(3/13) News from Thrush Green by Miss Read Read Free Book Online Page A

hug.
    'You are nice!' he cried. 'Like my granny!' His face was alight with happiness.
    Mrs Bailey ruffled the flaxen hair, more touched than she cared to admit.
    'Then I must be nice,' she agreed. 'Come and see me whenever you like. And put up your umbrella in the porch, or you'll be washed away before you reach home.'
    She watched them splash down the path, and then caught sight of Willie Marchant, the postman, tacking erratically back and forth uphill. His black oilskins ran with water, and drops fell from the peak of his cap on to the mackintosh which covered his parcels.
    He pulled in to the kerb, propped up his bicycle amidst a shower of drops, and extracted a letter from a bundle.
    'One for you, Mrs Bailey,' he grunted gloomily. 'Marvellous, ain't it? Got twice as many this afternoon just because it's raining cats and dogs. That's life, ain't it?'
    Mrs Bailey agreed, accepting the letter and studying it with drooping spirits.
    Richard again! Now what on earth did he want?

    Richard was her sister's boy, and Winnie Bailey had to confess that he was her least favourite nephew. He had always seemed mature, self-centred, and rather smug. Perhaps if he had been blessed with brothers and sisters this unchildlike quality of self-possession would have been mitigated. As it was, as an only child, Winnie Bailey found him uncannily precocious, and at times a trifle supercilious.
    As he grew from babyhood to childhood, it was apparent that Richard would make his mark in the world. He was highly intelligent, hard-working, and as efficient on the games field as in the classroom. His school reports were glowing. His parents adored him, and he appeared to be popular with his school fellows. But secretly to his aunt, he was always 'that odd boy'.
    To Winnie and her husband he was always punctiliously polite when he saw them. But, thought Winnie, surveying the envelope in her hand, Richard had never given her a warm-hearted hug as young Jeremy had just done!
    He had obtained a First in Physics at Oxford, and spent a year or two in America collecting further honours. As he grew older, his manner had become rather more sociable, and his somewhat anaemic looks had blossomed into wiry sparseness as maturity and a passion for walking grew upon him.
    He was now a man of thirty-two, engaged upon research so divorced from the ordinary scheme of things that Winnie Bailey and her husband found themselves unable to comprehend the language, let alone the aims, of Richard's studies. They saw little of him; for his travels and lecturing commitments were extensive. Doctor Bailey heard of each academic success with coolness.
    'Nothing wrong with his head,' was his comment, 'but he's no heart.'
    Perhaps, thought Winnie, making her way to the drawing-room and her reading glasses, that is why she had never really warmed to Richard, but she kept these feelings to herself.
    The doctor slept in the afternoon, and it was almost tea-time before she could hand him Richard's letter. The rain still fell relentlessly, drumming upon the roofs of Thrush Green, and drenching the schoolchildren as they straggled from the school porch. Their cries mingled with the spatter of rain on the window panes of the quiet room, as the doctor read the letter.
    'Wants something, as usual,' he commented drily. Winnie remembered that this had been her own first unworthy reaction.
    'What do you think?'
    'It's up to you, my dear. If you feel that you would like to have him here while he is engaged on this particular work at Oxford, then go ahead. But it all means more for you to do, and I'm enough of a burden, I feel.'
    'I don't like to refuse him,' began Winnie doubtfully. 'And we've plenty of room,'
    She wandered to the window and looked out upon the rain-lashed garden. A few leaves, torn from the lime tree, hopped bird-like about the grass in the onslaught. On the flagged path, shiny with rain, a tawny dead sycamore leaf skidded about on its bent points, like some demented crab. The