The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes

news excited him wildly and brought on a fearful fit of coughing.
    A son ! Then his name should be called Sylvanus ...
    How pleased little Rachel would be! How he longed to be watching her face the first time they let her hold her baby brother! Surely the doctors must let him go home now (indeed they probably soon would—but because they needed his bed for some less hopeless case).
    Little Rachel ... how long would it be before she got the news, he wondered? Wales must be a nice change for her after Gloucester Docks but the place was terribly cutoff. For his mother’s new home been a lonely sluice-keeper’s cottage once—in the piping days of farming, when the sluices were still kept on Llantony Marsh.
    *
    None of these people knew yet that Rachel lay under an official rubber sheet in the mortuary at Penrys Cross.
    *
    Gwilym’s old mother lived alone, and on Tuesday had somehow walked alone the whole nine miles to the Cross to report the child missing. She knew already that whatever his letters said her son was dying; she knew that Nellie was about to be brought to bed at any hour: they showed her the body on the slab and she collapsed. She recovered, but for the time being had lost the power of speech.
    Thus Augustine had already left for the inquest at Penrys Cross by the time the news reached Mellton.
22
    The cold had come early to the Continent that fall: in the next few days it crossed over, driving Dorset’s late mellow muggy autumn away before it.
    Mary’s mind at Mellton these days was full of the tragedy: she was cudgeling her brains how best Nellie behind the barrier that was Mrs. Winter could be helped; but now the cold had come and her brains refused to respond. Dorset never got quite so cold as central Europe of course; but at Mellton she had not those gigantic porcelain stoves she had once laughed at in Schloss Lorienburg, nor the double windows, nor even central heating: houses in Britain were nowadays no warmer than before the war—yet, as if they had been, women had ceased wearing wool next to the skin, ankle-length drawers and long thick petticoats. Thus in a large and draughty place like Mellton Mary always found it difficult in winter to think: her blood kept being called away to do battle in her extremities, leaving her brain on terribly short commons. Thus Mary in winter had to do most of her thinking in her bath, where her brain responded to the hot water like a tortoise in the sun: she saved up most of the day’s knottier problems for the bath she took each evening before dressing for dinner: and it was in her evening bath that Mary now had her brainwave about the Hermitage as somewhere for Nellie with her baby and her diseased husband to live.
    That morning Mrs. Winter had told her the doctors were going to send Gwilym home. There had been a pleading look in Mary’s eye as she offered to help, for she was deeply moved and longed to be allowed-to. Nellie must be desperately hard-up: naturally there was no question of Gwilym working “yet” (that “yet” which deceived no one except Gwilym himself!): with a husband to nurse and a new baby Nellie couldn’t go out to work, even if she could find work now there were millions unemployed ...
    But Mrs. Winter had shaken her head. Not money : in a life-time of domestic service she herself had saved nearly three hundred pounds, and that should at least last out Gwilym’s brief time: It was her own privilege to support her sister, not an outsider’s. Yet Mrs. Winter felt quite sorry for her mistress, for Mrs. Wadamy looked so sad at being shut out.
    Moreover there was one kind of help they could surely properly accept. If Gwilym was “to get well” they had to find somewhere to live right out in the country: somewhere high up and windswept, such as the chalk downs ...
    Mary’s face had lightened at the “chalk downs”: she would speak to the Master about it at once. But when