Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde Page B

in the front parlour where he’d left them.
    It was a bit difficult to think of Miss Barbara with a fiancé, and waiting so long in those awful breeches, and her big red hands and earphones and all, when perhaps the fiancé had just gone away somewhere. Like our grandfather who, our mother said, suddenly hop-skipped it off to South America without so much as a by-your-leave or even a kiss to his wife, and just never came back. Wrote some letters but never came back. Just went off. Perhaps our grandmother had got into a bit of a huff. People did do that and it could make you very disagreeable. My sister did it sometimes, and sometimes Lally.
    Miss Barbara was ladling the Yesterday’s into the milk cans and humming under her breath. ‘Bring your white mice again? Remember last summer and the harvest mice? Terrible that was! You got so upset . . .’
    I remembered the harvest mice all right. I’d brought them back to the farm from the gleaning and they’d jumped out of my pocket and Miss Barbara had trodden on one in her huge old boots and killed it dead. So of course, I got upset, anyone would. Silly woman. So that’s why I bought Sat and Sun in a pet shop in Lewes, to make up for it. Being dead, I mean. I said yes, they were in the lean-to and very well, thank you, and she ladled the milkand said that Mrs Daukes, up the top, had told her that my mother was not so well, on account of she had a nasty fall down the stairs not long ago . . . and how sorry she was if she’d lost it . . . and then she went quite red in the face and told me not to mind. Which I didn’t. Grown-ups are very peculiar sometimes. Really . . .
    When we put the lids on the milk cans and thanked her, she wrote down what we owed on a slate on the wall and said, ‘Take your mama some nice brown eggs, a present from me, help to build her up.’ As if she was a castle or something. Still, it was very kind, and she put them in a brown paper bag with
Eat more fruit
on it, and gave it to Flora to carry, on account of we had the cans. Then we all called, ‘Happy Christmas’, and shuffled about on the wet stone floor and went out into the slushy yard. All the way to the lane we could hear her singing – well, that’s what she would have called it – ‘If I Had a Talking Picture of Youhoooo’. She was really a bit batty.
    Our father was in the lean-to when we got back. He was looking very nice, wearing his painting smock which Mr Dick, the shepherd, had given him, and he smelled of turpentine. He had a saw in one hand and a clump of mistletoe which he’d cut from the old apple tree in the orchard. He held it over Flora’s head and said we had to have a bit of mistletoe in the house so that he could kiss all the girls, and Flora made a soppy face and gave him the eggs instead.
    Inside, the kitchen smelled of roasting goose and gravy, and the range was red hot and the copper boiling with steam tumbling about, and our mother, in a cotton frock, was getting the chestnuts ready for the sprouts. Everyonewas very happy, busy and cheerful. You’d never know we had forgotten the tree. Our father hung the mistletoe in the door between the kitchen and the hallway and Lally said it would be a terrible nuisance there and couldn’t we have it in the dining-room, over the table, and he said well, how could he kiss them all if it was over the table unless they all got on it? Anyway, Lally won, as usual. So he nailed it to a big beam above the table in the Big Dining-Room, which we never really used except for parties or Christmas. The door to
their
sitting-room was shut, and locked, and we had to go and take off our Wellingtons and coats and things and then he called to our mother, ‘Margaret! I think it’s high time for the presents, don’t you?’ and Lally and our mother came into the hall, and our father took off his smock and opened the sitting-room door.
    And there it