Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 24

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The thawed snow was running in rivulets down the gutters and dripping a cold rain from every shrub and tree. And—miracle!—where it lay on a lawn, thinned by the sun to nothing but a grey misty coverlet, a host of crocuses stood up like yellow trumpets, sounding the victory of spring. After all, it was March. There wouldn’t be much more snow—perhaps not any. The lilacs and cherries would soon be out in the park and the dandelions between the stone setts in Megson Street.

And thinking of Megson Street reminded him that Chris Hudson was living there now, and he asked himself what sort of rigmarole Chris had carried to Auntie Jessie last night. Whatever it had been, it couldn’t beat the reality for wonder: wonderful doctor, wonderful house, wonderful lady. He wanted to run, but his knee still felt a bit odd. However, his mind was running most vehemently when he turned into Megson Street.

And Aunt Jessie was a wet blanket! She met him with a dark face. He knew as soon as he saw her that something was wrong. She was dressed for fettling. When things were going well, Aunt Jessie took housekeeping easily: a flick and a rub and an occasional scrubbing-brush did all she needed. But when the world was against her she took it out of No. 6 Megson Street. She put on her uniform: a sack-cloth apron, a duster round her hair, a pair of formidable boots; and she assembled her weapons: buckets and soft-soap, hard brushes and soft brushes, carpet-sweepers, carpet-beaters, and, on the kitchen range, every pan in the house boiling away, offering its steamy incense to her mania for duty. What she did seemed not to matter. She had been known to take down every curtain in the house and give them all a glorious communal boiling in the copper, lace curtains and velvet curtains and chintz curtains pell-mell, so that they all came out marvellously inter-married and with a care-free sharing of racial traits and colours. She had been known to shift every stick of furniture from the back bedroom to the front bedroom and from the front bedroom to the back bedroom; to take up all the carpets and drench the floors beneath them with water that took weeks to evaporate; and even to reduce the mangle to a collection of cogs and wheels and rollers and miscellaneous pieces of ironmongery that littered the scullery till a mechanic was called in to put it together again.

“Oh, so you’re back!” she greeted Anthony, when he entered the sitting-room on that March morning. “Is your leg better?” Full panoplied, she was standing on a step-ladder, and glared down at him.

“Yes, Auntie, thank you.” And, diplomatically: “I’m sorry I disobeyed you and went to Ackroyd Park, but Mrs. Freilinghausen——”

“I’m not asking you about Ackroyd Park,” she said. “I’m asking you about your leg. If it’s all right, that’s all I care. And as for Mrs. Fry-whatever-it-is, I don’t want to hear about her or any other foreigners. There’s too many of ’em in Bradford, and so far as I’m concerned they can all go back where they came from.”

“But I don’t think Mrs. Freilinghausen is——”

“Will you shut up about that woman? I’ve got plenty to do to-day without listening to a lot of gab. Now, you take these pictures when I hand them down.”

This was the shape of the battle to-day. Every one of these photographs that Anthony had so intimately known all through his life were swept away like the litter of a beach before a furious tide. When the living-room walls were cleared they started on the stairs and moved up to the landing, and by the time they were finished all were gone, from Florrie Finch in her silver frame on the mantelpiece to Dick Hudson tacked on the wall in his dark niche outside the bathroom door.

As they sat down to a snack at one o’clock, Aunt Jessie said: “Thank you, lad. That’s the end of all that muck cluttering t’place up.” She looked round at the walls, oddly nude and cold and blotched all over with dark squares and oblongs where the pictures had been. “Now to-morrow,” she promised, “it’ll be a real do. I’ll get in some distemper and run t’place over. Then we’ll get some proper pictures. I’ve got a few that I saved from Pear’s Annual. There’s a very nice sad-looking dog on his master’s grave in the snow. I think that’ll do a fair treat.”

She seemed in a less aggressive mood, and Anthony wondered whether to venture again on the theme of Ackroyd Park. He decided that it would be unwise. “Must I go to school this afternoon?” he asked.

“Nay, take a rest, lad. And this evening we’re going to see Dick Hudson do his stuff.”