Starlight by Stella Gibbons Read Free Book Online Page A

living-room door. Sunlight was streaming through the window and the distant fields, beyond the two miles of roofs, looked green as green. Peggy Pearson glanced round indifferently. Then her eye went to the farther room, where, half out of the balaclava, her two coats neatly buttoned and the Mirror spread before her, Annie looked up long enough to give a hospitalized smile. Miss Pearson returned it with a casual wave of one gloved hand and, after a glance about the room, turned away.
    Gladys’s relief at seeing Annie undemoralized took the form of a slightly more cordial attitude towards their visitor. Tea might provide an interval in which the questions could be asked, and she was also anxious to keep the rackman’s daughter – if she was his daughter – from questions about the attic. Mr Fisher wouldn’t be able to stand up to shocks of this kind as stoutly as she, Gladys Barnes, had.
    ‘How about a cup of tea?’ she asked. ‘After all those stairs?’
    ‘Not so many,’ Peggy Pearson said. ‘All right.’ She sat down in one of the armchairs and began to take off her gloves. ‘Thanks.’
    While she bustled about, Gladys began on the questions. It was no use: she had to know; and Annie and Mr Fisher must be thought of; the answers meant as fearfully much to them as they did to her.
    ‘Your mother thinking of making many changes here?’ she asked, with her back to the visitor while she elaborately hunted for biscuits which were staring up into her face.
    ‘Depends what you mean by changes.’ The voice held just a note – so slight that Gladys could wonder if it was there at all – of teasing.
    ‘Well’ – she suddenly turned to face her, with the biscuits; a bit of a girl, not even the owner, couldn’t be more than in her early twenties, she was not afraid of her, and would show it – ‘Rents, and that. She going to put them up?’ Gladys could find clear speech, when fear and desperation drove her.
    Miss Pearson shook a dark head; small, the hair centre-parted and hanging like a nymph’s about small ears. She yawned behind a muscular hand.
    ‘Not … thinking … me and my sister was wondering … not … eviction?’
    Trembling, she spilled some water as she poured it from the kettle into the pot.
    The dreaded word was out, and Gladys stood staring, dismayed. Suppose it ‘put the idea into the daughter’s head’ and she suggested it to this unknown ‘mother’ – (could she be the white-swathed ghost in the rackman’s car?) – then she, Gladys would have brought it on them all.
    ‘My mother said you aren’t to be frightened. Is that mine? Thanks.’ She held out her hand for the cup. For once robbed of words, Gladys stood staring and for a moment did not pass it to her.
    ‘Who’s frightened?’ she demanded at last. Miss Pearson shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s what she said, though. Tell them they aren’t to be frightened.’
    ‘I’m not frightened. Nothing to be frightened about, far’s I can see.’
    ‘All right. She just said I was to tell you.’ Peggy Pearson bent her head over her cup and took an indifferent sip.
    Gladys carried a cup through to Annie, whose eyes glared up at her with a hundred questions and all of them alarmed.
    She had heard every word. Of course they were frightened, all of them, she and Glad and Mr Fisher – with him you couldn’t be certain, but he must be – but it wasn’t nice to hear it said right out. Oh, if the girl would only go away and leave Glad and her to talk it over! Why did Glad have to go and offer her tea? She was always wasting tea on people. Frightened?
    ‘All right.’ Miss Pearson stood up, looking round for somewhere in the cluttered room to put down her cup. ‘I’m off. I’ll tell mother and she’ll send someone in.’
    ‘When’ll that be, then? We got to have some idea – my sister’s bedridden and I go out to work – I can’t go shifting stuff ready for the men and them not coming, I know what they are