Some Die Eloquent by Catherine Aird Read Free Book Online

colleague had not been greatly looking forward to her retirement. Sitting back and resting was no fine ambition compared with the satisfaction of stretching elastic young minds. Better, too, to die while still searching for her own particular Philosopher’s Stone.
    Beatrice had been too much of a realist, too, she was sure, not to have observed the inevitable advances of old age, the decline in physical activity, the slow closing-in of horizons, that went with the passing years. Her manner had got more and more dry with the passage of time, though the girls whom she taught did not seem to mind. Miss Simpson smiled wryly to herself in the privacy of her study. There was no doubt that Beatrice Wansdyke had long ago reached that point in a schoolmistress’s career when she was cherished by her pupils as much for her idiosyncrasy as her teaching.
    The Head laid the revised timetable back on her desk. No … Beatrice Wansdyke wouldn’t have minded dying in harness, her duty done, her old friend Hilda Collins her chief mourner. She’d nursed her aged parents, kept her temper and her peace over the years with the silly, snobbish, brainless creature whom her brother’s son had married, and done what she could for her dead sister’s children. Nobody could have done more for the boy, Nicholas, than Beatrice, and who, added Miss Simpson charitably, could say yet that she had failed? He might improve and settle down in time. Who could say?
    Would he, though, she wondered, come to the funeral on Saturday?
    The young man who was the subject of Miss Simpson’s thoughts was at that particular moment by no means as sure as Pauline Wansdyke had been that he would be at his aunt’s funeral. This uncertainty had nothing to do with his wish to be there. It was to do with the nature and conditions of his present employment.
    â€˜No,’ the foreman was saying flatly, ‘you can’t have next Saturday off.’
    â€˜For a funeral,’ mumbled Nicholas Petforth.
    The foreman, it transpired, had heard that one before. Many times.
    â€˜She was the only aunt I had,’ said Nicholas Petforth truthfully. That, though he didn’t tell the foreman so, was the whole trouble in the family. Aunts had been a bit on the short side. His father had had no sisters and his mother only one. This situation didn’t usually matter, but it had mattered in their family when it came to the point.
    â€˜And Saturday,’ said the foreman without emotion, ‘is the only time this season that Luston Town will be playing Newcastle United.’
    Nicholas Petforth’s mobile face looked quite blank.
    â€˜Away,’ added the foreman meaningfully. ‘You’d need the whole day to get there. And –’ he was a soured man ‘– and you’d be late back on Monday morning into the bargain.’
    â€˜Ah, football.’ Petforth rearranged his features upon the instant to project a keen interest in the game. Negotiations about his going to the funeral had reached a delicate stage and he didn’t want them spoilt by an injudicious reference on his part to spectator sport.
    â€˜Back late on Monday with a headache,’ added the foreman for good measure.
    Petforth dragged up a remark he’d overheard being made at a recent tea-break. ‘The Town team haven’t a chance without their usual centre-forward.’
    The foreman nodded. ‘Unluckiest accident in the history of the Club.’
    â€˜And just before the big match,’ agreed Petforth solemnly. He became suitably deferential. ‘Do you think if he’d been fit to play … supposing he hadn’t broken his leg’
    The foreman shook his head. ‘Not a hope, if you ask me.’
    â€˜Ah …’ Nicholas Petforth was careful not to make a specific comment. He had learnt a lot since he had come to work on the construction site. In his time there he had come to perfect an ideal response to