Monster Mission

‘We could give the kids a good time with the money we get,’ said Mrs Danby. She’d buy Minette lots of new dresses and if there was any money over she could do with some new clothes herself. There was a lovely pink georgette with a black underskirt she’d seen at Adrienne’s Boutique … and the sitting room carpet was getting really shabby.

Professor Danby too was thinking of how he could help Minette with some extra money to spend; her bedroom when she stayed with him could do with a proper writing desk so she could do her homework, and if there was any money to spare he needed the new three-hundred-volume Grammar Scholastica. He’d had his eyes on it for months but the cost was absurd.

Even the old Mountjoys thought that suing the police was a good idea. Hubert-Henry’s fees at Greymarsh Towers were ridiculously high; any help would be welcome.

They were working out how best to do this when the parlourmaid came in with the tea things on a silver tray. She was the only one who had been fond of Fabio and now she asked whether there had been any news of him.

‘No, there hasn’t,’ snapped Mrs Mountjoy and told her to bring some more hot water. What were servants coming to, sticking their noses into family business?

While the Danbys and the Mountjoys met to complain in London, something sad and serious happened in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. The mother of Boo-Boo and the Little One tripped on a cracked paving stone and broke her hip.

Breaking a hip is a bad business. An ambulance came and rushed her off to hospital where they put a pin into the joint and told her she had to stay in for a week and be careful for a long time after that.

This left her husband, the tax inspector, with a problem. Being a tax inspector is very hard work. You have to go to an office every day and fill in lots and lots of forms and send rude letters to people who are trying not to pay their tax, and do a great many sums. Betty’s husband, whose name was Ronald, was a very good tax inspector and he did not feel he could look after Boo-Boo and the Little One as well as doing his job.

But now something amazing happened. He was just wondering what on earth to do with his children when a tall, fierce-looking lady came striding up the path, carrying a suitcase and the kind of saucepan that people use to stir-fry things in. The tax inspector had never used one because his wife Betty did not cook foreign foods, but he knew it was a wok and once he had realized this, he knew who the lady was. It was Betty’s sister Dorothy, who had been imprisoned in Hong Kong for hitting a restaurant owner on the head because he was serving pangolin steaks in his restaurant. She must have kept the wok as a memento and as she came closer he saw that he was right because there was a dent in the side which might well have been made by the restaurant owner’s head.

‘Where’s Betty?’ said Dorothy, putting down her case. She did not like her sister Betty, who shaved her legs and had three kinds of toilet freshener in her loo, but families are families and on her way home to the Island she had decided to call on her and see how she was.

She soon realized her mistake. Visiting Betty in hospital was one thing, but being asked to look after Boo-Boo and the Little One was quite another.

‘I can’t stand children, you know that,’ said Dorothy. She could have said, ‘I can’t stand your children,’ but she didn’t because of Betty being ‘family’.

Betty began to cry. Her leg was in plaster and hitched up to something and she had a bruise on her face where she had fallen, so when she cried she looked very pathetic indeed.

‘Please, Dotty—oh, please. Poor Ronald works so hard, and he can’t give up his job.’

Dorothy didn’t like being called Dotty and she didn’t like Ronald and she really loathed Betty’s house where everything was covered in little crocheted hats or frilly embroidered cloths or sprayed with some gooey scent which climbed into your nostrils and stayed there. Betty’s chairs had chair covers and the chair covers had more covers to keep the covers clean, as though sitting down was a dangerous act, and the whole thing drove Dorothy round the bend. Also she was homesick for the Island and for Myrtle and Coral and in particular for Etta who was next to her in age and her closest friend.

But there was Betty looking absolutely miserable—and after all it wasn’t her fault that she was an idiot and had two ridiculous children. Life isn’t fair and never has been.

‘I’ll stay for a week,’ Dorothy said. ‘Till you’re over the worst. But that’s all.’