Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde Read Free Book Online Page B

its feet in the house because it might scratch Aunt Phyllis’s parquet floors. Which were dreadfully cold and you skidded on.
    They didn’t eat meat, another bad mark, so my sister and I had a titchy little chicken that she especially cooked for us, which was kind, I suppose, except it was quite cold and was all bloody inside the legs. But there were about fifty different sorts of vegetables like swedes and parsnips and things, and loaves of bread, dark brown, with bits of corn sticking in them. It was all pretty dreadful. After dinner Uncle Digby started to play his gramophone, but not Christmas things like Elsie and Doris Waters or Stanley Holloway, but dreadful serious music which you had to listen to. At least, he did, lying back in his iron chair with leather sides, and his eyes closed, and Aunt Phyllis sitting on a pouf working away at something she said was a rug for the fireplace. Only there wasn’t one. I mean, it was just all wonky.
    And then Uncle Digby looked at his pocket watch and said, ‘Isn’t it about time that our young guests were on their way to slumber-land? Too much excitement in one day is not a good thing, is it?’
    Too much excitement!
    Thank goodness we went home quite early the next day and our father said never again because he’d only been given two measly watered whiskies before dinner, two glasses of thin Australian wine with, and nothing after but a mug of cocoa. And our mother said it wasn’t her fault, because they were his relations, and perhaps the next time he was intent on discovering his family he’d have a thought for his own, and if he ever did it again it would be over her dead body. Which worried us a bit because she looked pretty furious – you could see in the car mirror – and we felt a bit uneasy about the dead body part, but she said shedidn’t mean it quite like that. We asked her. And she explained. Sort of. So that was the Ghastly Farnham Christmas, and we never forgot it ever.
    And when we saw Lally again the day after Boxing Day she was all smiling and cheerful and didn’t even say that she had missed us, but that they’d had a lovely time at Walnut Cottage, Twickenham, with her father and mother, and they’d had a goose and mince pies, a whole bottle of tonic wine, and Brother Harold had played ‘Come, all ye faithful!’ on his clarinet, which was Mrs Jane’s very favourite.
    So that was all right.
    We were all in the morning room making paper chains, and Lally was busy mixing a bowl of flour and water paste for us, when there was a terrific crash and we heard our mother calling out, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ When we rushed into the hall, there she was, sitting all twisty, halfway down the stairs with her hat still on and a white face. Her lips were very red.
    Lally called for our father, who was hurrying from his study, and we were sent off to ‘keep out of the way’, but before we went back to the morning room our mother said she was all right, to us, and not to be worried. But I heard her say to our father, ‘Get Henderson, darling,’ so I knew she wasn’t that all right, because Henderson was our lady doctor. And she also said she was afraid that she would ‘lose it’, which I didn’t understand but thought that perhaps ‘it’ was her shoe which was lying at the bottom of the stairs, with no heel. So I said, ‘Here it is, you haven’t lost it really. It’sbroken though,’ and Lally said be off this minute, and so we were.
    Of course, it wasn’t a very nice feeling in the morning room and the paper chains seemed a bit silly somehow. There was a lot of coming and going, and then Dr Henderson arrived in her man’s suit and tie with her bag, and hurried up the stairs. And we just sort of mucked about really, making a few, but not really caring.
    â€˜Is she going to die?’ said my sister suddenly, and frightened me.
    â€˜No. Of course