A Cry from the Dark by Robert Barnard Read Free Book Online Page B

sense of who and where she was. Looking at her hands she found they were shaking, and she tried to hide them.
    â€œPlay it again,” she said. “Please, Hughie, play it again.”
    Hughie sorted through the records, then put the first one on again.
    This time the dancers appeared only intermittently in her brain, and she became more conscious of the shape of the music, the way the themes presented themselves, then changed and developed and intermingled. She was more conscious, too, of Hughie—of experiencing this wonderful music with someone. Of course, he knew the music and she didn’t, but she had a sense of it beginning to etch itself on her brain, the tunes and the shapes of it becoming part of her as it must be part of him.
    â€œThat was even more wonderful,” she said when it finished. And she was about to beg him to play it again when Mrs. Naismyth’s head appeared around the door.
    â€œCan’t you play something nice for your guest, Eugene? Beethoven isn’t the thing for hot summer afternoons, surely? What about John McCormack or Richard Tauber? Or ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’?”
    â€œ ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ isn’t the thing for hot summer afternoons,” said Hughie. But he said it when his mother had shut the door again.
    He put on “Fingal’s Cave” and some Chopin. When they saw his mother disappearing in the direction of Wilgandra carrying a wicker basket with something wrapped in dazzling white cloth inside, he lifted the arm of the gramophone and they played the Seventh again. Betty couldn’t remember when she had had a more thrilling day.
    During the Mendelssohn and the Chopin, which she might have liked if they had been played after something other than the Beethoven, Betty looked at the pictures around the room. Most of them were watercolors of English landscapes, alternately lush and wild (“Lake District and Northumberland,” said Hughie). Betty thought the little pictures nice but rather ordinary. The only large picture in the room was an oil, depicting a jagged, prickly, unsettled landscape.
    â€œIt’s mine,” said Hughie. “My grandad bought it for me. He said he wanted to give me something that would be valuable when I was thirty and had a family, but that my dad wouldn’t be tempted to sell before then.”
    That statement bowled Betty over. She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing, but she looked Hughie in the eye to show that she had registered it.
    Betty was an honorable girl, and she paid for her exciting afternoon by being especially nice and charming to the Naismyths over tea, which Mrs. Naismyth called “High Tea” (“You can’t call it dinner because it’s just cold, but with some quite nice things”). She offered Betty the bathroom to wash her hands, and she was glad she did, because she could use the wonderful toilet soap called Parma Violet, wrapped in a pretty little paper package, which had the most beautiful smell Betty had ever known. She knew that Phil Pollard at the shop stocked it only for Mrs. Cheveley, and had been quite disconcerted when Mrs. Naismyth bought the last bar for herself. He had had to apologize to the greater lady for having to send her a bar of Colgate instead. It had become a matter of comment in Bundaroo, as almost everything that happened there did.
    Over cold ham and cold meat pies and custard tarts (which didn’t taste any different from custard tarts made the Australian way, but Betty said it was very nice of Mrs. Naismyth to go to so much trouble for the invalid), Betty thanked the Naismyths for inviting her out and letting her listen to their wonderful gramophone records.
    â€œI’m passionate about music,” said Hughie’s mother. “With Eugene it’s more art, but I’m passionate about mu sic.”
    â€œI did like the pictures on the wall,” said Betty.
    â€œThey’re by my