And as though someone Up There had heard her, they sent her that day a quite extraordinary aunt.
She was so unlike the other aunts she had travelled with that both Minette and her mother stopped dead as they came up to where she waited, by the bookstall on Platform One of King’s Cross Station.
‘Are you …?’ began Mrs Danby.
The woman nodded. She was very tall with a small moustache and carried a large holdall which smelled slightly of fish.
‘I am your aunt,’ she said in a deep voice and pointed to her lapel on which there was a label saying Unusual Aunts and above that the words ‘My name is Etta’.
If Minette’s mother hadn’t been in a hurry to go to the cinema with her latest boyfriend she might have asked more questions. After all an Unusual Aunt is not quite the same as a Useful one, but as it was she handed over the money for the tickets and Minette’s lunch, took the cigarette out of her mouth long enough to kiss her daughter, and went away.
And presently Minette and the aunt sat opposite each other in one of those old-fashioned compartments which have no corridor and watched the train make its way through the London suburbs.
Aunt Etta and her sisters had had a hard week in London. They found a boarding house full of people like themselves — aunt-like persons who had come to town to show their pug dogs at dog shows or go to meetings about setting up retirement homes for ancient donkeys. But they hated the noise and the traffic and the dirty air, and they did not find it easy to get taken on by an agency.
Even when Etta got her label and was sent out on jobs, the children she was given were unspeakable. She took a little boy on a trip down the river who spent the whole time stuffing himself with ice cream and popcorn and crisps and dropping the wrappers in the water. She was sent to take a small girl to have her teeth cleaned and saw her bite the dentist’s hand, and she sat with a whining brat called Tarquin Sterndale-Fish who had the measles.
So by the time she met Minette on King’s Cross Station, Etta had begun to think that this kidnapping idea was pretty stupid. The world seemed to be full of Boo-Boos and Little Ones and it was better to become extinct, like the rainforests, than to bring such children to the Island.
Her first sight of Minette did not make her feel hopeful. The child had a crumpled, pinched sort of look; she was small for her age and very thin and looked as though she had been born tired. A wet and feeble child would be quite useless for the work that had to be done. She was also very stupidly dressed with a load of fluffy pom-poms in her long brown hair and a T-shirt which said Pinch me and I’ll squeal — and a pink plastic handbag shaped like a heart dangled from her shoulder.
And if Aunt Etta did not like the look of Minette, Minette was not in the least keen on Aunt Etta.
For a while the two of them sat in silence. From time to time a drop of water fell from the canvas holdall that the aunt had put on the luggage rack on to her topknot of grey hair, but she did not seem to notice it.
‘Is something leaking?’ asked Minette.
The aunt looked up and shook her head. ‘The canvas never seems to dry out properly. I use it to move seals about. Only pups of course; a full-grown seal would never fit inside.’
Minette began to be interested; her face lost its pinched and troubled look. ‘Are you a vet, then?’
‘Not exactly. But that does sort of come into it.’
There was another silence. Minette did not like to pry so she looked out of the window again. They were coming to the first of the dream houses which Minette had chosen to live in with her parents. It was an old station-master’s house with hanging baskets of flowers and a little gable. And as though she read her thoughts, the aunt said: ‘What a pleasant place to live in. There might be ghost trains going through at night with interesting spectres. That could liven things up.’
Minette stared at her. ‘Do you believe in—’
‘Of course,’ said the aunt briskly. ‘Certainly. I believe in almost everything, don’t you?’
‘My father says we mustn’t believe anything we can’t see or prove,’ she said.
‘Really?’
When they had been travelling for an hour, Minette opened her suitcase and became very busy. She had been wearing pink and orange socks with a border of Mickey Mice. Now she took them off and put on plain white ones. Then she removed the T-shirt which said Pinch me and I’ll squeal and put on a navy-blue one with long sleeves and no writing at all. And lastly she put the dangling handbag back in the suitcase and took out a practical leather purse.
The aunt said nothing, watching as Minette changed from a trendy little dresser to a sensible old-fashioned schoolgirl.
But Minette had not finished. She took out her brush and comb, propped a mirror on her knees, and began to plait her hair into two long, tight pigtails.
‘I always change here,’ she explained, ‘because there’s nothing interesting to look at out of the window. My father doesn’t like clothes with writing on. Or funny socks. He thinks they’re vulgar. And he hates untidy hair.’
‘And when you come back you change back again — put on the pom-poms and unplait your hair?’
‘Yes. My mother likes it loose.’
‘And you? Which do you like?’
Minette sighed. ‘I’d like it cut short.’
‘Well I have some scissors here. Why don’t we cut it?’ She opened a very large handbag and took out a pair of scissors.
‘Oh no! I couldn’t. Then both of them would be angry.’
Aunt Etta shrugged and dropped the scissors back into her bag. ‘Actually long hair can be useful.’
‘How can it?’
‘Oh for polishing things … oyster shells and suchlike. And if you fell into the water it would be something to get hold of.’
They had come to the second of Minette’s dream houses, a low white house on the bend of a river with a willow tree and a garden sloping down to the water. But this time Minette did not see her mother and father taking tea together on the lawn. She heard her father saying, ‘That willow must come down, it cuts off all the light,’ — and her mother saying, ‘If you cut that tree down I’ll have you put in a mental home.’
And suddenly, for no reason, she told this strange woman about her endless journeys from her mother’s tiny flat with its smell of face powder and curry from the takeaway downstairs, and the tights dripping in the bathroom, to her father’s cold, tidy, solemn house with its ticking grandfather clock. And about the silly dreams she’d had of bringing them together and the hopelessness of it all.
‘Do you think there might be a third place? Not my father’s house or my mother’s flat but somewhere else — by the sea perhaps? And that one day I might find it?’
She drew back, suddenly frightened, because the fierce aunt was looking at her far too intently.
But Aunt Etta was nodding. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course there is a third place. There is one for everybody. But it’s no good filling it up with people from your old life. If you want to find the third place you must find it alone.’
‘But I’m a child. I can’t go and live alone.’
‘Perhaps not. Not exactly, but you might be able to make a new start just the same if you had the courage.’
‘I don’t have courage,’ said Minette firmly. ‘I’m a coward.’ It was one of the few things on which her parents agreed. ‘I’m frightened of the dark and of diving off the top board and of being bullied.’