The Friday Tree by Sophia Hillan Page B

smell of smoke. It was time to be well again and, slowly, Brigid stayed downstairs for longer periods. She found she could support the weight of her head by herself, and sit in a chair. She could hold a book, without real pain.
    Only then, as she sat occupying herself, did she notice that Isobel was not in the house. Brigid thought she heard her parents say she had gone for a holiday, but it was not summer. Still, she was more glad than sorry. Her mother did all the things Isobel had done, and did them with more care and more kindness. She even let her look at her own book of photographs, brown pictures where she herself was a child, then a girl, laughing with her friends.
    The clock on the mantel ticked away the autumn days. When Francis came home he sat with her and at five o’clock they watched television, and all the while the year darkened down toward Hallowe’en, and every night the smell of woodsmoke rose in the air. Waiting for Francis to come home she watched caverns and mountains in the fire. Sometimes she fell asleep. Often she took down the books from her father’s shelves to look at them, or to smell the old paper, or see what was in the pages – a photograph, or a postcard, in writing like stitching, or a square of newspaper, yellow, and soft, like cloth, too small to read. There was one book she liked, with photographs of a small boy in a sailor suit. He was David: he grew up, now he was a king, and he was Edward. In other books, other photographs, she discovered tribes in Africa, Russians in the snow, Italians in the sun, warriors in wooden ships. In her own world, far away from everyone, the days went past too quickly.
    One morning, her mother woke her with the words she had almost forgotten. “Up you get, Brigid. School.”
    Brigid was stunned. She thought that was all finished. In a dream, she got out of bed, washed and dressed, but her clothes seemed shorter, and the heavy shoes pinched. Downstairs, the things she had left behind her forever were laid out for her: the leather schoolbag smelling of pencils and rubber and the prickly coat with the flat hood. She hated them all.
    “Growing fast, girlie,” said her father and she looked up at him.
    Behind his thick black glasses, his face in the morning light looked thinner, whiter than she remembered. When he took off the glasses to clean them, she saw that his eyes had brown shadows beneath, and the kind creases, always at the edges when he smiled, were still there when he was not smiling. Without resentment, she saw that the concerns of the family were no longer directed towards her, but once more to her father. It was right it should be so. She was well again; he was not.
    Looking about her in the frosty morning, seeing even Dicky in his cage huddled beneath his own wing, Brigid, in her warm home, felt cold – surrounded by her family, she felt alone. She did not need to ask whether her father would be taking her to school in the car. She saw that he would not, that she and her mother would brave the bus together. Something had gone from him. Brigid who, before her own brush with illness, would have asked why, or what, said nothing.
    She went back to school, because there was no choice, liking it even less, saying even less about it at home. She did not see George at the school again, and she did not talk about him. Her mother took her on the bus and collected her in the afternoon, and there was still no Isobel. In the shortening days, her father did not leave her again at the end of the road. He did not take her to school at all, even in the wet, even in the cold. Most days, he stayed at home. Sometimes, in the evenings, as he listened to the wireless, and she asked him about her sums or her spellings, it seemed that he had not heard her. When those times happened, she climbed on his knee, and listened to his heart as he tapped pale fingers to his music.
    Slowly, Brigid began to feel that school could be endured. She was surprised and pleased when,