Consequences by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online Page A

consequence was.”
    Lorna laughed. She turned to Matt. “What did you really say? Oh, I know—the ducks. You told me what the ducks were called.”
     
    And that afternoon floats into this one, conjured up in their two heads, the London park superimposed upon the Somerset hills. Matt sees her white dress, the little green bag she carried that lay beside her on the bench; he sees again for the first time the shape of her mouth, the set of her nose, her eyes. Lorna sees his hand moving to and fro across his sketch pad; she sees the glint of the sun on his hair, she sees his lips pursed in concentration. Each hears the other’s voice. They hear, too, the sharp cries of waterfowl, they see the dark green water of the lake that is ribbed and dimpled with light; each cruising bird trails a silvery V-shaped wake.
    He turns his head; he notices her.
    She smiles, uncertain.
    So does he.
    Both look away, disconcerted, and focus upon the throng of birds around them.
    “There are so many different kinds, ” Lorna says.
    “That is a tufted duck,” says Matt, pointing with his pencil. “And that’s a pochard. Those fellows are graylag geese. A shelduck there. Mallard, of course. You probably know all that.”
    “No,” she says. “None of them. Except the mallard.” There are mallard on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens; she has grown up with mallard. “What’s the big brown one?”
    “Ruddy shelduck. And here comes a pelican. I don’t really want him—he’ll bully the others out of the way.”
    She becomes bolder. “May I look?”
    He turns the sketch pad toward her. “This is just a preliminary. Note taking, as it were.”
    She says, “It’s lovely. Duck portraits.” She gazes, fascinated. She looks at him, and he at her; both return to the ducks, after rather longer.
    He tells her about wood engraving. He tells her about the Grosvenor School of Art, where he was a student under Iain Macnab. She has never heard of Iain Macnab, but she nods wisely. She tells him that she likes Matisse and Braque, that she goes to the Bond Street galleries sometimes but not all that often because…well, because it’s a bit difficult. She does not tell him very much because she feels that this young man would have little time for the life that she must lead.
    Later, in days to come, she would do so. When she came to realize that he wanted her for herself, and that it was neither here nor there to him whence she came.
     
    “He made me feel reasonable,” she told Lucas. “He made me feel as though how I wanted to be was perfectly normal. Nobody had ever done that before.”
    “What she means,” said Matt. “Is that I had no objection to milk poured straight from the bottle and I didn’t tell her what to wear. The poor girl just needed a spot of license.”
    “That room of his in Islington seemed like paradise,” said Lorna.
    “Ah, that room. The original garret—starving artists, for the use of.”
    “He had painted the walls different colors. The bookshelves were made out of planks and upturned flower pots. The table was an old rabbit hutch. I ate fish and chips for the first time.”
    “Such deprivation,” said Matt. “You poor love. It doesn’t bear thinking of. Never mind, you’ve made up for it since. The cottage is fish and chips on a grand scale. Or rather, bread and dripping and rabbit stew. Do you know, Lucas, she can skin a rabbit?”
    “Congratulations,” said Lucas. “I’m most impressed.”
    Lorna beamed at him. “I’ll show you how. You never know when it might come in useful.”
    “I’d appreciate that.” Lucas thought Lorna the most appealing and attractive girl he had ever met. It did not occur to him to envy Matt because patently a girl like Lorna was not for the likes of Lucas—she was destined for some charismatic being, for Matt indeed, and ever had been. It seemed to Lucas entirely inevitable that Lorna and Matt should have found one another, and he felt content—privileged—to