The Exiles

it.’
    ‘More than one I think. Anyway, she doesn’t care. It’s all right for her; she’s old enough to be a ghost herself.’
    ‘There’s ways of getting rid of them,’ said Ruth. ‘You can exercise them or something.’
    ‘They probably get enough exercise, tearing around the house all night.’
    ‘And I’ve heard you can keep them out by painting the window frames and the doors bright red. They don’t like red. It upsets them.’
    ‘It would upset Big Grandma too. She’d go mad.’
    ‘Or you can eat garlic.’
    ‘I didn’t know ghosts could smell things. How do they sniff ?’
    Graham heard Naomi’s last remark as he came sneaking up on them and obligingly sniffed a ghostly and horrible sniff. He smirked with satisfaction as they clutched each other in fright and glared at him.
    ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said. ‘I’m just here for a minute with a message from my mum, and then I’ve got to go school uniform shopping. She said to tell you you’re all to come to tea tomorrow.’
    ‘Big Grandma too?’
    ‘I don’t think so,’ Graham answered. ‘I think it’s more to give her an afternoon off. Anyway, it’s you lot they want to have a look at.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘My brothers. When I told them about you, they said they’d like to have a look,’ said Graham, ‘and my mum said to tell you to come to tea and give poor old Mrs Sayers an afternoon off.’
    ‘Thanks a lot,’ said Ruth at the end of this charmless explanation. ‘Any more kind remarks or are you going?’
    ‘I’m going,’ said Graham cheerfully. ‘See you tomorrow then. Don’t come too early though.’
    ‘Why not?’ asked Naomi incautiously.
    Graham opened his mouth to explain that his father did not want a pack of girls hanging about the farm half the afternoon, but at that moment he caught sight of Phoebe sitting in solitary state beneath the damson tree, earnestly angling.
    ‘I never seen anything like that,’ he murmured in amazement, and left very quietly.

    Much to everyone’s surprise, Big Grandma took her granddaughters’ launch into society remarkably seriously. They must look decent for once, she said; they were not going to tea with her friends looking (as they so often did) as if they had just been pulled out from under their beds. She made them put on their best (and only) dresses, brought in case Big Grandma ever wanted to take them anywhere special, but she never had.
    Ruth’s and Naomi’s dresses were navy blue, which was Mrs Conroy’s favourite colour because it did not show the dirt. The dresses had been made the summer before with good big hems so that she could let them down when they got too short. Her daughters never got any fatter, only taller.
    Rachel’s dress, newly mended by Big Grandma, was pale pink. It had once been Ruth’s bridesmaid’s dress, with puffed sleeves, a lace collar, and a pink bow. But, following Graham’s invitation, Rachel had secretly altered it with rather blunt scissors. It looked a lot plainer now.
    Phoebe, who quite often had new clothes, because Rachel ruined so many of hers before they could be passed on, was in a colour her mother described as Pretty Emerald (again, good for not showing the dirt). Her sisters described it as Marks-And-Spencers-Awful-Green, and disliked it very much. Phoebe did not look right; her dress, which Mrs Conroy had wisely remarked, ‘Would fit when she grew into it’, had not yet acquired that desirable state.
    When they were ready, Big Grandma held a gloomy inspection. Something looked unnatural, but she could not think exactly what.
    ‘Clean socks!’ she ordered, wondering if it would help.
    ‘None left,’ replied Ruth.
    ‘Well, no socks at all then,’ said Big Grandma. ‘And for goodness sake wash your feet.’
    ‘We’re going to the beach first,’ said Naomi. ‘We’ll get them clean there.’
    ‘No bathing then,’ said Big Grandma, ‘and keep tidy, and don’t get that plaster wet, Naomi. And behave yourselves.’
    ‘We always do.’
    ‘And have a nice time,’ said Big Grandma.

    ‘What’s that?’ asked Rachel, as they stopped on the way down to the sea and Ruth extracted a bulging carrier bag from under a hedge.
    ‘Swimming things.’
    ‘She said “No swimming”.’
    ‘She said “No bathing”.’
    ‘It’s the same thing.’
    ‘It’s not. Bathing’s with soap and swimming’s just swimming. Anyway, you don’t have to.’
    ‘I’ll say they made me,’ thought Rachel comfortably