“No, you’re not,” he cried delightedly. “You’re better than a Teddy Bear.”
“Anyone can have a Teddy Bear. But we have you, Mary Poppins,” said Jane.
“Oh, indeed?” she said with an uppish sniff, as she loosened Michael’s hold. “Well, there’s having and having, I assure you! Now go downstairs quietly, please, you don’t want to disturb the household.” And she pushed them before her to the door and closed it softly behind them.
Sleep was all about them as they crept through the house, slid down the banisters and tiptoed out into the garden.
No sound came from Number Eighteen as they placed the fruit and the bar of chocolate on the crossbar of the fence.
And no sound came from it all the morning as they played among the trees and flowers until Mary Poppins called them to lunch. Even when they raced down again, the banana, the apple and the chocolate were still in the same position.
But then, as they turned away from the hole in the fence, a strange noise came from the house next door – a deep and rhythmic rumble that went on and on and on. Everyone in the Lane could hear it and the house seemed to tremble with it.
The lady in Number Nineteen, who was of a nervous disposition, was afraid it might be the beginning of a volcano. Mr Twenty gave it as his opinion that it was a lion snoring.
Jane and Michael, watching from the branches of the pear-tree in their back garden, felt that whatever it was, it must surely mean that something was going to happen.
And it did.
The front door of Number Eighteen opened and through it came a small figure, cautiously glancing from side to side. Slowly, he made his way round the house till he came to the hole in the fence, and then, seeing the fruit and the chocolate, he touched them with a delicate finger.
“They’re for you!” shouted Jane, hurriedly scrambling down from her branch with Michael at her heels.
Luti looked up, a broad smile making his face like the sun, and he spread out his arms towards them.
“Peace and blessings!” he shyly whispered, cocking his head to one side, as he listened to the rumble.
“Missanda sleeps in the afternoon from two of the clock till three. So I came to see what these objects were.”
It was not a volcano after all, not even a lion. The rumbling noise was Miss Andrew snoring.
“The fruit is from Jane and me,” Michael told him, “and the chocolate from Mary Poppins.”
“Mary Poppins?” Luti murmured the name to himself as though he were remembering something that he had long forgotten.
“There she is.” Michael nodded to where Mary Poppins stood by the pear-tree, rocking Annabel in the perambulator.
“Peace and blessings to her,” said Luti, waving his hand at the upright figure with the large pink rose in its hat. “I will hide these gifts within my pockets and eat them at night when I go to bed. Missanda eats only porridge.”
“Is it a nice bed?” Jane enquired. She wanted to hear about everything that happened in Number Eighteen.
“Well, perhaps it is a little soft. On my island we do not sleep in beds but on mats that my mother weaves for us from the leaves of the coconut palm.”
“You could lie on the floor,” said Michael. “That would be almost as good.”
“No, I must do as Missanda wishes. I am here to be of comfort to her, measure her many medicines, cook the porridge when the fire is hot and study my seven-times-seven. That my parents promised her, for they think she is a learnt person and will send me some day back to the island with knowledge of many things.”
“But aren’t you lonely?” Jane asked him. “And aren’t they lonely for you?”
She was thinking how she herself would feel if Miss Andrew took her far away and of how her parents would grieve. No, no such thing could ever happen, not for all the knowledge in the world.
Luti’s face crumpled. The smile faded.
“I am lonely for ever,” his voice was husky. “But a promise has been made to her. If they have need of me, they will send—”
“A telegram!” exclaimed Michael. “In a yellow envelope.” A telegram was always exciting.
“On the island we have no such things. But my Grandmother, Keria, said for my comfort, ‘When we have need of you, it will be known.’ She is a Wise Woman. She reads the stars and understands what the sea is saying. But, harken! I hear the bells singing!”
Luti put his hand to his ear as the church clock beyond the Park rang out. “One, Two, Three!” it said. And at the same moment the rumbling from Number Eighteen stopped, as though switched off.
“Missanda has woken from her sleep.” Luti hurriedly gathered up fruit and chocolate and stuffed them into his pockets.
“Peace and blessings!” He raised his hand, his bright glance taking in Mary Poppins as well as Jane and Michael.
Then he turned and ran across the lawn, his feet in Mr Banks’ big boots crushing the grass as he went.
A door opened and closed behind him and Number Eighteen, suddenly, was as soundless as it had always been.
But the next day, and all the days after it, promptly at two o’clock, the rumbling began again.
“Preposterous! Not to be borne! We must complain to the Prime Minister!” said the people in the Lane. But they knew that even the Prime Minister could no more stop somebody snoring than he could say “Halt!” to a snowstorm. They would just have to grin and bear it.
So that was what they did. And the grinning and bearing made them realise that Miss Andrew’s snoring had its fortunate side. For now, between two and three o’clock, they could meet the smiling brown-faced stranger she had brought from the other side of the world. Otherwise, they would never have seen him, cooped up as he was, like a bird in a cage.
So, as well as the fruit that Jane and Michael put on the fence every afternoon – Mary Poppins always in the background – Luti soon found himself showered with gifts.
Mrs Nineteen gave him a paper fan, such as she would like to have made for the Grandmother she had never known.
Mr Twenty, a gruff, shy man, presented him with the King and Queen of an old chess set from his attic.
Admiral Boom, in a voice that would have roused from sleep anyone but Miss Andrew, hailed him with “Ahoy there, shipmate!” and pressed upon him a six-inch-long carved canoe, faded and shiny from spending years in the dark of a trouser pocket. “It’s my mascot!” he explained. “Brought me luck all my life, ever since I was a midshipman sailing the South Seas.”
Binnacle, the retired pirate, gave him a dagger with a broken point. “It’s me second-best,” he apologised, “but it’ll slit a throat or two if you’re minded to become a pirate.”
Luti had no desire to become a pirate, far less to slit anyone’s throat, but he took the dagger with gratitude and hid it carefully inside his jacket in case Miss Andrew should see it.
The Park Keeper too had a present for him – a page out of an exercise book on which he had printed in large letters, “Observe the Rules. Remember the Bye-laws”.
“You’ll need this,” he said earnestly, “if you ever get to come to the Park.”
Luti spelled out the strange words. “What is a Bye-law?” he wanted to know.
The Park Keeper scratched his head. “I don’t rightly know myself, but it’s something you have to remember.”