By the time I reached the bottom of the tower staircase I was usually up to two hundred-Shakespeare and it was touch and go whether I could climb the outside of the staircase, haul myself over the banisters, take off my shoes (for fear of my running feet booming out on the uncarpeted treads) and get to the tower room in time. On one occasion I just made it, peeped through the window and saw Van Hoosier’s hat disappearing under the front porch, so that I had to tear back down the staircase, haul myself back over the banisters, climb down the outside bit and get myself into the main corridor all over again before they started hollering for me. But then, no one had ever told me having a secret life was going to be easy.
That first day when it snowed I figured myself likely weather-proofed against the Van Hoosier boy, but I had made the very mistake that all too many people made with me (who would have thought I had two book nests? who would have thought I Frenched and Shakespeared?), namely I judged him by appearances. I figured him a spineless sort of tall weed, who would buckle in two without his starched shirt to hold him upright. So I grudged an admiration for him that day when I upglanced the drive from the drawing room (I had not then found my tower refuge, of course) and saw him Wenceslasing his way through the drifted snow. A dogged and doglike devotion to me, I realised, worth so much more than his doggerel could ever be.
Mrs Grouse told me to wait in the drawing room. I heard her open the front door and invite him to shake the snow from his boots, followed by an interval of quite prodigious stamping. Shortly afterward, the door to the drawing room opened and Mrs Grouse said, ‘Young Mr Van Hoosier to see you, miss,’ as though we didn’t both know I was sitting in there waiting for him and as if, too, I were much used to visitory. In this, and in adjectiving our guest as young, Mrs Grouse showed that she herself didn’t know how to behave, that she was a housekeeper and childminder, not a hostess. When she shut the door behind him, I noticed she had even neglected to relieve Van Hoosier of his hat.
I invited him to sit down. I had positioned myself in an armchair so as to preclude any possibility of him nexting me and he couched himself opposite, folding himself as though he were hinged at the knees and hips. We sat and smiled politely at one another. I did not know what to do with him and he did not know what to do with his hat. He sat and Gargeried it, twisting it this way and that, rotating it with one hand through the thumb and forefinger of the other, flipping it over and over. Finally, after he’d dropped it for the third time, I upped and overed to him. I irritabled out a hand. ‘Please, may I take that?’
He gratefulled it to me. I outed to the hall and hung it with his coat. But when we were seated again I realised I might have removed the hat but I had not removed the problem. Indeed I had exacerbated it, for now he had nothing to fiddle with. He was forced to fall back on cracking his knuckles, or crossing and uncrossing his legs, this way and that. I hard-stared his shins and he caught my gaze and, uncrossing his legs, put both feet firmly on the floor. He looked scolded and in that moment his face so Gilesed I twinged guilt.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘here we are.’
‘It would appear so,’ I frosted back.
‘It is very cold outside. The snow is deep.’
‘And crisp and even,’ I said.
‘What?’ He knew he was being made fun of, but could not quite figure out how.
We sat in silence some moments more. Then he said, ‘Oh yes, I almost forgot,’ and began patting the different pockets of his jacket and pants in an unconvincery of unknowing the whereabouts of something. Finally he pulled out a folded paper and began to unfold it. ‘I wrote you another poem.’
The look I gave him was several degrees colder than the snow and like enough to have sent him scuttling back out into it. ‘Oh no, it’s OK; you don’t have to entertain a kiss this time. There’s no question of any kissing being involved.’
I thawed my face and settled back in my chair. ‘Well, in that case, Mr Van Hoosier, fire away.’
Well, the least said about the second Van Hoosier verse, the better. The best you could say was that it was nowhere near as bad as the first, especially as it didn’t carry the threat of a kiss, although, then again, I wasn’t too impressed by the final rhyme of ‘immense’ and ‘Florence’; fortunately the reference was to the supposed number of my admirers, not my size.
When he’d finished reading it, Theo looked up from the paper and saw my expression. ‘Still not the thing, huh?’
‘Not quite,’ I said.
He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust it into his pocket. ‘Darn it,’ he said good-naturedly, ‘but I’ll keep going at it till I crack it, you see if I don’t. I’m not one for giving up.’
In this last he proved as good as his word, not just in the versifying but in the snow trudgery too. It didn’t matter if it blizzarded, or galed or howled like the end of the world outside, he Blithed it every afternoon for the next couple of weeks. After he’d visited with me a few times I began to see that, like his verse, his lanky body rhymed awkwardly and scanned badly. His long limbs didn’t fit too easily into a drawing room, where it seemed one or other of them was always flailing out of its own accord, tipping a little side table here or tripping a rug there; he was like a huge epileptic heron. It impossibled to comfortable him indoors, so on the fourth or fifth visit, when he suggested we take ourselves outside, I was somewhat relieved, for if we stayed in it was only a matter of time before china got broke; not that I minded that, for there was nothing of value at Blithe and no one to care about it anyhow, but I could imagine how distraught he would be. It was only as we put on our coats that I second-thoughted. Was it really safe to have him clumsying about on snow and ice? Would not his parents blame me if it were one of his arms or legs, rather than china, that got broke? God knows, there was enough of them to damage.
‘Is this wise?’ I said, as he mufflered himself up.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, your asthma and all. Taking it out into the cold.’
‘Not at all. It’s the best thing for it, a nice bright frosty day like today when the air is dry and clear. It’s the damp dreary days that get on my chest and set me to coughing.’
So out we went and, to my surprise, my very great surprise, we funned it for a couple of hours. It was not that Theo lost his awkwardness in this new element, but rather that this element was so bare and empty of obstacles that he had nothing to do but fall over on the ice, which he did time and time again. When he went you had to stand clear as his great arms windmilled fit to knock your head off if you should happen to put it in the way of them and his legs jerked up like a marionette’s and then everything collapsed like a deckchair and left a dead spidery bundle on the ground. It was so comical that the first time I burst out laughing before I could help myself and then, when the pile of his bones didn’t move, rushed