We trooped into the room, where Mrs. Candace was sitting elegantly on a low chair beside a table full of tea things. She turned. She had the most beautiful small head loaded with thick white hair and amazingly shapely legs in silken stockings. The dismay on her face when she saw the Izzys nearly made me laugh. “I didn’t know you were bringing the twins, dear,” she said. I realized that the affected voice the Izzys kept using was an imitation of Mrs. Candace. She was so old-fashioned and well bred and well spoken that she did sound almost affected.
“We knew you would just love to see us!” one Izzy said. It was almost an exact imitation. Mrs. Candace winced.
The other Izzy said rudely, “And who’s he? We don’t allow boots in the house.”
She pointed at the man standing by the table holding a teacup. He was a pleasant-looking elderly man in a shabby linen jacket. He was wearing green rubber boots. He looked down at his boots and then at the Izzy and seemed rather startled, but he didn’t say anything.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Candace said. “May I introduce Salisbury? We were just consulting about your problem, as it happens.”
“Salisbury?” said Judith.
“That’s right,” Mrs. Candace said. “Salisbury, the city.”
“Oh!” Judith wrapped her shawl around her in a flustered way and introduced Grundo and me. Obviously, the idea of speaking to a city in green rubber boots was too much for her.
The Izzys had no such problems. One of them said, “That’s stupid!” and the other agreed: “No one can talk to a town.” And they stared rudely at Salisbury.
Judith, as usual, pretended not to notice. She said, “I can’t stay very long, I’m afraid. It’s such a long drive.”
“You’ll stay for a cup of tea,” Mrs. Candace stated. “Then I shall make sure you get home much faster than you came. More tea and perhaps some cake,” she said to the air.
We all sat down politely on little padded chairs, except for the Izzys, who wandered about, pulling and prodding at everything in the elegant room. A fat gray cat that had been peacefully asleep on a stool only just escaped onto a high cabinet in time, where it stood with its fur bushed, staring down at the Izzys in horror. Mrs. Candace looked up at it anxiously. But Judith simply pulled her shawl closer round her shoulders and went on explaining how Grundo and I had been left behind by the Progress.
A teapot and a big cake cut into large, squashy slices came floating through the room. The Izzys left off trying to reach the cat and stared. Grundo’s eyes followed the path of the cake with interest. I screwed my eyelids up against the daylight and found I could just see the shapes of four transparent, birdlike creatures guiding the teapot and the cake down onto the small table beside Mrs. Candace.
“Don’t even think of it!” I whispered fiercely at Grundo.
He shot me a guilty look and grinned. Then he worked some magic. It is often hard to tell when Grundo is working magic. He doesn’t move, and his face hardly changes. But this time I had no doubt. It jolted me. I jumped as if I’d had a bad fright, and so did Mrs. Candace. I rounded on Grundo to tell him to behave.
But just then one of the Izzys succeeded in grabbing the cat’s dangling gray tail. The cat squawked. The cabinet rocked, and all the delicate china inside it rattled. And, to my surprise, Judith sprang up and more or less shouted at the Izzys. “Isadora, stop that at once! Come here, both of you!”
The twins, looking as surprised as I felt, wandered sulkily toward her. “It’s booooring here!” Isadora moaned, and Ilsabil said sweetly, “But we’re being ever so good, Mother. We promised!” Then, as usual, they did it the other way round.
“You are not being good at all!” Judith snapped. Her face was most uncharacteristically red and angry. “Say sorry to Mrs. Candace and then we’ll go home. I do apologize,” she said to the rest of us. “We really must leave now. It’s such a long way.”
She began pushing the Izzys out of the room. Both of them leaned backward. “But I want some cake!” Ilsabil protested.
“You’re not getting any. You don’t deserve it,” Judith said. “We’re going straight home, and you’re going to have another long talk with your grandmother.”
Both Izzys burst into loud tears. We could hear them wailing and yelling even after the front door had slammed behind them. We could hear them through the opening and shutting of car doors and the sound of the engine starting. We went on hearing them until the noise of the engine had died away into the distance.
“Well!” said Mrs. Candace in the final silence. “What was that about?”
“Grundo?” I said.
Grundo went pink. “They had a spell on Judith,” he growled, “so that they could do whatever they liked and she would never notice.”
“And you took it off?” Mrs. Candace demanded.
“Not quite. They had it on Hepzibah, too,” Grundo explained. “I had to put a spell on the
m, to make what they were doing obvious to Judith—and Hepzibah, too, I hope, once they get home. It was difficult. It took me the whole drive to work it out.”
“Well!” Mrs. Candace said again. “In the normal way, young man, I would give you a good talking to. It is not allowed to tamper with people’s personalities. That’s black magic. But in this case I concede that it was richly deserved. Still, it seems hard on poor Judith to have to take to the road again without even a cup of tea. I’d better do what I promised her. Help yourselves to cake. I won’t be long.”
She stood up—with an effort. She was old and creaking. Salisbury passed us cake, gravely and silently, and the cat came down from on high and sat across Grundo’s legs, purring. The cat knew who to be grateful to all right. I bit into squashy cake while I watched Mrs. Candace bring several pieces of empty air together and then sort of pleat it in her twisty old fingers.
“Find them a way through a suitable otherwhere,” she murmured, “and then bring their road to it and fold it like a fan, so that they only touch the road at the tops of the folds....”