School for Love by Olivia Manning Page A

know what’s the matter, but I suspect pneumonia, always a serious business in the very old. If someone could come over to Herod’s Gate . . . No. I understand. But I think it would be very dangerous to delay. Another night – the crisis – you know – and I feel so responsible. He has no friends. He came up here as a refugee and I took him in. It seems to me
vital
that he get attention to-night. . . . Well, yes, that would indeed be the best thing. Thankyou. Thank you so much.’ When she put down the receiver she sat some moments smiling gratefully before she said: ‘How good of Sister Smart. How very kind.’
    ‘Is a doctor coming?’
    ‘No, but she’s sending the ambulance. She, too, suspects pneumonia. Mr Jewel will get the very best of attention at the English Hospital.’
    ‘Poor Mr Jewel,’ said Felix, ‘I wonder how long he’ll have to stay there?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Miss Bohun lifted her chin with a movement of tranquil and gracious decision. ‘But he’s not coming back here.’
    Next morning, as Felix was struggling to write an essay on ‘The Animal World’, he heard a ceaseless coming and going on the stairs. When he put his head out, he saw that under Nikky’s direction Maria and the gardener were moving everything out of the attic. As Maria passed down with a bundle of Mr Jewel’s paintings under her arm, Felix asked Nikky anxiously: ‘You’re not going to burn them, are you?’
    Nikky answered: ‘Not yet,’ and shouted after Maria: ‘Put them in the wood-shed.’ He turned his back on Felix to prevent further questions and Felix went back to his room to write slowly, in a childish forward-sloping hand:
    ‘Faro is a little cat, but being a Siamese she is not an ordinary cat. She has some toys of her own and the one she loves best is her rabbit’s paw. She brings it and places it on my lap and waits for me to throw it. When I throw it . . .’ Felix paused, sucking his pencil-end and cogitating how he could describe the flurry and pin-pricking of claws with which Faro went off his knee, leaping, flying –like a leaping frog, perhaps he could say, but it reminded him also of the pictures he had seen of the fruit-bat; her brown velvet toes stretched, stretched in excitement, looking webbed as they stretched, she would pounce on the rabbit’s paw – then back she would bring it to be thrown again with all the flurry of before. After a long pause he started to write again: ‘She sails through the air like a frog and lands on the paw, then she brings it back for me to throw again.’ Another pause – now he had to describe how, when she got tired of playing with the rabbit’s paw, she would continue to jump down after it, just to show her appreciation, but slowly and more slowly, and then, in the end, she would place it, not on his knee, but out of reach somewhere, perhaps on the window-sill or the bed. Then she would settle herself beside it with paws curved in beneath curved breast – he could see the dark paws neatly placed beneath the white swansdown curve of fur, her head half up, erect but dreaming, and that lioness poise, that unselfconscious dignity of a queen! The picture hung on his mind as on a cinema screen, but how could he put it into words? He sighed and wrote:
    ‘When she is tired . . .’ and suddenly there was an uproar of sawing and banging from upstairs. His door fell open and Miss Bohun appeared, cheeks pink, voice high: ‘I hope this isn’t disturbing your studies, Felix, but the work
must
be done. The sooner it’s started, the sooner it will be finished.’
    ‘Yes,’ Felix began packing up his books.
    ‘Oh, I’m so excited,’ she brought her hands together in a single clap. ‘I’ve wanted to do things in the attic, but with Mr Jewel there I couldn’t get in. I had a little sparecash and I asked myself: “What shall I do with it? I know,” I said, “I’ll make the attic a
den
, a positive den.”’
    ‘For Frau Leszno?’ Felix was