force its way out of her lips at the prospect of owning such beauty and of living with it day after day. But then she saw that one complete shelf in the bookcase was filled with women's romances, such as she and Kate despised, and this made her feel strong, as if they proved Sorry to be stuck at some inadequate level of understanding which she herself had grown beyond. The cat pushed slickly past her legs and jumped up on to Sorry's knee where it disappeared, for he was wearing black and his greater blackness swallowed the cat's lesser one. Laura saw, even before she looked at him properly, that this was a different version of Sorry Carlisle from the one she had known at school. His black dressing-gown, or caftan, was part of the change; his hands, redefining the cat by stroking it, were another. For they were covered in rings, some of them old and beautiful, gifts perhaps from his grandmother who also wore many rings. However, when she looked into his face, as she was bound to do, at last, her hair stood quite simply on end, for in this room he was somehow expanded, less simple, less mild, less good— overflowing with blackness. At the same time he stared at her incredulously as if she had had a precisely similar effect on him, appearing in his doorway, a visitation hoped for and feared, a test he was forced to take before he was ready to do so. To be taken aback and frightened is one thing; to find that in some way you are frightening someone else is another. If it had not been for the picture of Jacko she carried in her mind, she would have turned and run out of the house.

  At the same time Laura saw, with relieved satisfaction, that Sorry had a few pimples at his hairline and the thought that this witch might have pimples like anyone else gave her confidence. The cat on his knees began to knead and purr, looking up at her with luminous eyes.

  "Come on in," he said. "What's eating you, Chant?"

  "Tigers!" Laura thought of saying as she sidled nervously into the room. Miryam Carlisle continued to stand in the doorway watching her. Sorry, for his part, recovered from his strange astonishment and began to smile a smile both inquisitive and sinister.

  "What's brought you into my parlour?" he asked ominously. "It's late to be visiting a
man in his rooms, Chant."

  "I'm wearing my school uniform," Laura said. "Does that make it better or worse?" She had never worked out why he had always chosen to call her by her surname, but she had not minded. Sorry laughed a little as if he were surprised at her answer.

  "I don't know the etiquette on that one," he admitted. "I don't think it's dealt with in any books I've read. Sit down."

  Laura did so, feeling shabby among the patchwork cushions, and Sorry watched her as if she were a model, displaying herself on his sole behalf.

  "Your school uniform's too short, for that matter," he added. "It should come down to your knees when you're sitting down. It's in the handbook."

  Laura looked at him cautiously. She did not want to misunderstand this remark.

  "I've let down the hem as far as it will go," she explained.

  "You need another," Sorry said. "There's the rest of this term and then two months the other side of Christmas before you can change into winter gear. And you'll probably grow over the holidays."

  "Sorensen, you're not at school now," said his mother.

  "I know that," Sorensen replied. "And she knows it. I was being subtle, letting her know I was looking at her legs. She's got very sexy legs but I'm not allowed to tell her about them at school."

  "There's a difference between being oblique and being obscure," said his mother, while Laura tried to hide her consternation.

  "You must forgive Sorensen," Miryam went on, turning to Laura, quite as if she were an honoured and adult guest who mustn't be offended. "He can be very inept at times."

  "I'm not being inept, Chant," Sorry said. "My mother knows that. She's just worried because I'm not doing an impression of polite conversation — weather or health — 'And how are you, Laura Chant, are you keeping well, and your dear mother, is she well too?' ... all that stuff." He spoke in a rapid, light voice that picked subjects up and abandoned them before his listeners had caught up with them, and there was a slight breathlessness haunting his words at times, the remains of his original stammer. "My mother finds 'sexy' a very aggressive word, but I think it's accurate and I'm more likely to know about such things than she is." Laura was being used as part of an argument between two little-known people. "Whatever else I may miss out on," Sorry added, smiling at his mother.

  "Sorensen!" she said in a soft voice, soft but quelling, a velvet cushion used to smother a prince in a tower.

  "Do go and do something else, Mother," he said, looking away. "Please do. It's very inhibiting to talk to a visitor with you listening in. I won't hurt her. I won't even frighten her."

  "I haven't noticed much evidence of inhibition so far," his mother said dryly. "But I shall certainly go. It's nice to see you, Laura, but don't let him alarm you."

  And they both looked at her with their matching eyes showing unmistakable appraisal, as if they were ancient priests assessing the quality of a sacrifice.

  "I won't," Laura said, but certainly feeling she was getting out of her depth, not because she had gone out too far, but because a totally unexpected tide had come rushing over her. Perhaps coming to see Sorry in his own house had been going too far after all. Mrs Carlisle closed the door and went away.

  "What do you want?" Sorry asked immediately the door closed, giving her a very close and private stare that suggested he knew a great deal about her, much more than the shape of her legs. The glances exchanged at school for a year and a half had given them a certain power over each other, which was why Laura was here at all, but she found this particular gaze so close it was suffocating.

  Now she also found she could not ask him about Jacko as simply and directly as she had planned to do, and looked around the room at the books, at the skeleton, at the naked woman whose revelations seemed to her to cross some unspecified boundary and somehow made her shy. This woman had been photographed as if she were on her own in a private reverie over her own private skin, but of course she had agreed to be photographed, the photographer at least had been present, and the picture was intended to be looked at by men. There was a small snapshot pinned to one corner of it, but Laura could not make out what it showed and was almost frightened to look closely, at least while Sorry was watching her.

  "D-don't you like it?" Sorry asked her, watching her eyes. "The poster, I mean."

  "It isn't meant to be liked by me," she answered, and then added, "it's too personal, really ... like standing in the dark and looking in at someone's window."

  "But that's quite an interesting thing to do," he said. "And harmless, as long as people don't know you're there."

  Laura struggled with a difficult idea.

  "It still seems too private though, as if looking at her somehow lets you look at other people too ... who mightn't want to be looked at," she ended hurriedly. Sorry studied his poster and then studied Laura.

  "That's art, isn't it?" he said after a moment of silence and speaking as if he did not expect her to understand him. "Like dissecting a possum in biology — private occasions having their skins pinned out and their guts identified and labelled. You read, don't you? Unless you carry books around for the look of the thing! Do you think there are any private moments in art? Better still, tell me what you really want to talk about."

  "Whose bones?" Laura asked, moving on to the skeleton whose privacy was, after all, violated even more than that of the woman in the poster.

  "It belonged to my great-grandfather who was a doctor," said Sorry. "I've inherited it. It's called 'Uncle Naylor', but I've not managed to find out if it's just a name or if he really was a relation. I expect you know that, except for my chromosomes, I'm a recent arrival in the Carlisle family. Do you take science at school?"

  "I know what chromosomes are," Laura said primly. "More or less."

  "Chant, you can't have come to see me simply to talk about my skeleton and my poster," Sorry suggested.

  "No!" Laura agreed, looking at the bookcase. "Why do you read all those romances?"

  "For romance!" Sorry answered promptly. "Research and romance. There's not a lot of romance in being a prefect, you know." He pointed his fingers at her, making a gun out of his hand. "Stand and deliver, Chant. What are you doing here?"

  Laura stood up. "I thought you might help me," she said. "I need help, I think. And you're a witch, aren't you?"

  Sorry's face went quite blank as if every expression had been cleaned from it with a cloth, but she had the impression that he had become very angry and couldn't think why. Now it had become impossible to ask a favour of him, and impossible not to. She looked around the room again, at the indisputable seventh form homework, the skeleton, the poster, the photograph. Out of anxiety and confusion she made a half move to look at the photograph more closely, for it seemed as if it might offer another diversion, but Sorry took hold of her wrist and shook it slightly.

  "What do you want?" he asked and added, "I might provide a love philtre, but I don't do contraceptives."

  Laura felt herself colour, as much with anger as embarrassment. "You know it's nothing like that!"

  "How do I know? You won't tell me. Except you've come to consult a witch."

  "I need help for my brother," Laura said at last, and Sorry looked taken aback and then openly angry.

  "Your brother!" he said. "You've come all the way here to ..." He broke off. "How did you get here?"

  "I walked, of course," Laura answered.

  "You were asking for it, weren't you?" he asked. "Think of what happened to Jacynth Close."

  "I did think, but how else could I get here?" she said. "Things like that don't happen often."

  "I expect once is enough if you happen to be the one," Sorry said. "You came here about your brother ..."

  "He's terribly sick," Laura said.

  "To hell with that!" Sorry exclaimed. "Take him to a doctor. I'll punish your enemy, cure warts, release the winds .. ." He raised his hand and a breeze actually rippled the pages of his seventh form chemistry, very eerie in the small room. "If you wanted to ma
ke a neighbour's goat have fits ... I'd be the right person then, wouldn't I?"

  Laura knew she had hurt his feelings but could not see why.

  "He's terribly sick," she said. "Sicker than anyone knows. A doctor won't help."

  Sorry was still holding her wrist. He stood up. "You should be careful, knowing what you know," he said. "I might drive a hard bargain. I might ask to drink a pint of your blood or goodness knows what. Get a doctor. They're subsidized by the government. I'll see you to the gate."

  "A doctor would be no good," said Laura, but she walked out of his room passively enough when he held the door open for her, though she felt her own anger building up in her in a gratifying way.