“They’re making themselves beautiful for the journey,” whispered Ellen, as she opened the door.
They certainly were. Grandma had found some scissors and was cutting her sixteen enormous toenails, bits of which were charging across the room like shrapnel. Lucy had vanished under a pink cloud of talcum powder and, in the bathroom, Uncle Otto, who was a very hygienic yeti, was gargling.
“We had a lovely sleep,” said Ambrose, bounding up to Con. “Is this another friend for us? Does he know about that bear called Winnie?”
Perry did not go through the business of pinching himself to see if he was awake. He just wasn’t a person who dreamed about yetis with blue bedsocks round their necks wanting to know about Winnie the Pooh. Perry’s dreams were quite ordinary ones like missing trains or having to play the piano to a huge audience wearing only his underpants.
“All right,” he said to Con. “Describe. Explain. Tell.”
So Con told him about the secret valley of Nanvi Dar and about Lady Agatha and how he had promised to get the yetis safely to Farley Towers.
“And I want you to take them back in your lorry, instead of whatever you were going to take. It’ll be all sealed up: they’ll hibernate. No one’ll see them.”
“Oh, yes? And when I’ve dropped them off and get back to my bosses with an empty lorry, what then?”
Con fished in his pocket and handed Perry the little bag which Lady Agatha had made out of the hem of her nightgown.
“Wow!” said Perry when he had opened it. “The real stuff. You mean I can give them the price of the goods. The lorry, too, if it comes to that. And there’d still be money over.”
“For you,” said Con. “A reward for taking us.”
“Us?” said Perry. “Are you coming too?”
“I promised I’d deliver them. And I’d like Ellen to come too if I can square it with my father. I really can’t go making plaits on people’s stomachs.”
Perry nodded. “There’s room in the cab, just about.”
He stood looking down into the little flannel bag. Perry had done a lot of things since the day he’d said “Open wide” to a lady called Gladys Girtlestone and decided he wasn’t cut out to be a dentist. He’d been a dishwasher, a road-mender, a lumberjack, and now he was driving lorries.
But not for ever. Perry had a dream and it was a dream to do with pigs.
Perry loved pigs. He loved their fatness and their slowness and their little, suspicious eyes and their disgusting habits. He loved Gloucester Old Spots, which look as though someone has spilt paint on them, and he loved Large Whites, which aren’t white but the pink of apple blossom in the spring. He loved Tamworths, which fatten like a dream, and he loved Saddlebacks and Windsors and those black, square, hairy pigs that come from Suffolk. And what Perry wanted more than anything was to have a pig farm and to breed a completely new pig, the Perrington Porker, which would be a pig to end all pigs, the best pig in the world.
Only, of course, to start a pig farm you need money…
“I’d have taken those crazy animals of yours anyway,” said Perry, “because I like them. But if there’s a reward I’ll have it. Now I’m going to sleep for twenty-four hours. Then I’ll go down to Jalpaigun and pick up the load I was supposed to take back. It’s mostly dry goods — spices and suchlike, and cloth. I’ll drop it at the nunnery — they’ll make sure it gets handed out to the poor. Then I’ll fix the customs forms and the bumph one needs to get across the borders and change some of the gold into cash for the journey. So… let’s see… I ought to be ready to leave again by Thursday night. Can you have the yetis in the hotel garage just after midnight? There shouldn’t be anyone around then.”
Con nodded. “Thanks,” he said, holding out his hand. He’d have liked to say more but just then Lucy said, “Sorry!” and began to choke horribly on the talcum powder. You could say a lot about looking after yetis, thought Con, as Ellen climbed on to a chair to thump Lucy on the back, but not that it was easy.
It was midnight on the following Thursday. It had taken the yetis a long time to leave the Bridal Suite because they had to say goodbye to everything: “Goodbye, bathroom”, “Goodbye, toothpaste”, “Goodbye, electric light”, and that of course had made them sad and so they’d cried. But now they stood in the hotel garage, staring at the huge, eighteen-wheeled, canary yellow vehicle which was to take them to Britain. On the trailer was an enormous metal container almost as big as a railway carriage. It, too, was painted yellow and on it, in big, black letters, were the words: COLD CARCASSES, INC.
“What’s a carcass?” said Grandma suspiciously.
Con and Ellen exchanged glances in the light of the lorry’s headlights.
“Well, er, it’s sort of… a cow after it’s been… you know… ready for eating.”
“I thought as much,” said Grandma grimly. “Well if anyone thinks I’m travelling halfway round the world labelled a cold carcass — let alone a cold carcass with ink on it — then they can think again.”
“Cows are our brothers, you see,” explained Ambrose, and the children sighed because they had a feeling that everybody was going to be the yetis’ brother and though they approved of this and knew it was right, it did seem to make things rather complicated. But fortunately at that point Clarence, who hadn’t understood about the carcasses, said, “’ox,” which turned out to be “Box” and started climbing into the back of the lorry. After that, the other yetis got in too.
There was a big, wide rack for each of them, a bit like a ship’s bunk, and a passage down the middle, and a tiny peephole at the end through which they could see into the cab of the lorry and the people in the cab of the lorry could see them. Lucy oozed over the edge of her rack a bit but on the whole they admitted that it was very snug and comfortable.
“When we wake up shall we really be at Farley Towers?” asked Ambrose.
“Really,” said Con. “All you have to do is hibernate and leave it to us.”
“Only of course we can’t hibernate just like that,” said Ambrose craftily, putting his head on one side and gazing at Ellen. “You’ll have to tell us a cold story. The coldest story ever.”
So while Con turned the freezer to “maximum”, Ellen told them about the Snow Queen in her palace of glittering ice, and about little Kay whom she carried away in her sledge and kept a prisoner, and the yetis thought it was very beautiful and very sad and just about as cold as you could expect a story to be.
And the yetis were just getting very limp and drowsy, and Ellen had just kissed them all goodnight when from the patch of darkness outside the garage door there came a trembly, bleating sound — a sound which turned Con’s heart to stone.
“What is it, Con?” asked Ellen.
But there was no need for anybody to tell her. Tottering into the headlights of the lorry, his idiot head waving from side to side, his left horn even more crumpled than it had been in Nanvi Dar, came Hubert.
In a second, Ambrose, his drowsiness forgotten, tumbled from the rack and leaped out of the lorry.
“It’s my yak! It’s my pet! It’s Hubert! It was him I heard on the mountain. Oh, Hubert, you’ll be able to come to England with us!”
“No!” The words burst from Con. “I can’t do it! You’ve got to tell him to go home.”
The other yetis had followed Ambrose out of the lorry. Now they looked rather pityingly at Con. “We could say, ‘Go home,’” explained Uncle Otto. “We could say, ‘Go home’ three or four hundred times. But you may perhaps have noticed that Hubert is not a very clever yak.”