Selected Stories

She didn’t want to. She learned the verse and said it to her father when he came to sit beside her, but the next day she didn’t have to go to Miss Mortimer’s. People came in the morning. She could hear their footsteps in the hall and on the stairs; she couldn’t hear voices. It was in the afternoon that her mother died.

‘That’s not like Connie,’ Robert said.

‘No, it isn’t.’

When Teresa had been told by her children what Connie had said to them she had guessed, with sudden, bitter intuition, that everything going well was over. And she had wondered where she and Robert had gone wrong. Robert was simply bewildered.

The wedding – to be conducted by Mr Crozier as a purely family occasion - was less than three weeks off. No going away afterwards, no honeymoon because the time of year on the farm wasn’t right for that.

‘What else does Connie say?’

Teresa shook her head. She didn’t know but suspected nothing else, and was right.

‘We want to be married,’ Robert said. ‘Nothing’s going to stop that now.’

Teresa hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Nothing is,’ she said.

‘Children manage to get on. Even when they’re strangers to one another.’

Teresa didn’t say that being strangers might make things easier. She didn’t say it because she didn’t know why that should be. But Melissa, who never wept, wept often now, affected as a stranger would not have been.

The books Connie pretended to read were in the dining-room bookcases, on either side of the fireplace. They’d been her mother’s books, picked up at country-house auctions, some thrown away when the shelves became full, all of them old, belonging to another time. ‘The Man with Red Hair,’ her mother said, ‘you’ll love that.’ And Dr Bradley Remembers, and Random Harvest. Only Jamaica Inn

retained its paper jacket, yellow, without a picture. ‘And The Stars Look Down,’ her mother had said. ‘You’ll love The Stars Look Down.’

Connie took it to the roof, to the lead-covered gully she had found, wide enough to lie on between two slopes of slates. Every time she went there she wished she didn’t have to disobey her father and always took care not to spend too long there in case she was discovered. Sometimes she stood up, protected from sight by the bulk of a chimney and, far away, saw her father in the fields or Teresa among the geraniums. Sometimes Melissa and Nat were on the avenue, Nat on the carrier of Melissa’s bicycle, his small legs spread wide so that they wouldn’t catch in the spokes.

Teresa felt she had never loved Robert more; and felt that she was loved, herself, more steadfastly even than before – as if, she thought, the trouble brought such closeness. Or was there panic? she wondered in other moments; was it in panic that the depths of trust were tapped? Was it in panic that the widowed and the rejected protected what they’d been unable to protect before? She did not know the answers to her questions. It only seemed all wrong that a child’s obduracy should mock what was so fairly due.

‘Connie.’

Robert found her in the outhouse where the furniture was. She had folded aside a dust-sheet and was sitting in an armchair of which the springs had gone, which should have been thrown out years ago.

‘Connie,’ he interrupted her, for she had not heard him. Her book was Folly Bridge.

She marked her place with a finger. She smiled at him. No one considered that recently she’d turned sulky; there was no sign of that. Even when she’d told Melissa and Nat that the house was not theirs, she had apparently simply said it.

‘You’re troubled because Teresa and I are to be married, Connie.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘You didn’t seem to mind before.’

The armchair had a high back with wings, its faded red velvet badly worn in places, an embroidery of flowers stitched into where an antimacassar might be.

‘It’s very good,’ Connie said, speaking about the book she held.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you read it?’

‘If you would like me to.’

Connie nodded. And they could talk about it, she said. If he read it they could talk about it.

‘Yes, we could. You’ve always liked Teresa, Connie. You’ve always liked Melissa and Nat. It isn’t easy for us to understand.’

‘Couldn’t it stay here, the furniture you don’t want? Couldn’t we keep it here?’

‘Out here it’s a bit damp for furniture.’

‘Couldn’t we put it back then?’

‘Is that what’s worrying you, Connie? The furniture?’

‘When the books are thrown away I’ll know what every single one of them was about.’

‘But, for heaven’s sake, the books won’t be thrown away!’

‘I think they will be, really.’