— You asked to have the attic bedroom, she told herself savagely. — Mother let you have it because you’re the oldest. It’s a privilege, not a punishment.
‘Not during a hurricane, it isn’t a privilege,’ she said aloud. She tossed the quilt down on the foot of the bed, and stood up. The kitten stretched luxuriously, and looked up at her with huge, innocent eyes.
‘Go back to sleep,’ Meg said. ‘Just be glad you’re a kitten and not a monster like me.’ She looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror and made a horrible face, baring a mouthful of teeth covered with a brace. Automatically she pushed her glasses into position, ran her fingers through her mouse-brown hair, so that it stood wildly on end, and let out a sigh almost as noisy as the wind.
The wide wooden floorboards were cold against her feet. Wind blew in the crevices about the window frame, in spite of the protection the storm sash was supposed to offer. She could hear wind howling in the chimneys. From all the way downstairs she could hear Fortinbras, the big black dog, starting to bark. He must be frightened, too. What was he barking at? Fortinbras never barked without reason.
Suddenly she remembered that when she had gone to the post office to pick up the mail she’d heard about a tramp who was supposed to have stolen twelve sheets from Mrs Buncombe, the constable’s wife. They hadn’t caught him, and maybe he was heading for the Murrys’ house right now, isolated on a back road as it was; and this time maybe he’d be after more than sheets. Meg hadn’t paid much attention to the talk about the tramp at the time, because the postmistress, with a sugary smile, had asked if she’d heard from her father lately.
She left her little room and made her way through the shadows of the main attic, bumping against the ping- pong table. — Now I’ll have a bruise on my hip on top of everything else, she thought.
Next she walked into her old doll’s house, Charles Wallace’s rocking horse, the twins’ electric trains. ‘Why must everything happen to me?’ she demanded of a large teddybear.
At the foot of the attic stairs she stood still and listened. Not a sound from Charles Wallace’s room on the right. On the left, in her parents’ room, not a rustle from her mother sleeping alone in the great double bed. She tiptoed down the hall and into the twins’ room, pushing again at her glasses as though they could help her to see better in the dark. Dennys was snoring. Sandy murmured something about baseball and subsided. The twins didn’t have any problems. They weren’t great scholars, but they weren’t bad ones, either. They were perfectly content with a succession of B’s and an occasional A or C. They were strong and fast runners and good at games, and when remarks were made about anybody in the Murry family, they weren’t made about Sandy and Dennys.
She left the twins’ room and went on downstairs, avoiding the creaking seventh step. Fortinbras had stopped barking. It wasn’t the tramp this time, then. Fort would go on barking if anybody was around.
— But suppose the tramp
— I’ll make myself some cocoa, she decided. — That’ll cheer me up, and if the roof blows off at least I won’t go off with it.
In the kitchen a light was already on, and Charles Wallace was sitting at the table drinking milk and eating bread and jam. He looked very small and vulnerable sitting there alone in the big old-fashioned kitchen, a blond little boy in faded blue pyjamas, his feet swinging a good six inches above the floor.
‘Hi,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
From under the table where he was lying at Charles Wallace’s feet, hoping for a crumb or two, Fortinbras raised his slender dark head in greeting to Meg, and his tail thumped against the floor. Fortinbras had arrived on their doorstep, a half-grown puppy, scrawny and abandoned, one winter night. He was, Meg’s father had decided, part Llewellyn setter and part greyhound, and he had a slender, dark beauty that was all his own.
‘Why didn’t you come up to the attic?’ Meg asked her brother, speaking as though he were at least her own age. ‘I’ve been scared stiff.’
‘Too windy up in that attic of yours,’ the little boy said. ‘I knew you’d be down, I put some milk on the stove for you. It ought to be hot by now.’
How did Charles Wallace always know about her? How could he always tell? He never knew — or seemed to care — what Dennys or Sandy were thinking. It was his mother’s mind, and Meg’s, that he probed with frightening accuracy.
Was it because people were a little afraid of him that they whispered about the Murrys’ youngest child, who was rumoured to be not quite bright? ‘I’ve heard that clever people often have subnormal children,’ Meg had once overheard. ‘The two boys seem to be nice, regular children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren’t all there.’
It was true that Charles Wallace seldom spoke when anybody was around, so that many people thought he’d never learned to talk. And it was true that he hadn’t talked at all until he was almost four. Meg would turn white with fury when people looked at him and clucked, shaking their heads sadly.
‘Don’t worry about Charles Wallace, Meg,’ her father had once told her. Meg remembered it very clearly because it was shortly before he went away. ‘There’s nothing the matter with his mind. He just does things in his own way and in his own time.’
‘I don’t want him to grow up to be dumb like me,’ Meg had said.
‘Oh, my darling, you’re not dumb,’ her father answered. ‘You’re like Charles Wallace. Your development has to go at its own pace. It just doesn’t happen to be the usual pace.’
‘How do you
‘I love you, but that’s not what tells me. Mother and I’ve given you a number of tests, you know.’
Yes, that was true. Meg had realized that some of the ‘games’ her parents played with her were tests of some kind, and that there had been more for her and Charles Wallace than for the twins. ‘IQ tests, you mean?’
‘Yes, some of them.’
‘Is my IQ okay?’
‘More than okay.’
‘What is it?’
‘That I’m not going to tell you. But it assures me that both you and Charles Wallace will be able to do pretty much whatever you like when you grow up to yourselves. You just wait till Charles Wallace starts to talk. You’ll see.’
How right he had been about that, though he himself had left before Charles Wallace began to speak, suddenly, with none of the usual baby preliminaries, using entire sentences. How proud he would have been!
‘You’d better check the milk,’ Charles Wallace said to Meg now, his diction clearer and cleaner than that of most small children. ‘You know you don’t like it when it gets a skin on top.’
‘You put in more than twice enough milk.’ Meg peered into the saucepan.
Charles Wallace nodded serenely. ‘I thought mother might like some.’
‘I might like what?’ a voice said, and there was their mother standing in the doorway.
‘Cocoa,’ Charles Wallace said. ‘Would you like a liver-wurst-and-cream-cheese sandwich? I’ll be happy to make you one.’
‘That would be lovely,’ Mrs Murry said, ‘but I can make it myself if you’re busy.’
‘No trouble at all.’ Charles Wallace slid down from his chair and trotted over to the refrigerator, his feet padding softly as a kitten’s. ‘How about you, Meg?’ he asked. ‘Sandwich?’
‘Yes, please,’ she said. ‘But not liverwurst. Do we have any tomatoes?’
Charles Wallace peered inside. ‘One. All right if I use it on Meg, Mother?’
‘To what better use could it be put?’ Mrs Murry smiled. ‘But not so loud, please, Charles. That is, unless you want the twins downstairs, too.’
‘Let’s be exclusive,’ Charles Wallace said. ‘That’s my new word for the day. Impressive, isn’t it?’
‘Prodigious,’ Mrs Murry said. ‘Meg, come let me look at that bruise.’
Meg knelt at her mother’s feet. The warmth and light of the kitchen had relaxed her so that her attic fears were gone. The cocoa steamed fragrantly in the saucepan; geraniums bloomed on the window sills and there was a bouquet of tiny yellow chrysanthemums in the centre of the table. The curtains, red, with a blue and green geometrical pattern, were drawn, and seemed to reflect their cheerfulness throughout the room. The furnace purred like a great, sleepy animal; the lights glowed with steady radiance; outside, alone in the dark, the wind still battered against the house, but the angry power that had frightened Meg while she was alone in the attic was subdued by the familiar comfort of the kitchen. Underneath Mrs Murry’s chair Fortinbras let out a contented
