The Loud Halo by Lillian Beckwith Read Free Book Online Page A

it was indeed a glorious day and went on politely to acclaim the benefits such weather would bring in the way of increased crops and increased tourism there was an air of preoccupation about the four of them. I wondered if it had anything to do with the folder Nelly Elly had in front of her on the counter.
    â€˜Ask Miss Peckwitt what she thinks about it,’ suggested Erchy.
    â€˜Yes, well,’ said Nelly Elly hastily. ‘I was about to do that just.’
    I looked from one to the other.
    â€˜It’s like this,’ the postmistress began to explain. ‘We’ve just had a telegram through for one of the young men that’s campin’ down by the burn there—yon dark boy who wears the thick glasses and chews bubbles when be talks, you mind?’
    I nodded, puzzling as to what the difficulty might be.
    â€˜Well,’ went on Nelly Elly, with a trace of reticence, ‘it seems it’s his twenty-first birthday and the sender’s paid for one of those special birthday greetings forms for him and I haven’t one left in the place.’
    â€˜And now,’ Duncan continued for her, ‘if we give it to him on a plain form just an’ he finds out it was a fancy form that was paid for, somebody might be after puttin’ in a complaint.’
    â€˜What sort of forms have you, then?’ I asked, trying to be helpful.
    â€˜Just these,’ said Nelly Elly, handing me two forms, one of which was decorated with wedding bells while the other was gay with storks.
    â€˜One’s for weddings and the other’s supposed to be for the birth of a baby,’ she explained superfluously. ‘Those are all I have except for the plain forms.’
    â€˜I’m sayin’ she should send him tse one with tse birds on,’ suggested Hector. ‘Tse poor man might get a bit of a fright if he gets a wedding telegram right in tse middle of his holidays.’
    â€˜It depends on the message, I should think,’ I said.
    â€˜It says just “Congratulations on your twenty-first”,’ Nelly Elly read out obligingly.
    â€˜In that case I should think he’d get much more of a fright if he got a telegram with storks on it,’ I said with a levity that was not particularly well received.
    â€˜Which sort of tsings is storks?’ demanded Hector.
    â€˜Those birds,’ I told him, indicating the telegram form. ‘They’re the ones that are supposed to bring the babies.’
    â€˜Aye?’ His expression was one of polite disbelief and I realised that of course Bruach had never indulged in such pleasant euphemisms.
    â€˜Well, will one of us go down an’ ask the man which form he’d like best?’ suggested Erchy.
    â€˜Ach, no.’ She seemed doubtful. ‘Maybe if Duncan took it down on a wedding form and explained to the fellow that it’s all we have just at the moment, likely he’d take it all right?’
    â€˜Likely he would,’ we comforted, and so she wrote out the message and gave it to Duncan. Erchy and Hector accompanied him so as to witness any possible reactions.
    I gave my letters to Nelly Elly and she tried the date-stamp experimentally on her bare arm. ‘Ach!’ she ejaculated. ‘Fiona was in last night and was playin’ with my stamp.’ She adjusted it and again applied it to her arm before stamping it on to the envelopes. ‘There now,’ she said, dropping the letters into the box.
    She came round from behind the counter to close and bolt the door of the Post Office behind me. It was only three in the afternoon but she was going to hoe her potato-patch beside the road and from there she could see any potential customers. She was not to be left long undisturbed, for Bruach already had its first quota of tourists and I had left the Post Office only about a hundred yards behind me when I met a pair of sun-scorched and midge-bitten campers sauntering along the road, who demanded a