Дом ста дорог

[514] Since he was obviously trying not to be so unfriendly, Charmain said, "We can get afternoon tea in the living room after I've emptied these. And my mother brought another bag of food when she came."

[515] Peter cheered up remarkably. "Then we can have a decent meal when we've done the washing up," he said. "We're doing that first, whatever you say."

[516] And he held Charmain to it, in spite of her protests. As soon as she came in from the garden, Peter came and took the book out of her hands and presented her with a cloth to tie round her waist instead. Then he led her to the kitchen, where the mysterious and horrible process began. Peter thrust another cloth into her hands. "You wipe and I'll wash," he said, lifting the steaming saucepan off the fire and pouring half the hot water on the soapflakes sprinkled in the sink.

He heaved up a bucket of cold water from the pump and poured half of that in the sink too.

[517] "Why are you doing that?" Charmain asked.

[518] "So as not to get scalded," Peter replied, plunging knives and forks into his mixture and following those with a stack of plates. "Don't you know anything?"

[519] "No," Charmain said. She thought irritably that not one of the many books she had read had so much as mentioned washing dishes, let alone explained how you did it. She watched as Peter briskly used a dishcloth to wipe old, old dinner off a patterned plate. The plate came out of the suds bright and clean. Charmain rather liked the pattern now and was almost inclined to believe that this was magic. She watched Peter dip the plate in another bucket to rinse it.

Then he handed it to her. "What do I do with this?" she asked.

[520] "Wipe it dry, of course," he said. "Then stack it on the table."

[521] Charmain tried. The whole horrible business took ages. The wiping cloth hardly seemed to soak up water at all and the plate kept nearly slithering out of her hands. She was so much slower at wiping than Peter was at washing, that Peter soon had a heap of plates draining beside the sink and began to get impatient. Naturally, at that point, the prettiest patterned plate slid out of Charmain's hands completely and fell on the floor. Unlike the strange teapots, it broke.

[522] "Oh," Charmain said, staring down at the pieces. "How do you put them together?"

[523] Peter rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. "You don't," he said. "You just take care not to drop another." He collected the pieces of plate and threw them into another bucket. "I'll wipe now. You try your hand at washing, or we'll be all day." He let the now brownish water out of the sink, collected the knives, forks, and spoons out of it, and dropped them in the rinsing bucket. To Charmain's surprise, they all seemed to be clean and shiny now.

[524] As she watched Peter fill the sink again with more soap and hot water, she decided, crossly but quite reasonably, that Peter had chosen the easy part of the work.

[525] She found she was mistaken. She did not find it easy at all. It took her slow ages on each piece of crockery, and she got soaked down the front of her in the process. And Peter kept handing back to her plates and cups, saucers and mugs, and saying they were still dirty. Nor would he let her wash any of the many dog dishes until the human crockery was done. Charmain thought this was too bad of him. Waif had licked each one so clean that Charmain knew they would be easier to wash than anything else. Then, on top of this, she was horrified to find that her hands were coming out of the suds all red and covered with strange wrinkles.

[526] "I must be ill!" she said. "I've got a horrible skin disease!"

[527] She was annoyed and offended when Peter laughed at her.

[528] But the dreadful business was done at last. Charmain, damp in front and wrinkly in the hands, went sulkily off to the living room to read The Twelve-Branched Wand by the slanting light of the setting sun, leaving Peter to stack the clean things in the pantry. By this time, she was feeling she might go mad if she didn't sit and read for a while. I've hardly read a word all day, she thought.

[529] Peter interrupted her much too soon by coming in with a vase he had found and filled with the hydrangeas, which he dumped down on the table in front of her. "Where's that food you said your mother brought?" he said.

[530] "What?" Charmain said, peering at him through the foliage.

"I said Food," Peter told her.

[531] Waif seconded him by leaning against Charmain's legs and groaning.

[532] "Oh," Charmain said. "Yes. Food. You can have some if you promise not to dirty a single dish eating it."

[533] "That's all right," Peter said. "I'm so hungry I could lick it off the carpet."