Mary Poppins Comes Back

When she came to Michael’s bed, she bent down and rummaged under it for a minute. Then she carefully drew out her camp bedstead with her possessions laid upon it in neat piles. The cake of Sunlight soap, the toothbrush, the packet of hairpins, the bottle of scent, the small folding armchair and the box of throat lozenges. Also the seven flannel nightgowns, the four cotton ones, the boots, the dominoes, the two bathing caps and the postcard album.

Jane and Michael sat up and stared.

“Where did they come from?” demanded Michael. “I’ve been under my bed simply hundreds of times and I know they weren’t there before.”

Mary Poppins did not reply. She had begun to undress.

Jane and Michael exchanged glances. They knew it was no good asking, because Mary Poppins never explained anything.

She slipped off her starched white collar and fumbled at the clip of a chain round her neck.

“What’s inside that?” enquired Michael, gazing at a small gold locket that hung on the end of the chain.

“A portrait.”

“Whose?”

“You’ll know when the time comes – not before!” she snapped.

“When will the time come?”

“When I go!”

They stared at her with startled eyes.

“But, Mary Poppins,” cried Jane, “you won’t ever leave us again, will you? Oh, say you won’t!”

Mary Poppins glared at her.

“A nice life I’d have,” she remarked, “if I spent all my days with you!”

“But you will stay?” persisted Jane eagerly.

Mary Poppins tossed the locket up and down on her palm.

“I’ll stay till the chain breaks!” she said briefly.

And, popping a cotton nightgown over her head, she began to undress beneath it.

“That’s all right,” Michael whispered across to Jane. “I noticed the chain and it’s a very strong one.”

He nodded to her reassuringly. They curled up in their beds and lay watching Mary Poppins as she moved mysteriously beneath the tent of her nightgown. And they thought of her first arrival at Cherry Tree Lane and all the strange and astonishing things that had happened afterwards; of how she had flown away on her umbrella when the wind changed; of the long, weary days without her and of her marvellous descent from the sky this afternoon.

Suddenly Michael remembered something.

“My Kite!” he said, sitting up in bed. “I forgot all about it! Where’s my Kite?”

Mary Poppins’ head came up through the neck of her nightgown.

“Kite?” she said crossly. “Which Kite? What Kite?”

“My green-and-yellow Kite with the tassels. The one you came down on, at the end of the string.”

Mary Poppins stared at him. He could not tell if she was more astonished than angry, but she looked as if she was both.

And her voice when she spoke was worse than her look.

“Did I understand you to say that –” she repeated the words slowly, between her teeth – “that I came down from somewhere on the end of a string?”

“But you did!” faltered Michael. “Today. Out of a cloud. We saw you!”

“On the end of a string. Like a Monkey or a Spinning-Top? Me, Michael Banks?”

Mary Poppins, in her fury, seemed to have grown to twice her usual size. She hovered over him in her nightgown, huge and angry, waiting for him to reply.

He clutched the bed-clothes for support.

“Don’t say any more, Michael!” Jane whispered warningly across from her bed. But he had gone too far now to stop.

“Then – where’s my Kite—” he said recklessly. “If you didn’t come down – er, in the way I said – where’s my Kite? It’s not on the end of the string.”

“O-ho? And I am, I suppose?” she enquired with a scoffing laugh.

He saw then that it was no good going on. He could not explain. He would have to give it up.

“N-no,” he said, in a thin voice. “No, Mary Poppins.”

She turned and snapped out the electric light.

“Your manners,” she remarked tartly, “have not improved since I went away! On the end of a string, indeed! I have never been so insulted in my life. Never!”

And with a furious sweep of her arm, she turned down her bed and flounced into it, pulling the blankets right over her head.

Michael lay very quiet, still holding his bed-clothes tightly.

“She did, though, didn’t she? We saw her,” he whispered presently to Jane.

But Jane did not answer. Instead, she pointed towards the Night-Nursery door.

Michael lifted his head cautiously.

Behind the door, on a hook, hung Mary Poppins’ overcoat, its silver buttons gleaming in the glow of the nightlight. And, dangling from the pocket, were a row of paper tassels, the tassels of a green-and-yellow Kite.

They gazed at it for a long time.

Then they nodded across to each other. They knew there was nothing to be said, for there were things about Mary Poppins they would never understand. But – she was back again. That was all that mattered.

The even sound of her breathing came floating across from the camp bed. They felt peaceful and happy and complete.