Dark Places by Kate Grenville Page B

found a man who seemed to be willing to have her; perhaps catching the bouquet had done some good after all. They would make a strange pair, I thought; Forbes was a big windy guffawing man with a red face and powerful whiskers hiding a feeble chin, a man whose name I somehow found easy to forget.
    I did not oppose, although I could not enthuse either. ‘Well, Kristabel,’ I said in my heaviest jovial way, ‘I suppose you will be asking me to say a few words, will you, before too long?’ But instead of being startled, and blushing, as any proper woman would have done, and exclaiming, ‘Why Albion, I had not thought, you will have to ask Mother, or Forbes, I do not know’—instead of this type of response, my perverse sister simply continued stitching away at some bit of white stuff, and said calmly, ‘Thank you, Albion, but we have decided to have the quietest possible wedding, and speeches are not permitted at the Registry.’ I had begun to frame an apt phrase or two in my mind, and it took me a moment to realise that she had decided that she had no use for my apt phrases at all: the freckled vixen, laughing at me up her sleeve and stitching away like the soul of sweetness!
    It was only right that Norah and I should now take over the master bedroom from Mother, but I had expected a fight about it, and had assumed that getting her out from among all her flounced bedroom furniture would be like winkling a beetle out from under a stone. But Mother astonished me even more than Kristabel had. She could not seem to turn her back on the master bedroom, or in fact the house itself, fast enough. ‘I have it all planned, Albion,’ she told me calmly. ‘I am going up to Katoomba, to Daphne’s, she has plenty of room and could do with the company.’ Going to Aunt Daphne’s! Without so much as discussing it with me, or doing me the courtesy of seeking my opinion! It was too late now, of course, and no arguments against the coldness of the place or the wrinkled unpleasantness of the sister prevailed against her obstinacy. It was the reaction , everyone agreed, from Father’s death, although that event seemed positively ancient history to me. It took people in funny ways, everyone agreed, and she had her own means, of course, from Grandfather, so there was nothing anyone could do. ‘Thank you for your concern, Albion, but my mind is made up,’ she said, but mildly, so I could not accuse her of anything.
    At the station, farewelling her, I experienced a pang. It was the same echoing sooty cavern where I had been the one boarding the train so many times to go to that loathed school. I had hung out the window for a last glimpse of Mother’s hanky waving among the others, and in front of all the other boys had not been able to shriek, Mother! Mother! Do not make me go!
    Was it an echo of all that grief, swallowed, stifled, flattened at the time, that caused me now to be glad of the folds of my face to hide behind? I watched Mother’s lavender bottom labour up the steps into the carriage and the person within cried out in his heart, Mother , Mother , do not leave me! But now, as then, such thoughts were inadmissible: the boy crushing the tears rising in his throat had been practising to be this man, nonchalantly handing his mother up into the train that would take her away.
    Norah’s first act was to get the dining-room re-done. ‘It seems perfectly pleasant to me the way it is, Norah,’ I said, but my reading had warned me to be patient about new wives and their whims, and I said no more. This re-doing occupied her for an astonishing length of time. There were endless holdings-up of strips of wallpaper, endless unpackings of Chinese vases and endless discussions about the merits of watered silk.
    But when the room was finished according to Norah’s taste, I regretted not having been firmer. In place of the embossed cream paper, and the gravy-coloured