Part of the Furniture by Mary Wesley Read Free Book Online

dog’s claws clicked across the floor and the wicker creaked as it obediently lay.
    Margery Murray’s voice called from upstairs, ‘Is that you, darling? I heard Bonzo bark.’
    Francis’s father answered loudly, ‘Yes, it’s me.’
    ‘You are very late, what happened?’
    ‘Old Perdue was late on duty.’
    ‘Oh! Are you coming to bed?’
    Francis’s father shouted, ‘Of course I’m coming to bed. Shan’t be a minute.’
    Juno listened as he left the kitchen, went back to the hall and into the downstairs lavatory. There was a pause, then the lavatory flushed and his steps came back to the kitchen. Next Francis’s father pushed open the door into the passage, letting in a stream of light as he hung a heavy overcoat onto a hook, brushing past Juno’s chin. As he did so he farted loudly, then he went out, closing the door.
    A beautifully mannered and courteous man, Juno had never heard him fart. Her heart beat violently. She breathed in and out several times to steady her nerves, then, reaching up among the jumble of coats and mackintoshes, she found what she was looking for.
    The coat brought back from their trip to Hungary in 1937 had been a joint present for their mothers. They had only been able to afford the one, Francis and Jonty said. Their mothers wouldn’t mind sharing, would they? So often they shared their dresses, borrowing and lending, they could do that with this coat, couldn’t they? Wasn’t it lovely? Were their mothers not pleased? They were themselves delighted by the originality of their present. It was sumptuous, rather grand, not like those awful embroidered peasant blouses everybody else had bought.
    The coat was of dark brown sheepskin leather, the fleece on the inside. It had black frogged buttons from waist to chin, a bell-like skirt. There were deep pockets and an astrakhan collar. Jonty and Francis had been tickled to death.
    Margery and Susan had not been so pleased. They concealed their feelings, of course, affected pleasure, but the coat had a nipped-in waist which did not meet round their ample figures and, unbuttoned, it looked ridiculous. And the skirt was too long, they were neither of them tall. With their sons out of earshot they murmured, ‘What a waste of their money,’ ‘It’s sort of fancy dress,’ ‘I suppose one could use it as a car rug, Susan,’ and Susan echoed, ‘… a car rug, yes.’ And one of them said, ‘Well, we can’t leave it just lying about, hang it up,’ and, hanging on the row of hooks in the passage outside the gun-room, it had gradually been worked to the back and forgotten.
    As Juno felt among the fleet of Burberrys, jackets, tweed coats and mackintoshes, they rustled and protested. One fell off its hook but she caught it as it fell. She was sweating when she eventually freed the sheepskin coat, carried it into the kitchen and put it on a chair by the suitcase, which Francis’s father had miraculously not seemed to notice.
    Breathing deeply to still her fear, Juno became aware that she was ragingly hungry. The air in the kitchen was rich with the memories of meals past. When had she last eaten? In London Aunt Violet had offered an egg, but she had refused and gulped coffee. There had been whisky in that man’s house, but she had refused soup. She would give much for that egg now, or that soup. ‘Let’s just have a little look,’ she whispered to the dog in its basket. The dog twitched its tail.
    Juno felt her way to the larder door, switched the light on briefly, taking in the content of the shelves, switched it off. Carefully she took a cold potato and ate it, then a meat rissole, rearranging its mates on their dish. Bolder now, she tore the legs off a cold pheasant, ate, gave a bit of skin to the dog, who had followed her, licked her fingers. She drank deeply from a jug of milk, then backed quietly out, closing the door. She could not give the pheasant bones to the dog, they might splinter inside him. She gripped them between her