Читать книгу High Rising - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 4

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Now, as they drove along towards High Rising, Laura became vaguely conscious that Tony was asking a question. He suffered from what his mother called a determination of words to the mouth, and nothing except sleep appeared to check his flow of valueless conversation.

‘Mother, which do you think?’

‘Think about what, darling?’

‘Oh, mother, I’ve been telling you.’

‘I’m sorry, Tony. I had to pay attention to the driving, and I didn’t quite hear. Tell me again.’

‘Well, I could get a Great Western model engine for seventeen shillings, but there is a much better L.M.S. one for twenty-five shillings. Which do you think?’

‘I should think the Great Western, if it only costs seventeen shillings and the other is twenty-five.’

‘Yes, but, mother, you don’t see. The Great Western would only pull a coal truck and one coach, but the L.M.S. would pull three coaches quite easily.’

‘Well, what about the L.M.S. then?’

‘Yes, but, mother, then I’d have an L.M.S. engine and Great Western coaches. Didn’t you know my coaches were all Great Western?’

‘I’m sorry, Tony, I’d forgotten that.’

‘Well, mother, considering I was telling you all about them I thought you would know. Mother, which would you say?’

‘Look, Tony,’ said his mother, stifling a desire to kill him, ‘there’s Mr. Reid’s shop. We shall be home in a minute.’

‘But which do you think, mother? A Great Western, to go with the coaches, or do you think an L.M.S.?’

‘Let’s have a look at the whole railway to-morrow, Tony,’ said Laura, temporising, ‘and then I’ll tell you. Here we are.’

They turned up the short drive, and found the front door open, with light shining from it. A very fat woman in a grey flannel dress, girt with a tremendous checked apron, came out to meet them.

‘Well, Stoker, here we are,’ said Laura. ‘How’s everything?’

‘Quite all right.’

‘You and Tony get the things out, and I’ll run the car into the garage. Are the doors open?’

‘Yes, and supper’s all ready. I thought you and Master Tony would have it together as you’re alone. Here, Master Tony, come and help with your trunk.’

But Tony had already secured his railway box from the back of the car and disappeared.

‘Don’t do it alone, Stoker,’ said Laura, as her maid prepared to lift Tony’s trunk into the house. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’

‘Hurt myself?’ said Stoker scornfully. ‘Not unless I was to burst, and that would be a bursting.’

Seeing her so determined, Laura put the car away. When she got back to the house she found that Tony had already unpacked most of his railway all over the drawing-room floor, flung his coat and cap on the sofa, and settled down to the construction of a permanent way.

‘No, Tony,’ said his mother firmly. ‘Put all those things back in the box and take them upstairs. You know you have your own play-room. I will not have your rubbish all over the drawing-room floor. And take your clothes off the sofa and go and wash for supper at once.’

‘But, mother, you wanted to see the railway, because of settling about the engines.’

‘I don’t want to see the railway now, or ever,’ cried Laura, goaded to exasperation, ‘at least not this evening, and not in the drawing-room. Pack it up at once.’

Unwillingly, with a delicious, pink, sulky face, Tony put his engine and lines away, piled his coat and cap on the box, and staggered from the room, with faint groans at the tyranny under which he lived.

‘No, not in the hall. Right upstairs,’ shouted his mother.

Tony reappeared at the door.

‘I only thought you wanted me to hang my coat and cap up,’ he explained in an exhausted voice.

Laura flung her own coat and hat on a chair and sat down. Darling Tony. How awful it was to be a person of one idea. The elder boys said she spoiled him. It was not so much that she deliberately gave way to Tony, she pointed out to them, as that, after bringing three of them up, she was too exhausted to do anything about the fourth. When, for about a quarter of a century you have been fighting strong young creatures with a natural bias towards dirt, untidiness and carelessness, quite unmoved by noise, looking upon loud, unmeaning quarrels and abuse as the essence of polite conversation, oblivious of all convenience and comfort but their own, your resistance weakens. Tony was no more trying than Gerald had been—oh, those first-born, how they take it out of one’s ignorance of their ways—or John, or Dick, but she was older, and less able to deal with his self-sufficient complacency. She had sent him to school at an earlier age than his brothers, partly so that he should not be an only child under petticoat government, partly, as she remarked, to break his spirit. She fondly hoped that after a term or two at school he would find his own level, and be clouted over the head by his unappreciative contemporaries. But not at all. He returned from school rather more self-centred than before, talking even more, and, if possible, less interestingly. Why the other boys hadn’t killed him, his doting mother couldn’t conceive. There seemed to be some peculiar power in youngest sons which made them resistant to all outside disapproval. When he was checked in his flow of speech, he merely took breath, waited for an opening, and began again. Laura could only hope that this tenacity of purpose would serve him in after life. It would either do that, or alienate all his friends completely.

A noise like the sweep in the next door chimney when you aren’t expecting him was heard coming down the stairs, and her hateful, adorable son burst into the room.

‘Supper’s ready, mother, and old Stokes is just going to ring the bell.’

‘Have you washed, Tony, and why haven’t you changed your boots?’

‘I couldn’t, mother. My other shoes aren’t unpacked.’

‘Well, there are some bedroom slippers upstairs. Put them on. And show me your hands.’

Tony reluctantly exhibited two grey hands, fringed with black, diversified by a few streaks of lighter colour.

‘Where did you wash, Tony?’

‘In the bathroom.’

‘Yes. One second under the tap and then wipe the dirt off on a clean towel. Off you go, and put some water in the basin.’ As her son left the room in offended silence, she continued her recommendations in a louder voice. ‘And turn your sleeves up, and use the nail brush, and when you’ve washed your hands, rinse them properly, and then clean your nails in my room if you haven’t enough sense to unpack your own bag. And don’t forget to change your boots,’ she wound up at the top of her voice. Then, with great and well-founded want of faith, she followed him upstairs, stood over him while he moodily continued his toilet, and showed a marked want of sympathy while he groaned over the knots in his bootlaces, knots which, as she unkindly pointed out, could only have been put there by himself. The result was so clean, so pink, and so inviting, that she had to hug it, to which it submitted with an excellent grace, putting its arms tight round her neck, and lifting its feet off the floor.

‘Mercy, mercy! you’re strangling me!’ she cried.

Tony pushed his hard, pink cheek firmly against hers, and let himself down.

‘Come on, Mrs. T.,’ he said, leading the way downstairs, ‘old Stokes wants us for supper.’

When they got to the dining-room, Stoker was standing before the fire with her arms folded. Laura often wished that Stoker didn’t feel it due to herself to wait at table with her massive arms bare to the elbow, but in matters affecting dress, Stoker was neither to hold nor to bind. She had entered Laura’s service soon after Gerald, the eldest, was born, with a very lukewarm reference from her former place, and nothing but her air of good-nature to recommend her. On this Laura engaged her, and never regretted it. She was an excellent cook, a devoted slave to the boys, and absolutely trustworthy. Manners she had none. Of her mistress’s housekeeping powers she had no opinion at all, and Laura had long ago given up any attempt to control her, or to interfere in the battles which raged between her and each successive house-parlourmaid in early days. After every particularly fierce battle she was accustomed to give Laura notice, which Laura always accepted, saying, ‘All right, Stoker, but you are a fool, you know!’ After two days of awful sulks the notice was always withdrawn with voluble explanations, and things would go on as before. By the time the two elder boys were at school, Stoker decided that a house-parlourmaid was an unnecessary expense, and from that moment she reigned supreme from top to bottom of the house. For Laura’s husband, that ineffectual and unlamented gentleman, she had a kind contempt, which took the outward form of always alluding to him in his lifetime as ‘the boys’ father’, which didn’t prevent her going to his funeral in widow’s weeds which left Laura in the shade, and having hysterics on the way home. Whether she was Miss or Mrs. Laura had never dared to ask her. The London tradesmen, with whom she liked to exchange loud and pointless badinage at the kitchen window, called her Miss, until a fateful day when the Milk, so she told Laura, had called her Miss once too often. What she meant Laura never dared to inquire, but after her next Sunday out, Stoker appeared with a broad band of silver-gilt on the third finger of her left hand, bearing in embossed lettering the mystic inscription, ‘Bethel I’ll raise.’ Gradually she let it be known that the ring had belonged to her mother, an old lady of well-known piety, support of a peculiar sect, but when Laura inquired whether the ring embodied an allusion to the chapel she favoured, Stoker darkly replied that her mother was long since dead and no one knew what the Lord had seen fit to do with her, but that’s what the Milk would get if he tried it on again. She then took to herself the prefix Mrs., under the shelter of which title she felt at liberty to go to more outrageous verbal lengths than ever, especially with the Milk. By good fortune she took a liking to Miss Todd, with whom she commiserated loudly on her unmarried state, bringing to her notice the various bachelors of the neighbourhood, none of whom Miss Todd had the slightest wish to marry.

‘Now, how about Dr. Ford, miss?’ she would say, as if she were recommending a cut from a good joint. ‘You won’t do much better, and neither of you are getting any younger, as they say. Or Mr. Knox over at Low Rising? He’s been a widower these four years now, and there’s Miss Sibyl needs someone to look after her, for we all know her poor mother wasn’t much to boast of, lying ill on her back till death her did part. Think of it, miss.’

Miss Todd thanked Stoker warmly, but didn’t feel called upon to think of it.

‘Soup’s hot now,’ said Stoker, getting her massive form sideways through the door to the kitchen; ‘eat it while I see to the fish.’

‘Oh, Stokes, no meat to-night?’ asked Tony.

‘No, Master Tony. Young blood like yours doesn’t need no heating at night. There’s fried fish, and I’ve done some chips, too.’

‘Chips! Good for you, Stokes,’ cried Tony, letting the soup slide backwards out of his spoon in his rapture.

‘Mrs. Birkett was quite right when she called you a foul child,’ said Laura dispassionately. ‘Wipe that soup off your waistcoat, Tony. No, not with the tablecloth. What’s a table napkin for?’

Tony, like most small boys, had a curious antipathy to unfolding his table napkin, which remained in its pristine folds all through the week, merely getting greyer and more smeared on the outside.

When Stoker had removed the soup plates and brought in the fish and fried potatoes, she settled herself in an easy attitude against the kitchen door, nursing her elbows, and began to impart information.

‘Just as well I come down a week before you,’ she began. ‘There’s always more than enough to do. I tell you, when I saw the way things were, I felt my back open and shut with the nerves.’

‘I’m very sorry, Stoker,’ said Laura. ‘That must have been awful. But hadn’t you Mr. Knox’s Annie’s sister to help you? I told you to get her if you needed help.’

‘Annie’s sister!’ exclaimed Stoker, with withering contempt. After a dramatic pause she added, ‘What that one is you wouldn’t know if I was to tell you.’

‘Well, what’s wrong? I thought you liked her.’

‘There’s many a slip between does and did,’ was Stoker’s enigmatic reply. ‘When a girl spends half the morning talking to the young fellow that brings the wood, and sweeps the dirt under the drawing-room carpet, where it may be, for all she cares, to the present day, for I said to her, “There it stays, to show the mistress the way you work”—there’s no talk of liking.’

‘That’s very sad, Stoker. Suppose you sweep it up, and we needn’t have the girl again.’

‘I did sweep it up. I wasn’t going to have the house left like a dust-bin for you to see. But I told Mr. Knox’s Annie what I thought of the girl, and she’ll sort her. And what do you think of the news at Low Rising?’

‘What news, Stoker?’ asked Laura, who sometimes vainly hoped that by using Stoker’s name rather often she might gently hint to her that some form of address would occasionally be acceptable—even Mrs. Morland, if Stoker’s soul were above ma’am or mum. But Stoker had her own code of etiquette, and though she freely gave Laura’s friends their titles, and never omitted the word ‘master’ when speaking to, or of, one of the boys, she chose to express her deep devotion and pitying condescension to her mistress by never addressing her otherwise than as ‘you’.

‘They’ve got a new girl.’

‘Is Annie leaving, then?’

‘Annie? No.’ On this word, long drawn out, she disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a fresh supply of potatoes which she placed before Tony, and continued:

‘Annie, she wouldn’t go. No; sectary.’

‘Oh, a new secretary?’

‘That’s right. Miss James, it seems, was took suddenly.’

‘Do you mean she died?’

‘Died? No. There was trouble in her family, and she had to leave, beginning of October that was, and Mr. Knox got a new girl, Miss Una Grey she calls herself,’ said Stoker, as if the secretary were indulging in a sinful alias.

‘Well, I hope she has settled down. It must have been very annoying for Mr. Knox. Tony, if you must eat potatoes in your fingers, which I don’t really mind, at least don’t wipe your hands down that unlucky suit. Go into the kitchen and rinse them. You can take away, Stoker.’

When Stoker came back, followed by Tony, who was gloatingly bearing a chocolate pudding, she took up her former position and went on with her news.

‘You may well ask me,’ she announced, though Laura had shown no intention of asking anything of the sort, ‘about Miss Grey. Mr. Knox’s Annie says there’ll be more than one change in the family before long.’

‘What do you mean, Stoker?’

‘Sectaries have been known to marry their Masters before now, and Annie says she pities poor Miss Sibyl if such were to be, and she will hand in her notice the very day the banns are put up.’

‘Rubbish, Stoker. You and Annie have been gossiping as usual. You have tried to marry poor Mr. Knox to every secretary he has had, and to Miss Sibyl’s governesses, and to Mrs. Knox’s nurse. You are just as bad as Annie’s sister. Bring me my coffee in the drawing-room now. I’m tired to death.’

Taking no notice of Stoker’s sibylline mutterings, she escaped, leaving Tony to give Stoker a highly-coloured account of his doings at school, and how the masters went in terror of his mordant tongue.

In the drawing-room she found a pile of letters waiting. Most of them were business, or proofs, which could wait till to-morrow, but presently she came upon one in her publisher’s well-known handwriting. If he had taken the trouble to write himself, it meant he had something personal to say. It turned out to be a suggestion that he should come down on Saturday for the day, to talk over a possible cheap re-issue of some of her books.

Laura looked up at the shelf of her novels, with Adrian Coates’s name on their backs. She had been very lucky, she thought, to fall into the hands of so agreeable and helpful a publisher. Soon after she first decided that she must try to earn money by writing, she had met him at dinner, and inquired earnestly how many thousand words one needed to make a novel. Adrian was charmed, and rather touched, by this delightfully vague widow with four sons. He had not been long in business and was anxiously looking out for good writers whom he might add to his list, so he asked her if she would have lunch with him.

‘If you are really writing a book I would very much like to see it when it is ready,’ he said.

‘You mightn’t like it,’ said Laura, in her deep voice. ‘It’s not high-brow. I’ve just got to work, that’s all. You see my husband was nothing but an expense to me while he was alive, and naturally he is no help to me now he’s dead, though, of course, less expensive, so I thought if I could write some rather good bad books, it would help with the boys’ education.’

‘Good bad books?’

‘Yes. Not very good books, you know, but good of a second-rate kind. That’s all I could do,’ she said gravely.

So in time her first story went to Adrian, who recognising in it a touch of good badness almost amounting to genius, gave her a contract for two more. Her novels had been steadily successful, and she and Adrian had had a very agreeable partnership over them. She looked upon him as a contemporary of her eldest son—after all, he was only ten years older—while he found it difficult to remember that she was almost old enough to be his mother. Owing to honest dealings on one side and conscientious hard work on the other, their relations had always been very friendly. Adrian’s only complaint about Laura was that she was too unconscious of her own worth, and would belittle herself as a hack writer of rubbish when she was turning out good, workmanlike stuff. Laura’s only complaint against Adrian was that he didn’t read her letters carefully enough, which may have been true, though to a busy man they were at times infuriating, as the business parts were sandwiched in among accounts of the boys’ progress, and general reflections on the conduct of life.

Of course Adrian should come down for Saturday, and she wrote a post card to that effect. Stoker came in with the coffee.

‘I want this to go to-night, Stoker. Tony can run to the pillar-box with it. What’s he doing?’

‘Helping wash up.’

‘Oh, all right. But send him up to bed soon, Stoker, it’s getting late. What’s the news of Mrs. Todd?’

‘Miss Todd took her away to Bournemouth. She rang up to-day to say her poor mother was feeling the benefit and she’d be back on Saturday and you wasn’t to bother about any business letters till she came. And there’s a telephone message from Mr. Knox. Miss Sibyl and him is coming over this evening to see you.’

‘Oh, Stoker, why didn’t you tell me before? Here I am all dirty and untidy.’

‘You’ll do all right,’ said Stoker robustly. ‘If Mr. Knox wants to see you he can take it or leave it. That’s them now. I hear the car.’

Taking the card for the post, Stoker went out and opened the front door. A pretty, dark girl of about twenty, with an ill-assured manner got out of the car.

‘Good evening, miss,’ said Stoker. ‘Where’s Mr. Knox? He said on the telephone you was both coming.’

‘I know, Stoker, but he found he couldn’t. Is Mrs. Morland there?’

‘Well, that is a pity,’ said the hospitable Stoker. ‘It’s always nice to have a gentleman. Mrs. Morland will be disappointed.’ Flinging open the drawing-room door, she announced, ‘Here’s Miss Sibyl, but you needn’t worry about not being dressed. Mr. Knox isn’t coming.’

‘Dear Sibyl, how nice of you to come,’ said Laura reaching out a hand. ‘Come near the fire. What’s the matter with your father?’

‘Oh, nothing. At least I didn’t think it was much, but he had a little cold, and Miss Grey thought he had better stay in. He’s near the end of a book, you know, and Miss Grey’s awfully keen on it, and she’s afraid he’ll get worse and not be able to get on with it. He sent his love and hoped you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Dear me, of course not. I’m really rather glad, because I’m all dirty and untidy. What have you been doing?’

‘Oh, nothing much.’

‘Not typing?’

‘No, not much. You see Miss Grey’s frightfully good at it, and she thinks it’s better if only one of us does it. And her typing is really much better than mine.’

‘And what about your own work? Have you been writing anything?’

Sibyl blushed painfully. ‘I wish you wouldn’t, Mrs. Morland. You’re so clever, and I know I can’t ever do anything half as good as yours, and it makes me feel so mortified.’

Laura laughed. ‘Good heavens, child. I’m a pot-boiler, that’s all. I look to you to do the Risings real credit, to rescue them from the disgrace of low-brow novels that I’ve brought upon them. High Rising’s pretty low at present. You must follow your father’s footsteps and make Low Rising a star.’

‘Coffee for you, miss,’ said Stoker, bursting in with a tray. ‘Better than what your Annie makes.’

‘Thank you, Stoker. But we’re having much better coffee now. Miss Grey makes it herself in a kind of machine, and daddy likes it very much. But I’m afraid Annie isn’t pleased.’

‘Listen to me, miss,’ said Stoker impressively, wrapping her arms up in her apron as she spoke, ‘a young lady like you doesn’t know what coffee made in the dining-room means. Extra trays to carry and twice the washing up. You shouldn’t let her do it.’

‘But I can’t help it, Stoker. I did tell Miss Grey that I thought Annie would be hurt, but she laughed. I don’t think she quite understands Annie.’

‘Send Tony to bed now,’ interrupted Laura, who began to fear that Stoker would favour them with her company indefinitely, ‘and tell him I’ll come up to see him in half an hour, and he must have a bath, whether he wants it or not. And now, Sibyl,’ she continued, as Stoker left the room with a burst of song, ‘what is all this about Miss Grey? Stoker is full of some gossip or other. She and your Annie are the death of all our reputations.’

‘Well, there’s nothing much really. Miss James’s sister got ill about the beginning of October and she had to go, so daddy advertised and of course he got shoals of answers. He didn’t know which to take, so he made me choose one, and I thought Una Grey sounded a nice name, and she wasn’t too old, so we asked her to come on approval for a week, and daddy and I liked her very much, or we shouldn’t have kept her.’

‘You don’t like her so much now, then?’

‘No, not really.’

‘What’s the matter? Isn’t she competent?’

‘Oh, yes, she’s terribly competent and daddy likes her awfully. I’m the one that doesn’t care for her so much. You see, she’s very clever, and I feel so small and unhelpful beside her—I expect it’s really a horrid kind of jealousy.’

‘But what is there to be jealous of?’

‘Nothing really, I suppose. Only I feel less and less use to daddy. I’m not very good at housekeeping, or typing, and Miss Grey is so good at both, so there doesn’t seem to be anything for me to do. But daddy is terribly pleased with her, so I suppose it’s all right. Only Annie and cook and I have conversations sometimes when she is shut up with daddy, and we wish we had Miss James again.’

‘But she isn’t unkind to you, is she?’ asked Laura, sticking a few hairpins more firmly into her head, as if in preparation for an onslaught on Miss Grey.

‘Oh, no, she’s very kind and asked me to call her Una, but I couldn’t quite do it, which is awkward, especially as she has called me Miss Knox ever since. She means to be very nice, I know, and encourage me; but she frightens me, Mrs. Morland. She is always talking about how I must go and live in London, and meet lots of people, to help my writing, and she will make daddy and me go out to dinner when we would much rather not, because she says she can’t bear us to stay in on her account. And then daddy writes to whoever it is and says may he bring his secretary, and people don’t want an extra woman, but they don’t like to say no. And if she isn’t asked out with us, Mrs. Morland, an awful thing happens. Her face goes scarlet, and she gets quite ill and goes to bed for a day or two. Of course, it is lovely to have her upstairs and have daddy to myself again, but Annie does so hate taking her meals up, and then I have to do it, and she won’t speak to me. Then, when she comes down, daddy is so sorry for her that he gives in more than ever. And the awful thing is that he won’t think of dismissing her, ever, because she has no home to go to and only distant relations, who despise her for being a secretary.’

Laura listened to this outburst with some perplexity. She had looked upon Sibyl as a kind of daughter since Mrs. Knox died, and was prepared to fight for Sibyl’s rights. But girls did exaggerate, and a girl like Sibyl, who had always lived at home with an adoring father, might easily make too much of Miss Grey’s attitude. Possibly it might be quite a good thing for Sibyl to be in town for a bit and learn to stand on her own feet and make her own friends. However, she put aside Sibyl’s speech for further consideration, resolved to judge for herself, and to get the opinion of Anne Todd, whose views were always worth considering. So she led the talk into safer channels, and delighted Sibyl by telling her some of the plot of the book she was working on. Sibyl, before she went, invited Tony to come and help with a little rough shooting on the following day and come back to Low Rising for tea, where Laura might meet him. Laura jumped inwardly at the prospect of seeing Miss Grey, and begged Sibyl not to let Tony kill himself, or, as a second thought, anyone else. Sibyl promised to put him in charge of the gardener, who would keep him out of mischief. Then she got into her car, and drove away.

Laura was genuinely puzzled and a little upset by this new and disturbing element in the quiet life of the two Risings, but a yell from Tony sent Miss Grey out of her head.

‘What’s the matter?’ she shouted up the stairs.

There was dead silence, so she went up. Tony was sitting in a bath full of boiling water, with all the soaps, sponges, nailbrushes, loofahs and toothbrushes floating on the surface.

‘Did you hear me, mother?’ he inquired as she came in. ‘I was being the South Wales Express going into the Severn Tunnel. This is the Severn, with all the boats on it. Now, watch.’

Uttering another piercing shriek, he plunged under the water, there making a loud gurgling which Laura took to be the noise of an engine going through a tunnel.

‘Come out at once, Tony, and don’t splash the water about. You’ve been far too long already. Stoker has enough to do without your flooding the bathroom.’

Tony emerged, his hair dripping down his face, and plunged into the bath-towel which Laura was holding for him.

‘Thank heaven you have washed that horrible stuff off your hair,’ she remarked.

‘Mother, did you see me go under the water? Did you hear the whistle? Mother, do you think old Stokes heard me?’

‘Get all those things out of the bath, and clean your teeth, and come along to bed,’ said Laura. ‘Sibyl has asked you to go over for some shooting to-morrow and have tea there, and you can’t go if you dawdle.’

Tony, by now in what he called his pyjama-legs, executed a dance of joy, while his mother picked up his clothes and examined them. The result was not satisfactory.

‘Right through the seats again,’ she said hopelessly. ‘And a hole in the middle of your jersey, as usual. Why on earth do little boys keep spikes in the middle of their stomachs? I can’t account for it any other way. And why matron can’t darn your stockings with a wool that matches, I can’t think. I suppose I’ll have to get Miss Todd to re-foot them all before you go back.’

‘Mother,’ began Tony, who had abstracted his mind during this jeremiad, ‘it’s a good thing we don’t live on a planet where there isn’t any air, or we couldn’t breathe at all. We couldn’t move either. Even a rocket car couldn’t move. I wonder how we would manage. I suppose we’d have to wear gas masks and breathe oxygen. Mother, do you know what oxygen is?’

‘No, I don’t, and I don’t care,’ cried Laura, pushing Tony into his bedroom.

‘Oh, mother, don’t you know that? We did an experiment about it in the lab. last week. Mother, how do you think people could get on without oxygen?’

‘Get into bed, Tony, and stop gabbling.’

‘I thought you liked me to fold my clothes,’ said Tony sanctimoniously. ‘Matron goes off pop if we don’t fold them at school.’

‘Leave them alone and Get Into Bed,’ shouted Laura.

Tony turned head over heels down the bed and dashed under cover, immediately poking up an anxious face to inquire, ‘Where’s Neddy?’

‘I’ll get him,’ said Laura, who was sorting out Tony’s ragamuffin attire. Opening a drawer, she extracted a stuffed donkey with a red flannel saddle, and threw him across to Tony. After rummaging a little more, she pulled out a foxcub’s tail, mounted on a handle, with the inscription, ‘Risings Hunt. November, 1828,’ which was a mistake of a century on the part of the local naturalist, but Laura had never liked to have it altered. On this cub Tony had been blooded, at the instigation of Gerald and John. He hadn’t enjoyed the ceremony at all, but another and smaller boy had been frightened and cried, which had made Tony boast quite unbearably of his superior pluck and true-blue-ness.

‘And here’s Foxy,’ said Laura, throwing it.

Tony caught them both with a scream of joy and arranged them carefully, one on each side.

‘You great baby,’ said his doting mother.

‘But Neddy and Foxy like it, mother. And really Neddy is quite a trouble, because he takes up so much room he nearly knocks me out of bed.’

‘Put him on the table, then.’

‘Oh, mother, he’d be cold. Mother, how would you like it if you were put on a table all night?’

‘The contingency would never occur,’ said Laura, and hugged her son tightly. Just as she was going out of the room, Tony’s voice was raised.

‘Mother.’

‘Well, what is it?’

‘Oh, mother, do you know the Cheltenham Flier does over seventy, part of the way. I should think it could do over eighty easily. Mother, did you ever go in the Cheltenham Flier? Mother—’

Laura shut the door and reeled downstairs. Four weeks of this to come. Nearer five than four. Thank heaven it was country, where he would be out all day, and would certainly amuse himself. Oh, the exhaustingness of the healthy young! Laura had once offered to edit a book called Why I Hate my Children, but though Adrian Coates had offered her every encouragement, and every mother of her acquaintance had offered to contribute, it had never taken shape. Perhaps, she thought, as she stood by Tony’s bed an hour later, they wouldn’t be so nice if they weren’t so hateful.

There lay her demon son, in abandoned repose. His cheeks so cool and firm in the day, had turned to softest rose-petal jelly, and looked as if they might melt upon the pillow. His mouth was fit for poets to sing. His hands—spotlessly clean for a brief space—still had dimples where later bony knuckles would be. Foxy was pressed to his heart, while Neddy, taking, as Tony had predicted, the middle of the bed, had pushed his master half over the edge.

Laura picked up the heavy, deeply unconscious body, and laid it back in the middle of the bed. Neddy she put revengefully on the table. Then she tucked the bedclothes in, kissed her adorable hateful child, who never stirred, and turning out the light, left the room.