Moonshine. Victoria Clayton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ father. Though he sat on several cushions, his view from behind the wheel of our Austin Princess was largely sky. My father regularly deducted the repair of wings, bumpers and headlamps from his wages, then lent him a subsistence to prevent him from starving. After twenty years of service, Brough was several thousand pounds in debt to my father. Because of this he seemed to feel he had no choice but to do my father’s bidding, however unreasonable the task and the hour, and to put up with any amount of calumny in the process. Understandably Brough was a morose man, given to violent outbursts of temper when out of earshot of my father.

      ‘I’ll get a taxi from the station.’

      ‘This is not the time to start throwing money about when I’ve the fruits of your mother’s confounded carelessness to pay for. That damned clinic charges the earth.’ Nor were reports of the general standards of hygiene of the Cutham Down Nursing Home encouraging. But my father presumably thought it was worth paying for a superior sort of dirt.

      ‘I’ll come tomorrow on the ten-fifteen.’

      ‘You’ll come today, my girl, or I’ll know the reason why!’

      There followed an unpleasant exchange which bordered on a row. A compromise was reached and I went down to Sussex late that afternoon.

      

      ‘How are you, Mummy?’

      A temporary bedroom had been made of the morning room, ill chosen as such for it faced due north and was perpetually in shade.

      My mother opened her eyes and sighed. ‘Terrible. Can’t sleep.’

      ‘Were they kind to you in the nursing home?’

      ‘They were harridans.’ Her voice was alarmingly weak but she managed to get a little emphasis on the last word. ‘Ill mannered. Coarse and stupid. Like being nursed by a gang of Irish road-menders.’

      ‘What a good thing you were able to come home early.’

      ‘They said I ought to stay in at least until the stitches were taken out. But your father insisted on my being discharged. It’s ninety pounds a day.’

      Her skin was lined and greyish. Her gooseberry-green eyes were reproachful and her mouth quivered with resentment.

      ‘Poor Mummy.’ I bent to kiss her and stroke her once pretty, fair hair from her forehead. ‘Does it hurt very much?’

      ‘Don’t pull me about.’ She jerked her head away. ‘You know how I hate it. It’s perfect agony, if you want to know.’

      I looked around the sickroom, noticing that the grey and white-striped paper was beginning to peel at the cornice, that the Turkey carpet had a hole in it and the bed on which my mother lay was propped up at one corner by a stack of books.

      ‘This is such a dismal room.’ I put an extra brightness into my voice to compensate. ‘We must see what we can do to cheer it up. I’ve brought you some flowers.’

      She looked at the bunch of exquisite pink and green-striped parrot tulips I held out, then turned her eyes away. ‘I prefer to see flowers growing out of doors where Nature intended them.’

      My eye travelled through the window to where Brough was hacking with uncontrolled fury at some spotted laurels, growing in a landscape of dank shrubbery and sour grass.

      ‘I’ve brought you some chocolate. Walnut whips. Your favourite.’

      My mother closed her eyes and screwed up her face. ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been ill. In the state I’m in, rich food is simply poison.’

      ‘I’ve also brought the latest Jeanette Dickinson-Scott.’

      ‘I expect I’ve already read it.’ Her eyes opened. ‘What’s it called?’

      I looked at the cover on which was a painting of a Regency belle in a low-cut purple dress, with powdered hair and a loo mask. ‘Amazon in Lace.’

      ‘Who’s in it?’

      I flicked through the pages. ‘Someone called Lady Araminta. And her guardian Lord Willoughby Savage. He’s got sardonic eyebrows, long sensitive fingers and a jagged cicatrice from cheekbone to—’

      ‘You may as well give it to me.’ My mother’s hand appeared from beneath the bed cover. When I looked in, half an hour later, she was reading hard and sucking the top of a walnut whip.

      After that the days had crawled by at an invalid pace. There was plenty to do but only things of a most unrewarding kind. Cutham Down, once a village, now a small town, was in a part of Sussex that had a micro-climate of bitter east winds and exceptionally high rainfall. After my maternal great-grandfather had amassed a fortune bottling things in vinegar – ‘Pickford’s Pickles Perfectly Preserved’ was the slogan – he had sold the factory and applied himself to the serious business of becoming a country squire. In the 1880s Cutham Hall had been a pleasing two-storey Georgian house with a separate stable block set in the middle of forty acres. This had not been grand enough to suit my great-grandfather’s newly acquired notions of self-consequence so he had added a top storey and thrown out two wings, at once destroying the elegant façade and making the house unmanageably large.

      Cutham Hall had ten bedrooms, most of which had not been slept in for decades, and a number of badly furnished rooms downstairs in which no one ever sat. My father lived in what he called his ‘library’, a room of mean proportions which housed the remains of the various hobbies that he had run through. There were drawers of butterflies and beetles pinned on to boards. There was a sad red squirrel with a crooked tail, his first and only attempt at taxidermy. In a cupboard were his guns and fishing rods. On the walls were photographs of meets at Cutham Hall from the period when he had been enthusiastic about hunting. No books, of course. He was really only interested in amusements that involved killing things.

      Oliver and I spent most of our time in the kitchen where there was an ancient lumpy sofa by the Aga and a television, ostensibly ‘for the servants’. We had no indoor servants unless Mrs Treadgold, our daily, counted as one. She had a twenty-eight-inch colour television in her tidy, warm, watertight bungalow and would have scorned to watch anything on our tiny flickering black-and-white set with its bent coat-hanger aerial.

      For about three days after my return home, Mrs Treadgold and I diligently dusted and vacuumed the ancestral acres of mahogany and carpet. I could tell by the quantities of cobwebs and dead flies that they were unaccustomed to so much attention. Then, by tacit agreement, exhausted by labour that was as dreary as it was pointless, we closed the doors on the unused rooms and allowed them to sleep peacefully on beneath a fresh film of dust. I took over the cooking and shopping while Mrs Treadgold cleaned the few rooms we lived in. Between us we looked after my mother.

      My chief duty was to keep her supplied with books and, as she read all day and half the night, I was constantly on the road between our house and the four libraries in the county to which she was a subscriber. Her taste was for romantic fiction. I had my name down for every novel that had the words ‘love’, ‘heart’, ‘kiss’, ‘bride’, ‘sweet’ or ‘surrender’ in the title.

      ‘I’ve read this,’ my mother said during the second week of my servitude, casting my latest offering aside. ‘Don’t you remember? You got it out last week.’

      ‘Can’t you read it again?’

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ