Deep Secret. Diana Wynne Jones
the grass and invent stories. My first really bitchy row with Janine was when I was twelve and Nick was six and Janine discovered that Nick would rather be with me than go anywhere with her. She said I was putting fantasies into Nick’s head. I told her Nick was inventing most of them himself. She said he didn’t know truth from reality because of me. And I said that yes he did, because he knew he would be bored going out with her.
I suppose it helps pick up the old relationship that Nick is still exactly the same startlingly good-looking child he was when I wheeled him up the hill and old ladies used to stop me and say what a beautiful little brother I’d got (and I always said, “He’s not my brother, he’s my cousin”). Except that these days he’s about a yard taller and I have to crane upwards to see his face. He says I haven’t changed either. He’s right. I haven’t grown since I was twelve. And still the same round face, like a badly drawn heart on a school Valentine, and my nose never grew either, so my specs slide off all the time like they always did. Same mousy mane of hair, same lack of figure. And I did a lot of comfort-eating while I was with Mum (like a fool, I thought health foods were invented to stop people putting on weight) so now I’m truly FAT – and I always was on the plump and dumpy side. I looked in the mirror before I wrote this and wondered how Robbie ever fancied me…
[2]
…told me I’d failed my driving test. Well, it’s not my fault. Bristol is so confusing. I don’t think he should fail me just for getting us lost, though I did end up running backwards down Totterdown (I think the gradient is 1:5 there) because I couldn’t seem to remember how to do a hill start. Now I shall have to wait another month before I can take the test again. Pah.
I relieved my feelings by storming into the Vet Dept and applying to change to Philosophy. They said I was doing quite well and did I mean it. And I said yes. If they thought I was going to stick around watching Robbie Payne make sheep’s eyes at Davina Frostick, they thought wrong. They said that wasn’t a good reason to switch subjects. I said it was the only real one. So they ummed and aahed and said it wasn’t possible until after Easter, or maybe even until autumn, and obviously assumed I’d have changed my mind by then.
I WON’T. I’d let my fingernails grow while I was looking after Dad. Now I swear not to cut them for a year. They can’t make me do work on animals with six-inch talons. So.
Oh FRUSTRATION!!! Applying for a new driving test took nearly all the money I had left. I had to tell Uncle Ted I’d pay him for my bed and board every six months. He took it well. He’s pretty rich anyway. And Janine seems to be made of money.
But God those two are so boring!
I don’t blame Nick for diving away into that basement of his every evening. Before I got it sorted out that I could go away to my attic and pretend to work, I spent several centuries-long evenings sitting in their living room with them after supper (hm. Supper. Janine doesn’t cook, you know. She has what she calls her menus in the freezer, pre-packaged slenderisers. Nick and Uncle Ted eat them with ten-inch-high piles of reconstituted potatoes. She and I just eat them. I keep myself awake rumbling with hunger every night, but it must be worth it). They never go out after supper. Apparently Uncle Ted once got struck with an idea for a book in the middle of the Welsh National Opera and they had to leave so that he could go and write Chapter One. Janine is opposed to wasting money like that, so they stay in now. They almost never watch television because it interferes with Uncle Ted’s ideas.
So there we sat. Now you’d think that a world-famous author like Uncle Ted would be really interesting to talk to. The very least you’d expect was that he’d discuss the vileness of his latest demons (no one does demons like Uncle Ted: they’re really horrific). But not a bit of it. He doesn’t talk about his work at all, or anything to do with it.
I asked him why, the second evening. Janine looked at me as if I’d remarked that the Pope was into voodoo. And Uncle Ted said he saved that kind of talk for public appearances. “Writing’s a job, like any other,” says he. “I like to come home from the office and put my feet up, as it were.” (He works at home of course.)
“Well, it’s a point of view,” I said. Actually I was scandalised. Nothing to do with the imagination should be just “a job”. My opinion of Uncle Ted, whom I’ve always rather liked and admired, went screeching downhill almost to zero.
Then it went down again, in a steady depressed trundle, like a sledge on a very small slope, because Uncle Ted started talking about the house. And money. Looking very satisfied with how much money he’d made lately, he told me just which bit of redecoration or alteration he’s paid for out of which book. And Janine nodded enthusiastically and reminded him that Nick’s basement came out of The Curse on the Cottage; and he retorted with the fitted bookcases out of Surrender, You Devil; and they both told me that after Shadowfall they were able to afford an interior decorator to revamp the living room. I thought that was an awful way to look at a book. I thought a book was a Work of Art.
“But we left the windows in all the rooms as they are,” Uncle Ted added. “We had to.”
Now I had been fascinated by the glass in the windows. I remember it from when I was small. It waves and it wobbles. When you look out at the front – particularly in the evenings – you get a sort of cliff of trees and buildings out there, with warm lighted squares of windows, which all sort of slide about and ripple as if they are just going to transform into something else. From some angles, the houses bend and stretch into weird shapes, and you really might believe they were sliding into a set of different dimensions. From the back of the house it’s just as striking. There you get a navy blue vista of city against pale sunset. And when the streetlights come on they look like holes through to the orange sky. With everything rippling and stretching, you almost think you’re seeing your way through to a potent strange place behind the city.
I knew Uncle Ted was going to destroy all the strangeness by saying something dreary about his windows, and I terribly didn’t want him to. I almost prayed at him not to. But he did. He said, “It’s genuine wartime glass from World War Two, you know. It dates from when Hitler bombed the docks here. This house was caught in the blast and all the windows blew out and had to be replaced. So we leave the panes, whatever else we do. The glass is historic. It adds quite a bit to the value of the house.”
I ask you! He writes fantasy. He has windows that go into other dimensions. And all he can think about is how much extra money they’re worth.
Oh, I know I’m being ungrateful and horrible. They’re letting me live here. But all the same…
Nick at least has noticed about the windows. He says they give you glimpses of a great alternate universe called Bristolia. And, being in some ways as practical as his father, he has made maps of Bristolia for a role-playing game…
[3]
…a low time. I ache inside my chest about Robbie. I go into the university but I just mooch about there really. One’s supposed to get over being crossed in love. People do. It was months ago now, after all. I don’t seem to be like other people. I don’t know what I’m like. That’s the trouble with being adopted and not knowing your real parents. They have little bits of ancestry you don’t know about, and aren’t prepared for, and they cone up and hit you. You don’t know what to expect.
And my money has dwindled away to almost nothing…
[4]
Well, what do you know! I got a letter from someone called Rupert Venables. I suppose he’s a lawyer. No one but a lawyer could have that kind of name. He says a distant relative has left me a hundred quid as a legacy. Lead me to it!
Those were my first, joyous thoughts. Then Janine put the kibosh on them by asking sweetly, “What distant relative, dear? Your mother’s, your father’s, or your own?”
And Uncle Ted chipped in. “What’s this lawyer’s address? That should give you a clue.”
Practical Uncle Ted again. The man Venables writes from Weavers End, Cambridgeshire. Mum’s family comes entirely from South London. Dad’s is all Bristol. And none of them have died recently as