Just then I heard Uncle Alfred galloping downstairs whistling, on his way to open the shop. “Hey, Uncle Alfred!” I called out. “Have you sold all the Peter Jenkins and the Football Formulas?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, rushing into the shop with his worried look. He hurried along to the children’s shelves, muttering about having to reorder as he changed his glasses over. He peered through them at the row of Peter Jenkins books. He bent to look at the books below and stood on tiptoe to look at the shelves above. Then he backed away looking so angry that I thought Mrs Potts must have tidied the books too. “Would you look at that!” he said disgustedly. “That’s a third of them different! It’s criminal. They went for a big working without even considering the side effects! Go outside and see if the street’s still the same, Conrad.”
I went to the shop door, but as far as I could see, nothing…Oh! The postbox down the road was now bright blue.
“You seel” said my uncle when I told him. “You see what they’re like! All sorts of details will be different now – valuable details – but what do they care? All they think of is money!”
“Who?” I asked. I couldn’t see how anyone could make money by changing books.
He pointed up and sideways with his thumb. “Them. Those bent aristocrats up at Stallery, to be brutally frank with you, Con. They make their money by pulling the possibilities about. They look, and if they see they could get a bigger profit from one of their companies if just one or two things were a little different, then they twist and twitch and pull those one or two things. It doesn’t matter to them that other things change as well. Oh no. And this time they’ve overdone it. Greedy. Wicked. People are going to notice and object if they go on doing this.” He took his glasses off and cleaned them. Beads of angry sweat stood on his forehead. “There’ll be trouble,” he said. “Or so I hope.”
So this was what pulling the possibilities meant. “How do they change things?” I asked.
“By very powerful magic,” said my uncle. “More powerful than you or I can imagine, Conrad. Make no mistake, Count Rudolf and his family are very dangerous people.”
When I finally went up to my room to read my Peter Jenkins book, I looked out of my window first. Because I was at the very top of our house, I could see Stallery as just a glint and a flashing in the place where green hills folded into rocky mountain. I found it hard to believe that anyone in that high, twinkling place could have the power to change a lot of books and the colour of the postboxes down here in Stallchester. I still didn’t understand why they should want to.
“It’s because if you change to a new set of things that might be going to happen,” Anthea explained, looking up from her books, “you change everything just a little. This time,” she added, ruefully turning the pages of her notes, “they seem to have done a big jump and made a big difference. I’ve got notes here on two books that don’t seem to exist any more. No wonder Uncle Alfred’s annoyed.”
We got used to the changes by next day. Sometimes it was hard to remember that postboxes used to be red. Uncle Alfred said that we only remembered anyway because we lived in that part of Stallchester. “To be brutally frank with you,” he said, “half Stallchester thinks postboxes were always blue. So does the rest of the country. The King probably calls them royal blue. Mind games, that’s what it is. Diabolical greed.”
This happened in the glad old days when Anthea was at home. I think Mum and Uncle Alfred thought Anthea would always be at home. That summer, Mum said as usual, “Anthea don’t forget that Conrad needs new school clothes for next term,” and Uncle Alfred was full of plans for expanding the shop once Anthea had left school and could work there full time.
“If I clear out the boxroom opposite my workroom,” he would say, “we can put the office in there. Then we can put books where the office is – maybe build out into the yard.”
Anthea never said much in reply to these plans. She was very quiet and tense for the next month or so. Then she seemed to cheer up. She worked in the shop quite happily all the rest of the summer and, in the early autumn, she took me to buy new clothes just as she had done last year, except that she bought things for herself at the same time. Then, after I had been back at school a month, she left.
She came down to breakfast carrying a small suitcase. “I’m off,” she said. “I start at University tomorrow. I’m catching the nine-twenty to Ludwich, so I’ll say goodbye now and get something to eat on the train.”
“University!” Mum exclaimed. “But you’re not clever enough!”
“You can’t,” said Uncle Alfred. “There’s the shop – and you don’t have any money.”
“I took an exam,” Anthea said, “and I won a scholarship. That gives me enough money if I’m careful.”
“But you can’t!” they both said together. Mum added, “Who’s going to look after Conrad?” and Uncle Alfred said, “Look here, my girl, I was relying on you for the shop.”
“Working for nothing. I know,” Anthea said. “Well, I’m sorry to spoil your plans for me, but I do have a life of my own, you know, and I’ve made arrangements for myself because I knew you’d both stop me if I told you. I’ve looked after all three of you for years. But now Conrad’s old enough to look after himself, I’m going to go and get a life.”
And she went, leaving us all staring. She didn’t come back. She knew Uncle Alfred, you see. Uncle Alfred spent a lot of time in his workroom setting up spells to make sure that when Anthea came home at the end of the University semester she would find herself having to stay with us for good. Anthea guessed he would. She simply sent a postcard to say she was staying with friends and never came near us. She sent me cards and presents for my birthdays, but she never came back to Stallchester for years.
Anthea’s going made a dreadful difference, far worse than any change made by Count Rudolf up at Stallery. Mum was in a bad mood for weeks. I’m not sure she ever forgave Anthea.
“So sly!” she kept saying. “So mean and secretive. Don’t you ever be like that, Conrad, and it’s no use expecting me to run after you. I have my work to do.”
Uncle Alfred was tetchy and grumpy for a long time too, but he cheered up after he had set the spells that were supposed to fix Anthea at home once she came back. He took to patting me on the shoulder and saying, “You’re not going to let me down like that, are you, Con?”
Sometimes I answered, “No fear!” but mostly I wriggled a bit and didn’t answer. I missed Anthea horribly for ages. She had been the person I could go to when I had a question to ask, or to get cheered up. If I fell down or cut myself, she had been the one with sticking plaster and soothing words. She used to suggest things for me to do if I was bored. I felt quite lost now she was gone.
I hadn’t realised how many things Anthea did in the house. Luckily, I knew how to work the washing machine, but I was always forgetting to run it and finding I’d no clothes to go to school in. I got into trouble for wearing dirty clothes until I got used to remembering. Mum just went on piling her clothes into the laundry basket as she always had, but Uncle Alfred was particular about his shirts. He had to pay Mrs Potts to iron them for him and he grumbled a lot about how much she charged.
“The ingredients for my experiments cost the earth these days,” he kept saying. “Where do I find