The Runaway Summer by Nina Bawden Read Free Book Online Page B

turned the pram into the front garden of Harbour View and began to unfasten the baby’s harness. ‘Come along my duckie-doo. Tea time now.’
    ‘Roast baby with mint sauce,’ Simon grinned at Mary. ‘Are you coming? Tea time with the Trumpets is a very special occasion.’
    Mary giggled. Then she shook her head. ‘I can’t, just now. There’s something I’ve got to do …’
    She looked helplessly at Simon who was capering round the pram, rolling his eyes and smacking his lips. ‘Something awfully special …’ she said, speaking loudly and willing him to stop acting the fool and pay attention …’
    But he barely glanced in her direction. He was too full of himself and his silly joke. ‘We don’t say what’s cooking in our house, we say who’s cooking,’ he said, bounding up the steps in front of his grandmother and flinging the door wide. She pretended to box his ears as she passed and he doubled up, laughing. He shouted, to Mary, ‘Of course, you can always have a peanut butter sandwich, if you don’t fancy what’s on the menu!’
    Mary clenched her teeth. It was no use. When people were in this sort of mood, you could never get them to listen.
    ‘I suppose you think you’re witty,’ she said. ‘Mister Too-clever-by-half!’
    She stumbled out of the gate her eyes scalding with disappointment. It had been a mistake to think Simon would help. He was too stupid, too cockily pleased with himself and his beastly family to bother about anyone else. She had been wasting her time.
    And not only her time, she suddenly realised. The boy’s time, too! While she had been chasing around, silly enough to believe she could find someone to help her, he might have been dying! She should never have left him alone, not without looking to see where he was hurt. Suppose he had cut himself when he fell, and was bleeding to death!
    Fear grew as she ran. By the time she reached the bathing hut, she was so panic-stricken that she could hardly believe what she saw. Or, rather, what she didn’t see …
    The hut was as she had left it: the door standing open and the sun streaming in. But the boy had gone.

FOUR
‘Anything might have happened to him …’
    â€˜I WAS ONLY trying to make you laugh ,’ Simon said. He sounded reproachful and slightly out of breath. When Mary didn’t answer, he sat down beside her on the hut steps and pretended to be more puffed than he actually was, blowing out his lips and fanning himself. ‘You run pretty fast for a girl,’ he said.
    Mary gave him a withering look and stuck her nose in the air.
    Simon said, ‘I know it wasn’t a very good joke, about eating people, I mean. But it wasn’t so terribly bad, either. Not bad enough to make you run away. Unless you believed it, of course …’
    Mary knew he was expecting her to laugh. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t even smile. She just sat, hunched up and staring at the sea. Perhaps the boatman had seen what happened and come back and fetched the boy? But if he had done, wouldn’t the boat be still in sight? She stared until her eyeballs ached. The sea was as empty as the sky.
    â€˜ Did you believe it?’ Simon was peering at her, leaning so close that she had to look at him. His face was wide open with laughter and his eyes seemed to reflect the speckles of light from the sea. ‘You didn’t really think we’d eat you ?’
    â€˜Don’t be potty .’ Mary’s voice was so frantic, he stopped smiling at once.
    â€˜Why did you run away, then?’ He sounded surprised: he was the sort of boy, Mary thought, who would always expect an immediate and reasonable answer to everything. But she couldn’t give him one, not now the boy had disappeared, because he wouldn’t believe her. People never believed her, she thought miserably, and of course, quite often they were right not to, since she was always making up stories. Sometimes people said,