The aunts let him tell the story about the grass snake and the teacher’s trouser leg because it was a short one, but when he began on the one about Freddie Boyle’s brother, who’d run over his own false teeth in a milk float, they shepherded the children out quietly.
‘He won’t notice,’ they said.
When they went downstairs again they found Art, the cook, wiping porridge off his trouser leg. He had tried to give Lambert some breakfast and had it thrown in his face.
‘Nasty little perisher you’ve got in there,’ he said. ‘Best drown him, I’d say. Shouldn’t think his parents would want him back.’
Before he escaped and was washed up on the Island, Art had worked in the prison kitchens, which was why he made such good porridge. Because he’d killed a man once, Art didn’t like the sight of blood and it was always the aunts who had to chop the heads off the fish before they went into the frying pan or get the chickens ready for the pot. Another thing Art didn’t like to do was anything energetic.
‘I don’t know my own strength,’ he would say, when there was anything messy or difficult to be done. ‘I might forget myself and do someone an injury.’
This didn’t seem likely — Art was a skinny person who hardly came up to Aunt Etta’s shoulder — but he’d quickly locked the door on Lambert and, leaving him to scream for his mobile telephone, retreated to his kitchen.
But Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral now led the children into the garden behind the house. It was time to explain.
The garden was surrounded by grey walls to give shelter from the wind; but no walls on the Island were built so high that they shut out the view of the sea. Aunt Myrtle had gone down to play her cello to the seals. A bumblebee droned on a clump of thrift. It was very peaceful.
‘Perhaps I’d better tell you a story,’ said Etta. ‘It’s a true story and it begins with five girls coming to an island with their widowed father to look for a new life.
‘They found a lovely and deserted place, but ruined, abandoned. All the people who had lived there had left long, long ago. Even the ghost in the old graveyard seemed to have gone away.’
Minette sat with her arms hugging her knees and her eyes closed. She loved stories.
‘So the girls and their father repaired the house and planted a garden and learnt to fish and cut peat and do all the things the Islanders had done before they left. But of course the world outside was changing. Oil was spilled into the sea, and sewage, and trawlers started to use nets that caught even the smallest fish. The water became overheated by nuclear power stations. You’ll have learnt all that at school.’
Minette nodded, but Fabio only scowled. Absolutely nothing useful had been taught at Greymarsh Towers.
‘Soon the sisters and their father found themselves looking after things that came ashore. Oiled seabirds … stunned seals … poisoned squids … And other things …’
Etta paused and looked up at Coral who raised her eyebrows in a warning way. Not yet, said Coral’s eyebrows. Remember what we decided.
Etta nodded and turned back to the children.
‘The sisters worked from dawn to dusk. One of them was an idiot; she started shaving her legs and marrying tax inspectors, so she was no good … And one went off to foreign parts to stop people eating rare animals. And the others got older and became aunts …
‘And then one day they realized they might die before long — they might become extinct — and then what would happen to all the creatures? So they decided to find people to carry on after them. Sensible people. Young ones. People who knew how to work.’
There was a long pause. Then:
‘Us?’ said Fabio shyly.
Both aunts nodded.
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Etta. ‘You.’
Chapter Four
So Fabio and Minette were set to work.
It was the hardest work they had ever done and it didn’t stop from morning to night.
The day began with fifty press-ups on the grass behind the house. Etta was in charge of these, rising up and down on her elbows with her skirt tucked into her navy-blue knickers. She had thirty-one pairs of these, one for each day of the month. The children had seen seven of them on the washing line and she explained that it made it easier having things the same colour and the same shape so that one didn’t have to think about things which didn’t matter — like which of one’s knickers were which.
Then they began on the chores. The aunts ran a smallholding; there were six goats and a cow, and two dozen chickens whose eggs needed to be collected, and fresh straw which needed to be put down.
There were buckets of mash to be taken to the eider ducklings whose mother had been fouled in a fishing net, and two seal pups who had to be hand-fed from a bottle. The children had thought feeding the seals might be fun, but it wasn’t. The pups prodded and squealed when the milk didn’t come fast enough; it was like being bashed into by two blubbery tanks.
A puffin with a splint on his leg lived behind the house, and in a tin bath with a wooden lid was an octopus with eye trouble.
And as they worked, the children were watched — tested, you could say — because anyone who was disgusted by a living thing, however odd, was no use on the island.
Minette was marched down to the strand by Aunt Etta and shown a pile of pink and purple slime.
‘These are stranded jellyfish,’ said Etta. ‘Put them back into the water. You’d better wear these.’
She handed Minette a pair of rubber gloves and stood over her while she carried the wobbling blobs back into the sea.
Fabio was taken to a big tank in the paddock and told to pick up an eel with a skin disease.
‘Hold him behind the head while I scrub,’ Coral ordered him. ‘He’s got scabies.’
When they were in bed at night, the children tried to think how to run away. Fabio now slept in a box room next to Minette and with the door open they could talk.
‘We can’t stay here and turn into slaves,’ said Fabio.
‘No. Except the aunts are slaves too. They work harder than us.’
This was true, but Fabio said it made no difference. ‘We’ll have to steal a boat.’
But their beds were warm; they had nightlights; the sea sighed softly beneath their open windows — and, before Minette could see even the smallest tiger on the ceiling, they were both asleep.
And while they slept the aunts discussed them.
‘Well, so far so good,’ said Etta. ‘They haven’t squealed or squirmed or wriggled. Yet. Or said “Ugh!” I can’t bear people who say “Ugh!” ’
‘And they seem to be keeping to the rules,’ said Coral.
The rules had been set out on the first day.
‘You’re not to go near the de-oiling shed in the cove,’ Etta had said. ‘Nor up to the top of the hill.’
‘Nor to the loch between the hills.’
The children had grumbled about this.
‘It’s exactly like that fairy story about Bluebeard’s Castle,’ said Minette. ‘You know … if you open the seventh door you’ll have your head chopped off.’
But they had obeyed — even Fabio who had been so difficult to control in his grandparents’ house. Nothing, though, could stop Fabio asking questions.
‘What’s that honking one hears sometimes? It sounds like a foghorn.’
‘If it sounds like a foghorn I expect it is a foghorn,’ said Etta, and that was the end of that.
But what of Lambert?
Lambert went on screaming and kicking and wailing for his mobile telephone and Art (who did not know his own strength) just put down his tray and ran for it whenever he brought him his food. They had locked him in a room above the boathouse; it had been the Captain’s study and the doors and windows were strong.