There was something wrong about him.Decidedly wrong.All in all, she was glad that he lived on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
As soon as she had farewelled Mr Anderson by the pond, watching him stroll out the gates with relief, Pip strolled up and deposited Oolong at her feet.
“Well?”Pip asked idly.“All disasters averted?”
“Only narrowly,” she sighed.“Iggy and Dolly were hiding in the undergrowth, extorting scones from me.What greedy pigs they are!After I left them no less than two bags of boiled sweets, and a scavenger hunt with clues to find them!They must have asked Hanna to help them, the sneaks!I was relying on it being her day off.Help me find them and send them home to Drake Hall?”
They combed the glasshouse, but the only sign they found of the infamous pair were two round indentations in the humus, decorated with crumbs.The ticket stubs and sandwich wrappers from the tourists would be picked up later by a boy from the village who was paid for all of the rubbish he found.
“Was he disappointed the American dragons were still deep in sleep?”Pip asked.
“American dragons?”Una repeated in confusion, stacking the teacups and plates on the tray and shooing the tiny dragons off them.
“The quetzalcoatls, Una.The only dragon species from the Americas currently known to science?”Pip tried again.“Currently hibernating in the caves down by the river?”
“Oh,” Una said.“How strange.I didn’t think of it, and he never asked.”
Despite the warmth of the glasshouse, she felt cold, and she picked up and held Oolong while he licked jam from a teaspoon.
“Strange bird, if you ask me,” said Pip.
“You thought so, too?”she asked quickly.
Pip shrugged.“All of George’s friends are odd, from the great Walter Rothschild all the way down.”
“Yes, I suppose that must be it,” she said, comforted.Oolong wriggled out of her arms and launched himself off her to stretch his wings.Una looked at Pip thoughtfully.“And what about you?You’re George’s friend, too.”
“Me?Can you see anything odd aboutme, Una?”
He looked at her almost defiantly.
Pip’s quiet tie and summer flannels had just the correct air of studied carelessness.No one would ever guess he had grown up doing odd jobs on a remote Yorkshire estate.
Una felt a flicker of disquiet.She understood that these changes must be an improvement in the world’s eyes, but she could hardly recognise the boy she grew up with.Was the boy Pip hidden somewhere inside this laconic young man?
None of this, of course, could be spoken aloud, so she shook her head.“What’s odd is that you are home—during term time.”
He winced.“I wondered when you’d notice that.”
She sat down on the nearby chair.“What happened, Pip?”
Pip scraped the other chair into the shade and sat.Oolong circled about among the tops of the palms.
“The worst, quite simply,” Pip said, drawing a cigarette from his pocket.
There were NO SMOKING, PLEASE signs posted inside the glasshouse, because salamanders were apt to get excited in the presence of embers and ash.Any other person, any other time, Una would have stopped.But this was Pip, and something was wrong.
Una hardly dared speak it.“You weren’t—“
“Expelled?As a matter of fact, I was.”
“No!For what?”
“A fight.”He lit his cigarette as if it was his only care in the world.“A fight I lost.Spectacularly.Not to mention predictably.”
“Oh, Pip,” Una breathed sympathetically.“That sounds perfectly awful.”
“Oh, it was.”
