The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont Read Free Book Online

to one full of grandchildren.
    My father stamped in, breaking the merriment as he sometimes did, carrying his heavy day with him. ‘That Jones boy was hanging about outside waiting for you,’ he said to Colleen.
    She put her book aside and lifted her heavy hair to knot it on top of her head. Years later I’d read a poem by William Butler Yeats and chafed at the lines, ‘ only God, my dear, / Could love you for yourself alone / And not your yellow hair. ’ It brought my sister to mind, and how boys who didn’t know a thing about her loved her in an instant. My mother worked a few days a week at a haberdasher’s, Buttons and Bits. One time Colleen covered a shift for her, and the owner forbade her from ever working there again because she drew too many boys, leaning on the counter with no interest in buying anything. Colleen’s hair was like a siren, screaming out to the city streets, drawing attention, and not from God. I hated that poem.
    Every night when we sisters settled into our beds in the room we shared, Colleen would tell us stories, sometimes recounting the book she was reading and sometimes making up her own. There were mornings all four of us woke with a stoop in our back, our stomachs aching from having laughed so hard the night before. I would have loved Colleen if she had no hair at all. So would Megs and Louisa. And my mother.
    ‘That Jones boy can wait all he likes,’ Colleen said. ‘I never said I’d see him.’
    ‘There must be something you do,’ my father said, shaking off his coat. ‘To lead those blokes on.’
    Colleen let out a quick, outraged laugh. Just yesterday Derek Jones and two other boys had dogged Colleen and me on our way to the Whitechapel Library. ‘You’re spoiling our walk,’ she’d finally told them, sharp and firm, and they drifted off with longing glances over their shoulders. Colleen wore a knitted woollen hat and pulled it down over her ears. Much as she liked to disappear into books, when she returned to the world, she was direct and no nonsense. ‘Lucky me with such admirers, eh, Nan?’ she’d said.
    ‘Hush with that,’ Mum said to our father. ‘She does nothing but live in the same world with them. Do you want me shaving her head? Leave the girl be.’
    Colleen snapped up her book and disappeared into our room while the rest of us worked on dinner. Mum patted my back because I was nearest, and it always soothed her to touch one of her children. Perhaps she was thinking what she must have already known. Sometimes living in the same world with them was all it took.

    The next summer, Finbarr came to the farm for tennis almost every night. He trained Alby to lie absolutely still, no matter what happened. I think Alby would have expended less energy running ten miles than it took to fight his every instinct and stay frozen in the face of that bouncing tennis ball. But stay frozen he did, never jumping to his feet until Finbarr gave him the command.
    ‘Ready. Ball,’ Finbarr would say, and finally the dog could catapult into the air.
    In the autumn, back home at my family’s dinner table in London, I listed the tricks Alby could do.
    ‘Finbarr tells him to sidestep one way and then another. He tells him to stand still until he gets the command to move.’
    ‘Not so impressive for that breed,’ my father said, from the looks of him remembering the dogs of his youth.
    ‘I’m not done. Alby can do all the usual tricks – sit, sit pretty, cover. Uncle Jack says he’s the best herding dog he’s ever seen.’ This would mean he’d be the best my father ever saw. ‘And Finbarr taught him to catch a football and balance it on his nose. He taught him to jump on a horse’s back and sit pretty.’
    ‘You make it sound as if Finbarr’s the clever one,’ said Megs. ‘I’d say it’s the dog.’
    ‘They’re both clever.’ But I knew Finbarr could do the same with any dog. He had a gift.
    ‘Perhaps I’ll go next summer, too,’ Megs said.
    ‘Give your