Calvin led Meg across the lawn. The shadows of the trees were long and twisted and there was a heavy, sweet, autumnal smell to the air. Meg stumbled as the land sloped suddenly downhill, but Calvin’s strong hand steadied her. They walked carefully across the vegetable garden, picking their way through rows of cabbages, beets, broccoli, pumpkins. Looming on their left were the tall stalks of maize. Ahead of them was a small apple orchard bounded by a stone wall, and beyond this the woods through which they had walked that afternoon. Calvin led the way to the wall, and then sat there, his red hair shining silver in the moonlight, his body dappled with patterns from the tangle of branches. He reached up, pulled an apple off a gnarled limb, handed it to Meg, then picked one for himself. ‘Tell me about your father.’
‘He’s a physicist.’
‘Sure, we all know that. And he’s supposed to have left your mother and gone off with some dame.’
Meg jerked up from the stone on which she was perched, but Calvin grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back down. ‘Hold it, kid. I didn’t say anything you hadn’t heard already, did I?’
‘No,’ Meg said, but continued to pull away. ‘Let me go.’
‘Come on, calm down. You know it isn’t true, I know it isn’t true. And how anybody after one look at your mother could believe any man would leave her for another woman just shows how far jealousy will make people go. Right?’
‘I guess so,’ Meg said, but her happiness had fled and she was back in a morass of anger and resentment.
‘Look, dope,’ Calvin shook her gently. ‘I just want to get things straight, sort of sort out the fact from fiction. Your father’s a physicist. That’s a fact, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a Ph.D. several times over.’
‘Yes.’
‘Most of the time he works alone but some of the time he was at the Institute for Higher Learning in Princeton and in England, at Cambridge. Correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then he did some work for the government, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘You take it from there. That’s all I know.’
‘That’s about all I know, too,’ Meg said. ‘Maybe mother knows more. I don’t know. What he did was – well, it was what they call Classified.’
‘Top Secret, you mean?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you don’t even have any idea what it was about?’
Meg shook her head. ‘No. Not really. Just an idea because of where he was.’
‘Well, where?’
‘Out in New Mexico for a while; we were with him there; and then he was in Florida at Cape Canaveral, and we were with him there, too. And then he was going to be travelling a lot, so we came here.’
‘You’d always had this house?’
‘Yes. But we used to live in it just in the summer.’
‘And you don’t know where your father was sent?’
‘No. At first we got lots of letters. Mother and father always wrote to each other every day. I think mother still writes to him every night. Every once in a while the postmistress makes some kind of crack about all her letters.’
‘I suppose they think she’s pursuing him or something,’ Calvin said, rather bitterly. ‘They can’t understand plain, ordinary love when they see it. Well, go on. What happened next?’
‘Nothing happened,’ Meg said. ‘That’s the trouble.’
‘Well, what about your father’s letters?’
‘They just stopped coming.’
‘You haven’t heard anything at all?’
‘No,’ Meg said. ‘Nothing.’ Her voice was heavy with misery.
Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.
At last Calvin spoke in a dry, unemotional voice, not looking at Meg. ‘Do you think he could be dead?’
Again Meg leapt up, and again Calvin pulled her down. ‘No! They’d have told us if he were dead! There’s always a telegram or something. They always tell you!’
‘What do they tell you?’
Meg choked down a sob, managed to speak over it. ‘Oh, Calvin, mother’s tried and tried to find out. She’s been down to Washington and everything. And all they’ll say is that he’s on a secret and dangerous mission, and she can be very proud of him, but he won’t be able to – to communicate with us for a while. And they’ll give us news as soon as they have it.’
‘Meg, don’t get mad, but do you think maybe they don’t know?’
A slow tear trickled down Meg’s cheek. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
‘Why don’t you cry?’ Calvin asked gently. ‘You’re just crazy about your father, aren’t you? Go ahead and cry. It’ll do you good.’
Meg’s voice came out trembling over tears. ‘I cry much too much. I should be like mother. I should be able to control myself.’
‘Your mother’s a completely different person and she’s a lot older than you are.’
‘I wish I were a different person,’ Meg said shakily. ‘I hate myself.’
Calvin reached over and took off her glasses. Then he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped her tears. This gesture of tenderness undid her completely, and she put her head down on her knees and sobbed. Calvin sat quietly beside her, every once in a while patting her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed finally. ‘I’m terribly sorry. Now you’ll hate me.’
‘Oh, Meg, you are a moron,’ Calvin said. ‘Don’t you know you’re the nicest thing that’s happened to me in a long time?’
Meg raised her head, and moonlight shone on her tear-stained face; without the glasses her eyes were unexpectedly beautiful. ‘If Charles Wallace is a sport, I think I’m a biological mistake.’
Now she was waiting to be contradicted. But Calvin said, ‘Do you know that this is the first time I’ve seen you without your glasses?’
‘I’m blind as a bat without them. I’m near-sighted, like father.’
‘Well, you know what, you’ve got dream-boat eyes,’ Calvin said. ‘Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don’t think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.’
Meg smiled with pleasure. She could feel herself blushing and she wondered if the blush would be visible in the moonlight.
‘Okay, hold it, you two,’ came a voice out of the shadows. Charles Wallace stepped into the moonlight. ‘I wasn’t spying on you,’ he said quickly, ‘and I hate to break things up, but this is it, kids, this is it!’ His voice quivered with excitement.
‘This is what?’ Calvin asked.
‘We’re going.’
‘Going? Where?’ Meg reached out and instinctively grabbed for Calvin’s hand.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ Charles Wallace said. ‘But I think it’s to find father.’
Suddenly two eyes seemed to spring at them out of the darkness; it was the moonlight striking on Mrs Who’s glasses. She was standing next to Charles Wallace, and how she had managed to appear where a moment ago there had been nothing but flickering shadows in the moonlight Meg had no idea. She heard a sound behind her and turned round. There was Mrs Whatsit scrambling over the wall.
‘My, but I wish there were no wind,’ Mrs Whatsit said plaintively. ‘It’s so difficult with all these clothes.’ She wore her outfit of the night before, rubber boots and all, with the addition of one of Mrs Buncombe’s sheets which she had draped over her. As she slid off the wall the sheet caught in a low branch and came off. The felt hat slipped over both eyes, and another branch plucked at the pink stole. ‘Oh, dear,’ she sighed. ‘I shall never learn to manage.’
Mrs Who wafted over to her, tiny feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground, the lenses of her glasses glittering. ‘Come t’è picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!’ With a clawlike hand she pushed the hat up on Mrs Whatsit’s forehead, untangled the stole from the tree and with a deft gesture took the sheet and folded it.