The Changeover by Margaret Mahy Page A

him.
    "At least come into the kitchen, Laura," said Winter Carlisle. "He will have to change his clothes and then he'll bring his bike round to the kitchen door."
    Laura let herself be led into what was surely a farmhouse kitchen, though the farm had ceased to exist. In spite of the warm night she had begun to shiver, but she did not wish to show it. Also she found something sinister about the unremitting kindness these women showed her, for she had come as a stranger and quarrelled with a member of the family in their own hall. Besides she knew herself to be scruffy and tired and forlorn. They gave her lemonade — the second glass she had had that night, but this was not fizzy, shop lemonade; it was a home-made kind, made with real lemons. Indeed a slice of lemon floated in it like an opaque island. It was in her hands almost before she knew where she was, and a plate with tomato sliced over home-made bread was put in the other. They both watched her from under their peaceful eyelids and she felt the pressure of an unspoken expectation, and an anxiety which their calm faces did not reveal.
    What's going on? she thought, wondering if she might not enlist these new witches — for looking at them she saw they could not be otherwise— on Jacko's behalf. Sorry's nature, when she first saw him, had been almost flamboyant in its declaration, but his mother and grandmother were softer and more secret. The faces of the witches looked out through their own faces as if through masks of grey lace.
    "What did you want Sorry to do for you, Laura?" asked old Winter.
    "My little brother is so ill," Laura began, but they were not really interested in Jacko, only in Sorry himself and for some reason in Laura, too. Miryam interrupted her, something Laura thought this polite woman would not normally have done, except that she was anxious to say something before Sorry came back.
    "Please be patient with him," she said. "I know he can be very difficult at times, but for reasons I can't go into now I have to tell you that Sorensen's difficulties are partly my fault."
    "But he's not wicked," said the older woman, more to herself than Laura, "not yet! A wicked witch can be a very terrible thing," she added, to Laura's further confusion. Laura took a mouthful of bread and tomato, not so much from hunger as from nervous politeness, and felt their anxiety ease a little though she had no idea why.
    "He wasn't really so very difficult," Laura said. "It was more as if we started talking about two different things, but he's different from the way he is at school."
    "Ah, yes, I imagine he is," said Miryam, "but he has to go to school, you know. He's talked a lot about you. It seems you recognized that he has this ambiguous nature and perhaps, by now, you can see that it's an inherited thing."
    "I thought he was a witch," Laura said. "That's the word that came in to my mind."
    "It's very much a feminine magic— or so we think," Miryam said. "And Sorensen sometimes resents it. He doesn't like being called a witch, although of course that is really what he is. Sometimes he feels that he's not completely a man or a witch but some hybrid, and he struggles too hard to be entirely one thing or the other. But he can't give up either nature. We do try to reconcile him, but so far, at least, our efforts have met with very mixed success. However, the real difficulty lies elsewhere." And once again Laura felt their glances fall on her, outwardly calm, inwardly concerned, as if they were depending on her for something, but could not tell her what.
    "He thought I came to see him because I liked him," she said. "Not that I don't," she added hastily, "but— you know — because I specially liked him."
    "Well, perhaps you do," suggested Miryam smiling at her. "Or perhaps some day ..."
    "I wouldn't come to see him at night because I liked him," Laura said, horrified that they should think she might have. She stared down at the bread in her hand. There was only a crust