Kitabı oku: «A Simple Life», sayfa 2
She thought back involuntarily and then stopped herself, pinching off the flow of recollection.
The guests arrived, headed by the Berkmanns. Max Berkmann was wearing French workman’s overalls. Mr Dershowitz was missing because he was in hospital, and the four graduate students had moved on. Dinah had never really got to know the good-looking one any better than to exchange affable nods across the street.
‘Bit of a failure,’ she had joked to Nancy.
‘Matt’s better-looking anyway, and he’s got full tenure.’
It was a good party. The moon hung above the trees, heavy and orange-tinged, and the children’s candle lanterns glowed amongst the dry leaves. The Kendrick Street neighbours were pleased to see each other after the long vacation and there was plenty of news to exchange.
Jack and Merlin went off with Tim Kerrigan. Dinah caught a glimpse of them in one of the bedrooms, sitting in a line with legs stuck out in front of them and chins sunk on their chests, watching a video. Just lately, her children had stopped making unfavourable comparisons between Franklin and home. They seemed to have stopped thinking about England altogether.
Dinah flitted from group to group, laughing and talking. She had drunk two quick glasses of wine in the kitchen with Nancy. Two or three people told her she was looking well, that her summer tan suited her. She listened to Max Berkmann describing the idyllic year in France.
‘I tell you, we would have stayed right there in Mâcon if there was any way I could have fixed it.’
‘Here, Dinah.’ George Kuznik was partial to Dinah, and he shifted to make a place beside him on the garden seat. The darkness was warm and scented and within it the lanterns made oval patches of fuzzy golden light.
George’s voice rumbled in her ear. ‘A cold beer and you. What more could a guy ask for? You know, I always think this is the best time of year. After the heat, waiting for the fall, before the cold comes.’
Talking without listening to herself, Dinah said something about not much looking forward to another New England winter. She was overtaken by a sense that this place was still utterly strange to her, and by the mysteriousness of the people around her, even her husband. The landmarks of habit and logic and certainty were dissolving. She was on the outside of all this talk, detached from the physical world even with George Kuznik’s bulk pressing against her thigh, and she was losing her ability to decode the messages that were flashed to her.
She was afraid they would notice; everyone would notice her singularity.
With a beat of panic Dinah wondered if she might be going mad.
She turned to George suddenly and took hold of his hand. Anchoring herself. His palm was moist, surprisingly soft. George’s domed forehead reflected the lantern overhead. He leaned forward and for a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. A bubble of laughter forced itself upwards but George only asked solemnly, blinking a little.
‘You all right, Dinah?’
The garden began to coalesce again around her. The fearful dislocation was passing. Dinah did laugh now, and the laughter eased her throat and slackened her face. She released George’s hand and set it back in his lap, registering the flicker of his disappointment. Beyond him she saw a big man emerge from the house and stand on the porch steps, hands on hips, his gaze panning across the garden.
‘How much have I had to drink?’ she smiled.
‘Aw, and I thought it was my charm that was intoxicating.’
Dinah kissed George’s cheek then leaned back, separating herself from him. ‘You’re a good neighbour,’ she said truthfully. They both drank, allowing the tiny awkwardness to pass.
‘Who’s that?’ She indicated the big man who was now strolling between the groups of people. His height and commanding manner gave him a seigneurial air.
‘A friend of Max’s, Todd must have asked him over. Name’s Ed Parkes. Have you heard of him? He writes thrillers. Pleased with himself, but a decent sort of guy. His wife’s British, now I come to think of it.’
Later in the evening when the party shifted indoors and the children began to reappear and rummage for leftover food, Dinah met the Parkeses. Ed had a huge handshake, and his face creased into affable crinkles while his shrewd, light-blue eyes examined her. He told her that he came originally from Detroit but he and his wife had a house in the woods outside Franklin, and one in London where they spent part of the year, and a chalet in Zermatt. He talked easily, amusingly, but in the slightly overbearing way of a man accustomed to being the focus of attention. At last, but with a suggestion that it was out of good manners rather than real interest, he turned the conversation to Dinah.
‘I don’t have a job here,’ she told him. ‘I used to be in advertising, in London.’
‘Doing hearth and home for a while?’ He was appraising her.
‘That’s right.’ She was grateful for his way of putting it.
Your husband’s the scientist, isn’t he? I must have a talk with him. I can always use special expertise.’
Dinah was amused at the idea of Matt’s work being good for nothing more than extra colour in one of Ed Parkes’s airport blockbusters. She bit the corner of her lip, and then realised that Ed had followed her thoughts as plainly as if she had spoken them aloud. He was grinning down at her.
‘You think I’m full of shit?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Not much. Hey, I want you to meet Sandra. Here she is. Sandy, this is Dinah Steward. You’ll like each other, and not just because you talk the same language.’
Sandra Parkes was in her mid to late forties, tall and pale and thin, and very beautiful. She had the kind of flawless finely featured face that make-up artists and cameras fall in love with. Dinah didn’t dare to squeeze her hand when she took it in case the pale skin bruised.
‘What’s he said?’ Sandra asked.
‘Nothing you can’t contradict if you wish, honey.’ Ed sauntered away. His made-to-measure shirt sat comfortably across his massive shoulders.
‘Nothing worth contradicting,’ Dinah told the woman coolly. Sandra was wearing a complicated outfit of layers of gossamer fine wool and chiffon and slippery satin. Dinah had often wondered, as she flicked through the fashion magazines, what colour greige might be. It came to her now that this was it. It was so subtle and refined that it made her cheery yellow linen look by contrast like the flowering of some tenacious garden weed.
‘It’s never worth disagreeing with Ed,’ his wife murmured. ‘He believes that he’s right and he almost invariably is. I think it’s the act of believing itself that does it.’
Dinah smiled. Surprisingly, but distinctly, she felt herself warming with interest in Sandra Parkes. It was not her clothes, or the way she looked, or even what she said. It was the sound of her faint English voice and the half-swallowed, descending semitones of irony and deprecation.
Ed Parkes might look like a bull elephant and sound like a hick, but he was as quick as a whip. The stirring of empathy was not a matter of sharing a common language with Sandra, nothing as obvious as that. By the bare movements of her lips and the darting little gestures of her fingers, Dinah knew where Sandra came from. She could read the text of Sandra’s background just as surely as Sandra could read hers.
Within a few moments the women were perched side by side on the scrubbed pine of Nancy’s kitchen table, exchanging the common currency of their histories in a way they would never have done at home in England, or even in New York or Los Angeles. Whereas the links would have been taken for granted there, here they seemed surprising, remarkable. They had both grown up in the Home Counties, the only children of career servicemen. Sandra’s father had been in the Navy, Dinah’s in the Army. There had been overseas postings, and then from the age of eleven, good safe girls’ boarding schools within a sensible radius of London. After boarding school there had been long interludes of rebellion. And then for both of them, marriage to men from backgrounds entirely different from their own.
The Parkeses lived for part of the year in London, Sandra explained. Ed liked to be there when he was writing. Zermatt was for a month or six weeks at Christmas and Franklin was where he claimed to feel most at home.
‘But Ed gets bored quickly. In a month he’ll be fidgeting, working out a trip to somewhere.’
‘And you?’ Dinah asked.
Sandra sighed, looking sideways at Dinah through the pale and silky bell of her hair. ‘I would like to feel …’ her elegant fingers shaped a box in the air ‘… located.’
Like me, Dinah thought. Correctly located. It must be this need in both of them that Ed Parkes had recognised. Talking to Sandra had stirred a hundred associations within her. Her Englishness called up the inessential details of home and history, but it was not those details Dinah felt severed from only what they contained. A secret, embedded in England like a fly in amber. She couldn’t explain the severance to Nancy or Dee or George Kuznik or anyone else, nor could she talk about it even to Matthew.
Most of all, not to Matthew.
She couldn’t even think about this. She had to keep them sealed away, all the connected threads, or they would snake loose and whip and whistle around her.
‘Do you have children?’ Sandra was asking.
Yes.
‘Yes, two boys. They’re here somewhere.’
‘Of course. I met them earlier. One of them said to me “You see, dinosaurs had tiny brains relative to their bulk.”’
‘Jack. The younger one is Merlin. And you?’
Sandra plucked at the filmy top layer of her draperies. An odd wary note sounded in their talk. Each of them heard it and interpreted it for herself, without wondering if the other did the same.
Sandra said, ‘One. A girl. She’s fourteen now.’
Fourteen.
Dinah felt a jolt, and the tidy focus of her attention scattered like beads in a kaleidoscope. She made herself say smoothly, ‘You must bring her over, the boys would like it.’
Sandra’s narrow shoulders lifted. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. She’s quite difficult …’
Impulsively Dinah put her hand on Sandra’s arm. ‘Aren’t they all? Listen, why don’t you come and see me? One day next week. We’ll have lunch, just the two of us. Will you?’
There was some connection between them, not yet identifiable, beyond the mere similarity of their histories.
‘Yes. All right, I’d like that. I’ll come while Milly’s with her tutor. She doesn’t go to school just at the moment. Ed travels so much, and I like us both to go with him …’
For a second, Sandra’s pale eyes held Dinah’s imploringly.
From across the room, Matthew was watching them. He saw Dinah touch Sandra’s arm. It was okay, he thought. Good. Dinah needed a friend over here and the writer’s nervy wife might be the one. He had liked the writer himself, for all his bullshit. But there was a shiver of impatience with Dinah. She was needy, and once she had been strong. He had drawn on her strength, of course. Made himself with her help.
The equation was different now. He was concerned for her, for Dinah separately and the two of them together. But still there was the chafe of exasperation, the raw edge of worn-out patience rubbing the smoothness between them.
The boys were in bed and asleep at last. Even Ape had given up his clicking and thumping and settled in his basket in the laundry room. In her bathrobe, Dinah sat in front of her bedroom mirror brushing her hair. When she was a little girl her nanny had taught her to brush her hair every night, just so, counting the strokes. Not that she did it, then or now. Why tonight? Because of the associations crowding in on her? Dinah remembered her parents coming into her bedroom while she sat at her dressing table, her mother in a cocktail dress with a stole round her bare shoulders, her father resplendent in his uniform. A kiss on the top of her brushed head. A cloud of Arpège and her mother’s hands resting on her pyjama shoulders. Their two faces reflected one above the other, a blurred half-formed version under the poised lipsticked one. Eleanor always so perfect. Yet they were alike, hair and eyes and colouring.
That mother-daughter link broken. Eleanor, long widowed, in England, in a bungalow on the south coast. Elegant, bridge-playing, lonely probably. Herself with her two boys. Tufty hair, their father’s, an odd whorl at the back of three heads.
‘Are you coming to bed?’
Matthew was already there, propped up with the inevitable scientific journal.
Dinah untied her robe, and slipped under the covers. Matthew put his reading aside and turned out the light.
In the darkness he asked, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
She had not mentioned the frisbee game. Scientists’ wives often feel excluded. Someone had warned her, at the very beginning. The Prof’s wife, back at UCL, that was it. It’s like a very exclusive club. The exchange of ideas, the stimulus, the sheer thrill of it all. Most of them enjoy it more than sex, dear.
It wasn’t the obviousness of her own exclusion from the club that had hurt her, though. It was the sight of Matthew’s unclouded happiness. And as she thought this Dinah felt a stab of self-disgust like a spike driven into her neck.
He reached out for her now. She knew that they would make love and they did, in their tender and considerate way that masked other feelings nothing to do with tenderness or concern.
Afterwards Matthew mumbled sleepily, ‘I love you, you know.’
‘I love you too,’ she answered. And thought that the divide between love and hatred was a very fine and fragile one.
Dinah dreamed of England. It had become a place of steep hills, each hill revealing another beyond it, all of them with pale roads winding to their rounded summits like illustrations in a child’s picture book.
TWO
The road climbed as it led deeper into the woods. There were no more houses to be glimpsed between the trees, nor were there any mailboxes at the roadside.
‘Have we missed it?’ Dinah wondered as she drove, peering ahead to where oblique shafts of sun filtered through the branches. The leaves were showing the first margins of butter-yellow and crimson. In another two weeks the fall would be in full blaze.
In the back seat Merlin looked up from his GameBoy.
‘101 was miles back.’
They were looking for 102, the Parkeses’ house.
‘How do I get to the next level of this? Jack?’
‘Give it here. You’re so dumb, I’ve shown you this already. Look, there’s another sign.’
A yellow arrow stencilled 102 pointed onwards.
‘I wouldn’t want to live out here,’ Jack said.
‘Aw, too creepy for you? The deep dark woods are full of monsters?’
‘Too boring, in fact, Merlin. Like you.’
‘Stop bickering,’ Dinah snapped.
‘Mum, we aren’t bickering. Can’t you tell the difference between argument and conversation?’
Opposition to her was the only factor that united them, Dinah thought. Nothing was new.
‘Sandra Parkes complains that Camilla is difficult. She can’t be as bad as you two.’
‘Camilla, what a totally sad name.’
‘Sort of like some disgusting pudding, Camilla-and-custard.’
‘Pink and wobbly. I bet she’s really fat.’
The boys snorted and retched, united also by their unwillingness to make the visit to the Parkeses.
Matthew seemed to hear none of this. He had been silent most of the way, sitting with his eyes turned to the woodland flickering past.
He was thinking about his work; ever since the summer, when the present avenue of speculation had properly opened up to him, the thought of it had never been far from his mind. Even when he surfaced from sleep he was aware of it rising again through the membranes of semiconsciousness.
He was thinking about his engineered molecule now, his inner eye turning it so that it twisted elegantly, three-dimensional, a dense cluster of atoms floating free in black computer space. Which group should he change, to make the molecule more active?
Frustration and excitement simultaneously prickled within him.
The first tests were encouraging. His technicians had demonstrated that the enzyme material he had engineered was beginning to function as it should, partly binding to the surface of IM-9 lymphocytes, and so indicating that it would bind to some extent to insulin receptors on the surface of cells. The question now was which part of the beautiful structure to change, to make it work better, to make it perfect?
His eyes were unfocused but he saw the sign first. And the mailbox beneath it. Matthew pointed.
‘There, look. I thought the place would be somewhere at the top of this hill.’
The road was dipping downwards ahead of them. Dinah compressed her lips but said nothing as she swung the Jeep sharply into the driveway. There were more trees, conifers and birches pierced by airy columns of sunlight, and then they emerged into a wide space at the crown of the hill. The Parkeses’ house rose in impressive stone and timber tiers against a sombre belt of firs.
Before Dinah had parked beside Ed’s Porsche a door opened in the bottom tier and Ed himself emerged.
‘Great, so you found us okay, no problems? Come on, come on in. Sandy’s looking forward to it.’
Obediently they followed him through a hallway and into the centre of the house. The huge room soared up through complicated levels, its cool space enclosed by squares and rectangles of wood and rough stone and shimmering glass. Beyond the glass was blue air and the reckless colours of the trees.
‘Cool,’ Jack murmured.
‘This is an amazing house, Ed.’
‘You like it? I designed it myself, with a bit of help from an architect.’
Matthew looked around him, his hands in the pockets of his shabby khakis.
‘Is there no end to your talents?’
Ed turned on him, grinning and sharp-eyed.
‘Beginning, doesn’t the line go?’
Matthew was easy in the company of other men, particularly men as successful in their fields as he was in his own. He laughed now, genuinely amused by Ed’s disarming self-satisfaction.
‘That’s not what I said or what I intended. Hi, Sandra.’
Sandra appeared on one of the balconies projecting over their heads, and then fluttered down some steps to join them. Her hair was knotted close to her small skull and she was wearing a loose cream tunic that revealed the knobs of bone at the base of her throat. She kissed Matt and Dinah in turn, resting her hand for an instant on Dinah’s wrist.
Dinah and she had had lunch together the week before.
At Sandra’s suggestion they had met in one of the potted-fern-and-scrubbed-boards café bars that were popular in Franklin. They sat at a window table looking across the green towards the campus. Students streamed past in pairs and groups, on their way between morning and afternoon classes.
‘Would you like to be that age again?’ Sandra asked.
Dinah made the conventional response without thinking about it. ‘Only if I could be forewarned and forearmed against making all the same mistakes.’
‘Did you make so many?’
Dinah could not look at her. She felt an instant of fear that this woman was a threat. She might come too close and Dinah would not be able to fend her off in the way that she could keep Nancy and Dee Kerrigan and the others at bay. She heard herself laugh, a false high-pitched denial.
‘No, not really. What about you?’
Sandra turned her wineglass full circle on its stem. A spilled drop broke into shining globules on the polished table top. Dinah’s deflection of her question had been too sharp. She hesitated, on the brink of offering some truth of her own, and now thinking better of it. They looked at each other, suspecting an opportunity missed before they had even become properly aware of it.
Sandra said, ‘Mistakes? I couldn’t lay claim to too many, could I? Ed’s a good man, as well as a very successful one. I have everything I want. A husband, a daughter I adore …’
Family, wealth, travel, ease, luxury, Dinah silently supplied for her. Only Sandra did not have quite everything she wanted, evidently. Not her own freedom, perhaps, from her husband’s dictates. Dinah wanted to ask her why they had only one child. But she could not. The ripples that the question would make might stream back and rock her own precarious equanimity.
‘How is your daughter?’ she tried instead. Sandra had said the child was difficult. Fourteen …
Sandra drank her wine. ‘Milly’s quite unusual. Very strong-willed, very certain in her opinions. And we’ve probably spoiled her. But I expect most of the difficulty is just to do with her age, isn’t it?’
‘I should think so,’ Dinah murmured. ‘I daren’t think what will happen when Jack gets there.’
That was all. The spectre of intimacy had shivered between Dinah and Sandra and they found that they had somehow brushed it away. After that they talked about missing England, and all the places Ed and Sandra had travelled to when Camilla was smaller and more tractable.
Now, a week later, they were all in the Parkeses’ gleaming glass castle in the woods. Ed was herding them towards the drinks.
‘C’mon, honey, what’s going on? Are Bloody Marys okay for everyone? I don’t believe in these orange juice brunches. Take this glass and let’s fill it up for you. Listen you guys, the pool table is through there. You don’t have to hang out with us if you can find something better to do.’
Jack and Merlin sidled away, not needing to be told twice. Dinah and Matt were caught up and washed along like twigs in the full flood of Ed’s hospitality.
‘Now, you want the house tour? Outside or in first? Perhaps we’ll do outside after we’ve eaten, maybe we can get some kind of a walk. The property stretches a good distance, way down into the dip out of sight of here. I want to take you in my study, Matt, show you the setup I’ve got in there, maybe you can tell me something about computer modelling, I’ve got this idea I want to kick around? Dinah, what do you think of this bathroom?’
He led them through his house, flicking taps on and off and clicking remote controls of lights and blinds and screens into choreographed display. There were twin studies, a vast creamy bedroom with twin bathrooms, an exercise suite with every conceivable machine and a shipsized deck with a spa tub overlooking the descending panorama of trees. There were pictures everywhere, covering the limited wall space, excellent modern pictures. Ed had a good eye.
Matt and Dinah tried not to look at each other because they feared a descent into giggles. They suddenly felt like children, awed and irreverent in the face of such purchasing power. The house was beautiful, but in its sheer opulence and abundance it was also comical.
And yet, it was impossible not to like Ed himself. The energy of him was invigorating.
‘Quite a place,’ Matt murmured. Ed seemed to expect no more.
One corridor on the upper north side of the building was left unexplored. Dinah glimpsed at the end of it a door, firmly closed, and guessed that this must be Camilla’s territory. Because every other nook and cranny had been so freely displayed and demonstrated, she was left with the sense of something brooding, almost sinister, contained within the open geometry of the house.
Ed led them away from the corridor without comment and back to the big room. Sandra was setting out food and cutlery on a huge refectory table in a slate-floored annexe.
‘How are the drinks? Here, Matt, let me freshen you. What hardware have you got in that department of yours? Are we ready to eat, baby, those boys will be starving.’
‘Yes, everything’s ready,’ Sandra said.
The boys came in from the pool table at the first summons.
‘Where is she?’ Ed growled. The creases in his face were no longer genial.
Sandra picked up an intercom and pressed a button.
‘Milly? Brunch is ready, darling.’ She replaced the handset. ‘She’s coming,’ she said.
The six of them were standing behind their chairs, as if waiting to say grace.
A door slammed shut on another level. A moment later a girl appeared framed in one of the upper windows and stared down at them. There was a silence, and then an awkward clatter as they all pulled back their chairs and hurried to sit down. The girl was coming slowly down the stairs.
There was nothing pink or wobbly or plump about Camilla Parkes. Nothing so familiar or explicable.
She was thin and dark and her small pointy face was dead white. Her lustreless hair was matted and spiked and knotted into dreadlocks that hung around her cheeks and down her thin neck. Her eyes were painted with thick black lines and her mouth was outlined in vicious crayon. Her clothes were layers of shredded knits and torn and faded black drapes, and her spindly legs were thickened by black woollen tights with holes at the knees. On her feet she wore huge Doc Marten boots with steel toecaps. Her right nostril was pierced with two small silver rings.
Camilla did not look at any of them, or at Sandra’s scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and bagels and the baskets artfully heaped with raisin breads and croissants. She went to the fridge and took out a small dish covered in clingfilm, tore off the film and screwed it into a ball and aimed it towards the sink. Then she sat down at the far end of the table and began to eat, spooning up a gluey mixture of rice and beans without lifting her eyes from the dish.
‘Camilla is a vegan,’ Sandra explained. ‘Milly, please say hello to Professor and Mrs Steward.’
She raised her head briefly. Her eyes were full of anger.
‘And this is Jack, and Merlin. Some company for you.’
Milly didn’t favour the boys with so much as a glance.
‘Where do you go to school?’ Jack asked, refusing to be intimidated into silence.
‘Milly doesn’t go to school right now. A teaching assistant from UMass comes here to tutor her.’
Milly put down her spoon. There were dirty silver rings on every finger of both hands and her nails were painted black. She turned her burning stare on her mother.
‘Why do you answer everything for me, as though I’m a moron? Why do you think I can’t speak for myself?’
Her voice was pure glottal North London.
‘If you can speak, why don’t you?’ It was Ed who asked, with surprising forbearance. There was a flush of colour mottling Sandra’s lovely face.
Dinah had been watching Milly with terrible fascination, half-greedy and half-apprehensive. But as soon as the child opened her mouth familiarity embraced her and Dinah smiled, without thinking.
‘You make me remember London. It’s like hearing a piece of home.’
Oh, what a crappy thing to say, she reproached herself immediately the words were out.
But Milly only shifted her gaze in her direction.
‘Where you from?’
‘London.’
‘Yeah. London’s okay.’
‘Did you go to school there?’
‘Camden. Only I got expelled.’
Dinah and Milly looked at each other. In the child’s face, as she made her boast, Dinah read the habits of defiance and aggression, and also saw from the soft and uncontrollable pout of her lower lip that she was vulnerable, and deeply unhappy. Milly was very young, however hard she might try to pretend otherwise.
‘Tough,’ Dinah said.
But she was already becoming aware that Milly and her assumed disguise – fourteen-year-old part-punk, part-Goth and part-Dickens street-urchin – called on some hungry instinct ineffectively buried within herself. She was drawn to the child, and she also felt a cold stirring of fear brought on by the intensity of these feelings.
Merlin put down his bagel. ‘Ben Burnham was expelled from my old school. He used the phone in the secretary’s office to call the Fire Brigade. He told them the science room was on fire, and two fire engines came with ladders and hoses and about twenty firemen.’
The adults laughed and Jack sighed, but Milly gave no indication that she had heard the story. She ate the last grains of rice from her bowl and then left the table as silently as she had come. The tails of her wraps flapped behind her as she mounted the stairs and disappeared the way she had come.
‘Do you see what I mean?’ Sandra murmured to Dinah. ‘Somehow it’s easier just to let her …’
Ed shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair until it stood up in a rakish crest on top of his big round head.
‘They’re parents as well, honey. You wait, you guys,’ he warned Dinah and Matthew. ‘They get past twelve years old and all bloody hell breaks out.’
‘I’m nearly eleven …’ Jack said meaningfully.
The adults laughed again and the boys were given permission to go back to the pool table. Coffee was poured and the baskets of croissants passed round, and the mellow Sunday morning talk was resumed. From time to time Dinah found herself glancing upwards to the frame where Milly had first appeared in the half-apprehensive hope that she might materialise again. But she did not, and there was no sound or movement to indicate that she was even in the house.
After the meal Ed proposed a walk. He wanted to show the Stewards the full extent of the property, and some thinning and replanting that was under way in his woodland. Ed liked to be physically involved in the work. He emerged for the expedition in a lumberjack’s coat and boots with a bow-saw slung over one shoulder. Sandra had already announced that she was not much of a walker, and would stay behind to have a nap.
Ed was leading the way through his woodland garden when an outer door slammed in the house. They all turned. Milly had put on a man’s long tweed coat over her ragbag clothes. The afternoon was mild but she was wearing gloves with the fingers roughly sawn off and a shapeless knitted hat. The Dickens urchin effect was complete.
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