When the children got back to the house, they found Art with a large piece of sticking plaster on his forehead. He had tried to give Lambert some lunch and Lambert had torn the plate out of his hand and hurled it across the room. Then he’d lain down on the floor and drummed his heels and screamed for his father and his mobile telephone.
‘I’d have thumped him,’ said Art now, ‘but I daren’t. I don’t know my own strength. I might have pulped him into a jelly.’
Fabio didn’t say anything but he was beginning to wonder about Art’s great strength. Meanwhile Lambert was still in the room above the boathouse.
‘But he can’t stay there,’ said Coral. ‘The boy is a fiend. We’ve got to get rid of him.’
But though they discussed it for the rest of the day, none of the aunts could see how this could be done short of killing the child — which they would very much have liked to do, but which was not the kind of thing that happened on the Island.
Chapter Five
When the children came down to breakfast the next day they saw at once that the aunts were worried. Etta’s moustache stood out dark against her pale face and her nose had sharpened to something you could have used to cut cheese.
‘I really don’t want to operate,’ they heard her say, ‘but it’s serious. She’s completely egg-bound.’
‘Who’s egg-bound?’ asked Fabio.
Aunt Etta ignored him.
‘I’ve tried massage; I’ve tried Vaseline; I’ve tried a steam kettle,’ she said to her sisters.
‘What about castor oil?’ suggested Coral.
‘It’s worth a try, I suppose.’
‘Can we help?’ asked Minette.
‘No.’ Etta looked up briefly. ‘Well, perhaps you can carry the buckets. We’re going up the hill. And kindly fold your napkins properly when you leave the table. You left them in a disgusting heap yesterday.’
It was quite a procession which wound its way up the hill. Etta carried an enormous bottle of castor oil, Fabio lugged a footstool and a primus stove, Minette had two buckets and a bundle of rags.
The path was steep and the morning was warm but Aunt Etta kept up a fierce pace. She also chose to give them a lecture as she went.
‘Now I want to make it absolutely clear to you that I will not have favourites on this island. The unusual creatures you will be working with are no more important than the ordinary ones. A sick water flea needs help just as much as a mermaid. A flounder is exactly as important as a selkie. I hope you understand this because if you don’t, you’re not going to be any use doing your job.’
The children said, yes, they had understood it, but when they reached the top of the hill they were pleased they had been warned.
There were two hills, actually, with a dip in between which held a loch of dark, peaty water. On the far side of the loch was a great pile of brushwood and boulders and bracken. It looked like one of the stockades that the settlers in America used to build to protect themselves from the Indians.
But what stuck out over the top of the stockade was not an American settler. It was the head of an absolutely enormous bird.
The head was black but its beak was a bright yellow and made the children think of those great machines — crunchers or diggers or shovellers — that one sees looming over building sites. Its eyes were yellow too, huge and round and mad-looking, and as they stared they were blasted backwards by the deep honking noise they had heard on the first day.
‘What is it?’ stammered Fabio.
‘It’s a boobrie,’ said Aunt Etta, striding round the edge of the loch. ‘And I can tell you there aren’t many of those left in the world. They’re a sort of cousin of the dodo — people thought they were extinct but they weren’t. They developed on a different island and the sailors didn’t find them so they just grew and grew and grew. But then people started doing atomic tests and that kind of nonsense and the ones that were left managed to fly away.’
She led them round the other side of the stockade and they saw a short ladder propped against the side of the nest. Aunt Etta climbed up it and beckoned to the children to follow but they hung back, thinking of the huge yellow eyes, the dreadful beak.
‘Hurry up!’ said Etta and, as they still hesitated, she turned round, took a deep breath, and let them have it. ‘I have to tell you that kidnapping you was quite the most unpleasant experience any of us have had: that boarding house full of yacking women, and the London Underground with all those fumes. If you think we’d have gone to all that trouble just to let you get eaten by some bird, you need to have your heads examined. Anyway boobries are vegetarians, at least this kind are — more’s the pity.’
So the children followed her up the ladder and jumped down into the nest which was trampled flat and lined with moss and feathers.
The boobrie was not really so enormous. She was smaller than an African elephant — more the size of an Indian one. It took a lot of courage to look up at her but when they did the children stopped being afraid. She could hurt you, of course, by stepping on your feet for example, but they could see that she was a bird with serious troubles of her own.
The nest was ready for eggs but there were no eggs to be seen. The boobrie’s chest looked sadly naked so that they knew it was her own feathers she had plucked out to make a warm lining, but a lining for what? Where were the eggs and where the chicks that would follow?
‘I have to tell you that I am very worried about her,’ said Aunt Etta. ‘Being egg-bound is a most serious business.’
‘You mean her eggs are stuck inside her? She can’t get them out?’ asked Minette.
‘That’s right. And she’s too uncomfortable to go and look for something to eat.’
‘Doesn’t she have a mate to bring her food?’ asked Fabio.
Aunt Etta snorted. ‘She had but she’s lost him.’
‘You mean he’s dead?’
‘He may be, for all I know. Or he may have lost the way or forgotten all about her. You know what men are.’
This annoyed Fabio. ‘I’m a man, or I will be, and I’ll never leave my wife to starve in a nest. Never.’
‘Why did you say it’s a pity she’s a vegetarian?’ Minette wanted to know.
‘Because it makes it hard for us to feed her. We could have thrown her a frozen side of beef, but to dredge up all those sludgy sea lettuces and sea noodles and gutweeds takes hours,’ said Etta. She was stamping round the boobrie, batting her with a stick, thumping her. ‘Get up, you stupid bird. I’m trying to help you.’
At first the boobrie wouldn’t move; she sat hunched and shivering and from her throat came a single squawk which seemed to be her way of saying ‘Ow!’ But Etta was merciless. She thumped and scolded and prodded the bird till she struggled to her feet and stood there swaying and honking.
Then she climbed on to the footstool and peered into the boobrie’s back end and there, sure enough, was a glimmer of white speckled with blue.
‘You can make seventy-two omelettes from one boobrie’s egg,’ said Etta when the children had had a look.
But of course she didn’t want seventy-two omelettes — she didn’t care for omelettes anyway — she wanted living chicks. ‘The next part is going to be messy,’ she warned.