“Is that a train game?” asked Kitty. “Can I play too? Chu … chu … chu …” she went, up and down the paths and round the pond. “We’re great big steam trains,” she told him, “we’re not silly diesels … chu … chu … chu …” But at this the little boy slowed down, shook his head very solemnly and began to chew his fingers. Then he let out the most enormous HOWL.
It was quiet in Golden Square, and already quite dark. There were no doctors or dentists around in any case, because it was Saturday. In the silence, the cry of the little boy felt as big as an earthquake, and Kitty panicked. “Please don’t cry, dear,” she said, going up to him. “Please don’t cry—” and then something suddenly burst out of the bushes, something resembling a big, red, flapping monster.
“Timothy!” it bellowed. “Timothy Joe! Come here this minute! We are terribly late. Your daddy’s been sitting in the car for a whole ten minutes and he’s extremely cross.”
Kitty took a few steps backwards. She didn’t like loud noises, or people that shouted. In this respect she was like Nicholas. But the red monster (who turned out to be a rather tall lady in a raincoat the colour of holly berries, with a red hat to match and curly fair hair), came right up to her. “What are you doing here?” she said, quite rudely.
“I … I live here,” Kitty whispered, her insides turning into wobbly snakes, as they tended to do when she was nervous. “I live at Number 19, with my friend Miss McGee. We are your neighbours. I was so pleased to see your little boy in the garden that I came down to say hello. It’s lovely to have a family in the square again. We so miss Debbie and her mum, you see. They’ve gone to live in the Town Flats, to escape the damp. Debbie was like a granddaughter to us.”
For a second the very red lady looked slightly less ferocious, but then somebody nearby sounded a car horn three times. The driver was getting impatient. Without a word she swept the small boy off his feet and stuffed him under her arm like a large parcel. “I’m sorry but we really are horribly LATE,” she said, moving off towards the gate.
Kitty ran ahead of her and unlocked it, but the lady did not say thank you, not even when Kitty called out, “I’ll see to the gate – let us know if we can be of any help to you,” because she really did want to be a good neighbour.
She watched the woman strap Timothy Joe into a car seat and climb into the car herself, next to a worried-looking man with spectacles who was the driver. She watched the car move away from the pavement and disappear from the square. Then she went back into the garden and sat for a while by the little pond, thinking about how angry the mother had been, how roughly she’d stuffed the little boy under her arm and how she’d not said thank you for anything.
Perhaps she wasn’t his mother. Perhaps she was his nanny, or an “au pair” person, or even an aunt. Perhaps she was cross because she thought he’d got lost. But Kitty had been in the garden too, they had both been there, with the gate locked. She couldn’t understand it at all. Next time she saw Debbie’s mum in the square she would ask her if she knew anything about this fierce lady. Mrs Springer got to hear all sorts of gossip as she did her cleaning jobs.
Kitty sat for ages by the pond, turning the mystery over in her mind, then started to walk home very slowly, swishing the fallen leaves about with her flat, brown shoes. Little children liked swishing through leaves, especially when they were nice and crunchy, but these particular leaves had turned soggy. They had been on the pavement rather too long; it was too near Christmas for good crispy leaves.
Christmas! Kitty suddenly remembered the pudding, and Big Time, ticking away on the hall table in Number 19. Even though she was quite an old lady, she was still quite fit and so, picking up the hem of her long coat so as not to trip, she ran all the way home.
As she puffed up the steps to the front door it opened all by itself, as if by magic. But Miss McGee was standing just behind it, her face all swollen with red rage, and there was a sickening smell and a haze in the air, as if the house had recently been on fire.
“I’m sorry, McGee,” Kitty whimpered, knowing that her friend was about to explode about the pudding. “But I got held up in the garden. There really is a family with children at Number 26, well, there’s a child, a dear little boy called Timothy Joe. It’s wonderful.”
But Miss McGee took no notice. “You went out, Kitty,” she said, through gritted teeth, “and you left your timer behind you, and you forgot. My pudding’s boiled dry, my beautiful pudding that cost me all that time and effort and money. There’s a horrible mess all over the kitchen. It’s a tragedy.”
Kitty didn’t answer, there was no point. She had seen Miss McGee in this angry mood before. What she must do was to put matters right as quickly as possible. She walked past her friend and went down the basement stairs into the kitchen, to see what she could do.
The haze down below was worse than in the hall: it was like thick fog and the horrible burnt smell made Kitty cough. She pulled out a hanky, squashed it against her nose, and spluttered into it. Her eyes began to stream but she could see, though everything was rather blurred, McGee’s very best saucepan, all blackened with soot, and the pudding basin cracked right in half and, on the ceiling, a huge, dark ring, like a thundercloud.
“It’s a tragedy,” McGee repeated. “It’s a real tragedy.” Sagging down on to the nearest chair, she began to cry.
One part of Kitty was very sorry indeed but another part wasn’t. Yes, it was terrible that she had forgotten the pudding but it wasn’t the end of the world. She pointed this out to Miss McGee. “I’m really sorry, McGee,” she told her, “but I was so excited about the new family. Listen, I’ll paint the ceiling this afternoon; I’ll stand on the table and I’ll paint it, and I’ll buy you a new pan for Christmas. It’ll be an extra present. And I’ll make another pudding for us, I’ll do it right now.” Picking up a cookery book, she started to turn the pages, she even started to hum.
It was the humming that did it, the humming was the last straw to her friend McGee. “I don’t want you to make another pudding,” she wailed. “It’s a tragedy.”
It was Kitty’s turn to get cross now. “Don’t be silly, Florence,” she snapped. “If you call spoiling a silly old pudding a tragedy, what do you call it if something really awful happens? What do you call it if someone has a terrible accident, or even dies? Now that’s what I call a tragedy.”
McGee did not reply. Instead she snatched up the lid of the saucepan, which was lying on the kitchen floor, and hurled it at Kitty’s head. She missed and the lid hit a row of plates on a dresser and broke two of them. McGee, who had been sniffing miserably, now started to howl in earnest. In complete silence, like a person on television with the sound switched off, Kitty raised the cookery book she had been reading to find the pudding recipe, and threw it across the room in her friend’s direction. She missed, too, (neither of the old ladies was a very good shot), and the book plopped into the sink where the pages spread out like wings. “Now my best cookery book’s ruined as well!” McGee wailed, and she buried her face in her hands.
“You are RIDICULOUS!” screeched Kitty.
“Not so ridiculous as YOU,” screeched Miss McGee.
Then she threw a wooden spoon at Kitty, then a nutmeg grater, and Kitty threw another cookery book and an egg, and they both screeched and screeched.
In the middle of it all, Nicholas, who had come running in through his cat-flap for tea, ran out again, and pelted right along all four sides of Golden Square