Mr Wrong by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page A

but before sitting down,
she went to the kitchen door and opened it.
    He was there! He had waited. He was wet, bedraggled, and shivering, but his ecstasy at the sight of her had no resentment at all. She flung her arms round his neck and he whimpered with joy.
Surely her mother would see how sweet he was? She had one last try. ‘Mummy – look, Mummy, he waited all night. Please can he come in?’
    ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ her mother replied levelly, as she placed her own steaming plate of breakfast on the table.
    ‘Can I dry him a bit?’
    ‘As long as you don’t use any of my towels.’
    (As though the house was filled with other people’s!)
    In the end, she used rather a lot of paper towel, and he did not seem to be very much drier, although grateful for the attention.
    She looked at her breakfast – wanting it quite badly – and then began to cut up the ham.
    ‘If you’re going to mess about with your food, I’ll put it away.’
    So that was why she hadn’t seemed angry. She’d been waiting to say that! What she meant was that if Fern tried to give any of her food to the dog, it would be taken away from her. In
fact, he was not to be fed at all. He was to starve to death. That was worse than being cruel – it nearly amounted to murder. If only her mother had actually murdered a person, then she could
ring up the police and have her taken away – as easy as that. But animals didn’t count – except to the Society . . .
    She ate her breakfast – there was no point in nobody having it, and she had to think what to do and if she got too hungry she wouldn’t be able to think about anything. After
breakfast, and after classes began in the Studio, she knew her mother would have gone out to shop and have coffee and more cakes with someone or other. So, she asked to be excused, went quickly to
the telephone and dialled the operator (she was so bad at spelling that looking things up was hopeless). The Royal Society etc. it turned out to be called. She memorized the number (she was good at
remembering things) and got on to them.
    It took her some time to explain what she wanted. They seemed to find it difficult to understand why, if she was
there
– where the dog was –
she
couldn’t do
anything about it. ‘I’m a minor,’ she said more than once; ‘you see I can’t stop any of it because I’m a minor.’ In the end they agreed to come.
    The same thing happened at lunch. Her mother said that if she did not immediately get on with her meal, it would be taken away. She took her supper out of the fridge while her mother was on the
telephone and hid it until she could take it up to him (she was keeping him out of the way – in her room as much as possible).
    Mrs Bracken came back from the telephone. ‘Mr Strong will be seeing us this evening with a friend of his,’ she said. ‘I’ll wash your hair.’
    This was a familiar but horrible business. First a trickle of icy water on her head – icy to scalding – then soap in her eyes, nothing to get it out with, then feeling that she was
drowning as her mother poured huge enamel jugfuls of water of indiscriminate temperature over her, then being violently rubbed with a specially harsh towel followed by the near-weeping pain of
being combed out with a steel comb and her mother’s temper on edge, to the final misery of being screwed so tightly into curlers that it felt as though her hair was being very slowly pulled
out by the roots . . . it was one of the worst spots of the week. The whole process took a little over an hour but it seemed to change the whole day. When it was all over, her mother made her sit
at the kitchen table and do homework of one kind or another.
    The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, and Fern liked being there. She would also have liked to have the dog with her on this of all afternoons, but she dared not do it, in case her
mother ordered him out of the house. All the afternoon, she longed for and dreaded