The Lotus House by Katharine Moore Read Free Book Online

she supposed. “There’s plenty of green outside,” she’d said to her — it was different at home with nothing but pavements and houses, but here there would be always something green to look at, even in winter. She could see some sort of evergreen bush now in a corner over by the fence. She had been told that the strip of garden below her windows belonged to her. “Well, I don’t know that I want it,” she had said to Mrs Sanderson. “I’ve never had anything to do with gardening.” But on thinking it over she rather liked the idea, she could learn, she supposed. Better than having someone else poking about so close any old time, she thought. They hadn’t had a garden at home, just a square of coloured pavement in front and a yard at the back for dustbins and washing. The house was in one of those utterly characterless suburbs of London, a district which was neither going up nor down. Its streets gave away nothing about their inhabitants — far less than did the neighbouring large cemetery about its graves.
    No doubt Albert Street, where Miss Cook’s home had been, contained some happy lively families but the Cooks’ was not one of these. The dominating factor in all their lives was that Mrs Cook had married beneath her. Her father had been a country clergyman, without any private income and therefore of straitened means, but undeniably, by reason of his profession, a gentleman. She had been romantically inclined towards a young Air Force flight sub-lieutenant quartered in a nearby camp during the latter part of the first world war. But after themarriage, and Armistice Day when the uniform was laid by, there was found to have been nothing much inside it. Untrained for any civilian post and without influence and not very intelligent, Sydney Cook had failed in one job after another and had ended up driving a laundry van. Disappointed and resentful, his wife had concentrated on bringing up her two children — Henry, named for her father and Janet for her mother. She taught them to keep themselves to themselves and to despise their father. The neighbours in Albert Street where they were forced to live were potentially threatening to Mrs Cook’s self-respect and her son and daughter were strictly forbidden to play with the other children in the street. She starved her family of all indulgences so that she might send Henry and Janet to second-rate private schools where they made no real friends — the right sort in Mrs Cook’s eyes could not well be asked home, and the wrong sort were frowned upon. On the whole both children, she considered, had justified the care bestowed on them. They each qualified for respectable white-collar jobs and their mother died happy in the thought that she could now meet her Maker and her father (she had never really distinguished between them) with a clear conscience. By then Henry had made an entirely suitable marriage — his Doris was a schoolteacher and kept on her job. Janet had tried nursing but had found the paper-work difficult and had also had trouble with her back, so had given it up and entered the ranks of the Civil Service instead. She had qualified as a Post Office assistant. As for their father, he had driven his van and brought back his wages and eaten his meals, and bestowed a few furtive caresses on Janet when she was little, and gradually became invisible, and one day he had a stroke and died. His daughter could scarcely recall either his face or his voice. The voice of her mother, on the other hand, she remembered very well as an ever-admonishing wail — “do this, do that”, ormore often, “don’t do this, don’t do that”. When she actually heard it no more in the flesh, she felt at first stunned by the silence and even yet, especially whenever she sat down to rest, as she was doing at this moment, sipping her coffee and warming her toes by her now gleaming electric fire, she heard it echoing in her mind and felt it unwise to be too pleased with her new