King and Joker by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

to the nursery in the first place. But he cannot touch you here at Abergeldie, my darling, not with the Princess here. And when we go back to England we will not be in the same house with him, and he has his own lady friends there, and …”
    â€œOch, but he’ll hae me in the end. He’s the snake and I’m the wee bird in the heather. He’ll hae me in the end.”
    They lie in silence for a while until Nurse Durdon realises that Catriona has begun to weep again, without sobs, a helpless welling of slow tears. She lifts her head and kisses the salt lashes and runs a comforting palm along the soft back, as she would with a hurt child. With a wriggle like that of a fresh-caught salmon in a ghillie’s rough hand Catriona throws her arms round Nurse Durdon’s shoulders and drags her down to kiss her fiercely on the mouth. She is strong, and half again Nurse Durdon’s weight. She fights the first shying buck of surprise and revulsion, forcing heads and bodies together.
    â€œLet me go! Let me go!”
    â€œNa. Na. Be kind wi’ me. Ye’re sae bonny and wee. I love ye.”
    Catriona pleads on and on in whispers until, frightened and slow, Nurse Durdon relaxes into softness where touch tingles, breath smells of sweet fruit, nerves and muscles float in happy warmth. She finds that the muttered love-words her lips are saying twang with old Essex vowels. It is as though she had laid proper-spoken, careful Nurse Durdon neatly aside, like the dress and apron folded on her chair, and was Ivy, simple Ivy, in the caressing dark.
    Mostly Miss Durdon found it unpleasant to have no feeling at all in her paralysed body, not even to know except by smell when she had wetted or soiled herself; if the electric circuits in the apparatus by the bed were to fail, then she would not feel the fall in temperature except as a slowing in the activity of her mind and a drowning into sleep. But in one way the lack of a palpable body was a gain. For sixty years, while she had work to do and a chosen life to live, she had shut Catriona McPhee out of her mind, but, now that the work was over, almost every day she allowed the time-drift to take her back and eddy her round and round that one Christmas at Abergeldie, Unhindered by any sensations from the used-up scrawn that lay on the bed, smooth-skinned limbs would form invisible round her central will; they would feel again the stiffness of tight-buttoned boots and tight-laced whalebone, the crackling glossy crispness of fresh-starched caps and aprons—so like the crackling surface of the snow that had been touched by each day’s clear but feeble sun and then restarched by each night’s ruthless frost. It needed a little more will-power to shut out the endless, surf-like drumming of London traffic from across the Palace garden, where the buses and taxis growled up Grosvenor Place to Hyde Park Corner, but it was no effort for Miss Durdon to close her eyes and see the spaniels gambolling along a glittering slope, and the Princesses sedate in their furs like little squirrels but with brilliant eyes and glowing cheeks, and Catriona—Cat—Kitten—with her wild animal look, wearing her uniform like armour against the sword-sharp glances of the men who paced along the swept paths.
    Twelve days, eleven nights. Nurse Durdon during the diamond days, cased in that armour, careful and loving, watching the girls—Vicky especially—relax and lose the edge of wariness, discover that they were now free to live in the rejoicing instant, with nothing to pay into Bignall’s iron till at the end of it. Ivy during the caressing, trembling, whispering nights.
    â€¢ • •
    That eleventh night.
    â€œOch, and I love ye.”
    â€œNow you dan’t, Kitten. You just love to be stroaked. Shh. You lie still—I mun tark wi’ you.”
    â€œI winna listen.”
    â€œShh, shh. Lie still, Kitten, still. I’m goin’ to tell