And to make everything certain, from behind the largest of the tombstones with its strange carvings, there now rose a white, mysterious wraith, with rays of light coming from her face, and outstretched hands.
‘It’s Ethelgonda,’ breathed Aunt Etta, ‘Ethelgonda the Good!’ And everyone fell to their knees, for this was a ghost who had not appeared for well over a hundred years.
The saintly hermit was smiling. She was totally happy; she enfolded them in her blessing.
‘Yes,’ she said, in a deep and beautiful voice. ‘You have not been mistaken. What you have heard is most truly the Great Hum.’
Minette and Fabio, who had been spellbound by the apparition, heard the sound of the most heartfelt sobbing beside them and turned their heads. All three of the aunts were crying. Tears streamed down Aunt Etta’s bony cheeks, tears made a path through Aunt Coral’s nourishing night cream, tears dropped on to Aunt Myrtle’s hands as she brought them to her face.
‘It is the Hum,’ repeated Aunt Etta, in a choking voice.
‘It is the Hum,’ nodded Aunt Coral.
And Myrtle too said, ‘It is the Hum.’
‘What is—’ began Fabio but Minette frowned him down. She felt that this was not the moment for questions.
‘So does that mean …?’ faltered Aunt Etta, and the children looked at her, amazed. They did not know that this fierce woman could sound so shy and uncertain and humble.
The hermit nodded. ‘Yes, my dears,’ she said in her melodious voice. ‘It means that this place above all others has been chosen. You have been blessed.’
The aunts rose slowly to their feet. They could still not quite believe what they had heard, yet the Hum now was everywhere, filling the sky, coming up from the earth.
‘So he is really coming? After a hundred years?’
The holy woman nodded.
The aunts did not ask when he was coming. They knew that one must not pry into mysteries, but accept them gratefully, and they were right.
‘I can say no more,’ said the saint. ‘You must hold yourself in readiness.’
And then she vanished and they were left alone with their miracle.
‘You heard what Ethelgonda said. We must hold ourselves in readiness. Readiness means cleaning. Readiness means tidying. Readiness means cooking and scrubbing and fettling. It always has and it always will,’ said Aunt Etta.
She was almost her old brisk bossy self as she sent the children to scour out the goat sty and swill down the floor of the mermaid shed and pick up the litter washed ashore.
Almost, but not quite. None of the aunts were quite the same. Etta still hung her navy-blue knickers on the line each morning, but sometimes she patted her bun of hair like a young girl invited to a party. Coral’s clothes got wilder and wilder; she was painting a great underwater mural on the back of the house in all the colours of the rainbow, and the tunes that Myrtle played on her cello had become very powerful and loud.
‘If only Dorothy was here,’ said Etta, who missed her sister badly. Hitting people on the head with their own woks was nothing to the excitement of what was to come.
The Captain insisted on clean pyjamas every day so that he would not be caught short, and the old Sybil danced about in her cave in a frenzy of excitement. She still thought it was unwise to wash her face and hands but she decided bravely to wash her feet. This took a long time (mould had grown between her toes and mould can be interesting — the blue-green colours, the unusual shapes) but once one has heard the Great Hum life is never the same.
The creatures, in their own way, were as excited, and now the aunts understood why it had been so difficult to get anyone to go away. They must have known that something special was going to happen, even if they did not know exactly what.
Even the animals that never talked; even the herrings and the haddock and the flounders … even the lugworms buried in the sand seemed to be excited.
‘How can a lugworm be excited?’ Minette wanted to know, but when Aunt Etta dug one up for her, she saw that it might be so.
As for Art, he baked buns — hundreds and hundreds of buns which overflowed his cake tins and had to be stored in sealed bin bags in the larder. But the buns he baked were not ordinary buns, and nor were the omelettes they had for lunch and tea and supper ordinary omelettes.
Because something very wonderful had happened out there on the hill after Ethelgonda vanished. They were turning to go home when they heard a sound from the boobrie’s nest which stopped them in their tracks.
It wasn’t the mournful honking they were used to: it was a proud and cheerful clucking — a noise full of motherhood and joy. Pressing and pressing her muscles together to try and follow the others had not made the boobrie airborne, but it had done something else. And there it was; an enormous, blue-spotted and totally egg-shaped egg!
But the most touching thing happened the next day when they went up to congratulate the bird once more. For the egg she had laid when the Great Hum went through her body and she had pressed so hard, had been followed by three more. Four gigantic spotted eggs had rolled together and were keeping warm beneath her body, but when she saw the aunts and the children the boobrie moved aside, examined each egg very carefully — and then pushed one out towards them with her great yellow foot.
‘Be careful, dear,’ said Myrtle. ‘It mustn’t get cold.’
With difficulty, for the egg was heavier than a cannonball, they rolled it back … and the boobrie pushed it out again with her enormous foot.
The same thing was repeated three times — and then they understood.
‘It’s a present,’ said Minette, awed. ‘She wants us to have it.’
Minette was right. The boobrie wanted to share. There was nothing to be done except to fetch Art and load the egg on to a barrow — and since seventy-two omelettes are an awful lot of omelettes, the great bun bake began.
It was hard for the children to be patient during those days of waiting. They knew that when the time came they would find out what the Great Hum meant and who was coming. But on a day when Fabio was sent out for the third time to make sure that not so much as half a cigarette carton or a cotton reel had been washed up on the north shore, he dug in his heels.
‘I think you should tell us,’ he said. ‘Me and Minette, I mean. We can keep secrets.’
‘We will tell you when the time is ripe,’ said Aunt Etta, and they had to be content with that.
But what had been happening to Lambert?
The aunts were right. Lambert had slept through the beginning of the Hum and heard nothing.
When he did wake up at last, he realized that the house was empty. Doors stood open; there was no sign of Art in the kitchen. Everyone, though Lambert did not know it, was out on the hill.
‘I want my breakfast,’ said Lambert crossly, but there was no one to hear him.
By the time he was dressed he did hear a kind of thrumming noise, but to Lambert the magical sound seemed to be the kind of noise a generator might make, or some underground machinery.
But he was interested in the open bedroom doors. Since he had begun to work, Lambert had been allowed to come back into the house to sleep, but Myrtle and the others kept him firmly out of their rooms. Myrtle had not forgotten how he had frightened the ducklings when he first came.
Now, though, Myrtle’s door stood open. Her bed was unmade and the ducklings had grown enough to manage out of doors.
Lambert crept in. His shifty eyes took in all Myrtle’s little treasures and he sneered. Fancy bothering to pick up bits of driftwood and veined pebbles and arranging them on the bookcase as though they were ornaments. There wasn’t a single thing in her room, as far as he could see, that was worth tuppence.