The Looking Glass House by Vanessa Tait Read Free Book Online Page B

revealed teeth, followed through the day. She knew that her mother had left it there for her to see – she had sent Mary into the kitchen to pick up a jam jar, when she knew Mary was squeamish about dead animals. For Mary was sentimental about animals, especially lambs. She got this sentimentality, perhaps, from the fiction she read, which did not tend to deal with meat and the getting of it but only the gambolling of lambs and their woolly white curls, as a backdrop for romance.
    Dinnertime came. Mary faced her mother across the surface of the dining-room table, darkly shining and sparse. The head of the lamb was browned and collapsed in on itself from a day spent in the oven, but still recognizably reptilian. Its eyes were misshapen with fat, which must have bubbled up from the recesses of its skull. Her mother – for there were only two of them at the table – carved up the cheek. Red grease pooled around the base of the head. Mary’s throat rose up. She felt suddenly that she was going to cry.
    ‘Mary, plenty of fat for you,’ said her mother.
    Half the head lay on her plate, a pile of potatoes steaming gently to the side.
    She stared at her mother across the table, sawing hard at a cheek. She stared back down at her own plate, at the nubby cartilage between the jigsaw of the nose bone.
    A curl of shame tugged at her stomach. She pushed her chair back. ‘I am not hungry.’
    ‘You are always hungry!’
    ‘I am not hungry,’ Mary said again.
    ‘Sit there till you have finished it. It’s been all day cooking and it’s not to waste.’
    Mary grabbed the back of her chair and scraped the legs across the stone floor. Now her mother did look up and Mary was glad to see surprise on her face.
    ‘I will not eat it. There is no point, Mother, and stop trying!’
    ‘Trying what, Mary?’
    But Mary could not say for what her mother was trying; she could not form the words out loud unless it was an admission of defeat.
    A few months after that, Mary had got her job with the Liddells, and in between times she decided that God had made her thin to test her fortitude and strengthen her in the face of people’s judgement. She knew very well that she was considered unwomanly, untrustworthy, spiteful, by anyone who cared to vouch an opinion, and they could tell all this just by passing her in the street and without ever having talked to her. But she had as much soul as them – and full as much heart!

Chapter 5
    Alice and Ina were wearing matching dresses of black and white checked organza, with two large black velvet bows at the neck and the chest; Mary had seen the same on much older girls.
    ‘What are we getting dressed up for?’ said Alice.
    ‘Your mother is having a small tea party,’ said Mary.
    ‘But she always has people to tea! Why are Ina and I to come?’
    ‘Don’t ask questions,’ said Mary again. She didn’t know the answer, or why she was to take such care preparing them. She bent over Alice’s face and scratched something off it with her fingernail.
    ‘Do not flinch. You were dirty. I don’t know how, when your face was just washed.’ Mary took hold of Alice’s chin in her hand and rubbed at her face with a licked thumb.
    ‘I don’t see how spit is cleaner than dirt,’ said Alice. ‘You said spit was dirt, I’m sure of it!’
    ‘Don’t ask questions,’ said Mary, giving Alice’s cheek three extra rubs with her thumb. Then she took the brush and swept it down over Alice’s hair. The image of Mr Wilton came into her mind. She wondered when he would come for his visit. He could drop in at any moment – she ought to tidy those books, and the beading had come loose from the overhang of the tablecloth. And her socks needed darning. And she should ask the house­maid to scrub the stain out of her sleeve.
    The longer she stayed at the Deanery, the larger the suspicion grew that it was not her life that was important to the world generally, but the children’s. She was a shadowy presence