Starlight by Stella Gibbons Read Free Book Online Page B

…’
    ‘These’ll come. They’re people my father knows. Some time early next week. You can move into those rooms downstairs, if you like, while they’re here, my mother said.’
    Gladys stared. High-handed, but after all the girl’s mother did own the place. And was anything going to be done about those two rooms on the ground floor with their ceilings all down? Empty, they’d been, for years.
    ‘She said he’d bought it,’ she muttered.
    ‘Who said?’ Miss Pearson was pulling on the gloves that matched her suède coat.
    ‘Jean, she had the flat below us, only moved out this morning, she said she told her –’
    ‘Who told who? I can’t bother with all this … my father bought the place and he’s given it to my mother and she’s coming to live here and someone’s coming in to do it up and she told me to tell you all you aren’t to be frightened. That’s absolutely all I know. I’ve got to go now. ’Bye.’ She waved, without looking at her, towards Annie.
    ‘Coming to live ’ere?’ Gladys repeated eagerly, leading the way across the landing where the tap lacking a washer dripped musically. ‘P’raps the men’ll see to that tap then?’
    ‘I dare say. Or someone will. My mother doesn’t like irritating noises, her nerves are bad.’
    Gladys, inwardly raging to get back and discuss every detail of what had been said with her sister, now took a reckless plunge.
    ‘There’s a very old gentleman, educated he is, name of Fisher, well, it isn’t always he changes it every month, I mean, that’s his real name but he makes believe, he can do for himself, lives up in the attic, earns a bit showing off fancy dolls, do you think she’d let him stay on? He’s not really what you’d call mental.’
    They were on the doorstep now and the door stood open to the bright November morning. This time Peggy Pearson laughed, shortly but outright, showing teeth small, white, and pointed as those of a young fox.
    ‘I expect so. She likes what you’d call mental people. ’Bye!’
    She walked away, leaving Gladys staring after her.

6
     
    The Reverend Gerald Corliss associated the season of Advent with the scent of violets.
    This was the hour before the dawn of the Church’s year, when the end of the nave was in darkness by four o’clock, and Evensong was said under a night sky. To him, it always seemed darker, more patient, and more a time of waiting than the three days following Good Friday.
    Born and brought up in the country, he knew well that English violets did not appear until the spring, but the flowers that haunted this season for him were not country ones; they belonged to London, and were sold in bunches made up with an alien leaf; sometimes at street corners, but most often in expensive flower-shops, and their faint scent was blent with that of the London smoke.
    He thought of this idea about violets as a weakness in himself, and faced it resignedly. Nevertheless, he always bought a bunch of violets in the first week in December and put them in his room.
    It was all petty; the association, the tiny self-indulgence, and the introspection. He did not need telling that, in ‘a world bursting with misery’, he should have felt ashamed; and he was ashamed. He had read somewhere that among the crosses bestowed by God temperament might be included, and the clerical essayist had added, almost casually, that it could be one of the heaviest.
    There was no doubt about the nature of Father Gerald Corliss’s cross, and it weighed several ton.
     
    A coffee-party was always held in the church hall at Saint James’s after Evensong in the first week in December. The Vicar, whose cross was not in his temperament, felt that the month was a gloomy one; and with the exhausting business of commercialized Christmas only three weeks away, to say nothing of the gloomier aspects of the Advent message looming over his congregation (although few of them took that seriously), he did feel that a little social