A Winter's Child Read Free

unmarried daughter and the possible effect on her daughter-in-law of exposure to large numbers of wounded but no doubt attractive men, entirely another.
    â€˜Oh dear,’ she repeated, her eyes growing bright with speculation. What had the girl seen during her four years overseas? What unsuitable tales might she tell? And, rather more to the point, could she possibly settle down again in a world which must surely be returning to the state Miriam cherished as ‘normal’? Tea on the lawn. Strawberries with cream and sugar. Good manners. Long engagements. No more hasty, untidy passion but delicately prolonged romance. Young girls who wore gloves and corsets and who had but one safe and sensible ambition: to be the virgin brides of gentlemen. A regular and willing supply of nursemaids and nannies, cooks, butlers, parlourmaids waiting discreetly in the wings; leafy, leisured days which now, in her memory of that pre-war world, seemed always to be luminous, rainless, vibrant with bird-song and golden with pure sunlight.
    Miriam had assumed, naively but very firmly, that on Armistice Day or, just possibly the day after, all shortages and austerities would automatically cease. The hero would return to his cottage or his castle, take off his uniform and begin his life all over again. The dead would be laid out neatly beneath rows of white headstones strikingly garlanded with poppies. The wounded – and Miriam’s mind could not translate wounds beyond an empty sleeve, a limp, possibly an eye-patch – would take up quiet lives somewhere in becoming obscurity. Shopkeepers would be obsequious again, tradesmen efficient. Order, not only among nations which did not really concern Miriam, but among the social classes, would be instantly-restored. And now, although sugar was still rationed, housemaids under the age of forty in short supply, and her butler having acquired a chestful of medals on the Somme and a commission after Passchendaele, had declined her offer of re-employment and gone off to manage a local hotel, Miriam felt that she had waited long enough.
    She wished to entertain again this year, to celebrate her birthday in May with a garden party as she had always done, to give a few little dances and suppers with a view to finding some eligible young man who might take her daughter Polly off her hands. And in these days of increased opportunities for gentlewomen, which made it almost impossible to get anything approaching a decent secretary-companion, it had already occurred to her that ‘young Mrs Jeremy’could be of great use.
    â€˜Really – one had only a glimpse of her. One scarcely remembers …’ she murmured, closing her eyes the better to observe the perfectly retained image of the slender schoolgirl Jeremy had brought her, pretty enough if one cared for very dark brunettes, which Miriam did not, a quiet girl with serious, pansy-black eyes and a hesitant manner. Miriam, blonde, curvacious, effervescent, had not cared for that either. ‘Mother, this is Claire.’ And he had had no need to say ‘I love her’with those rich vibrations in his voice, his young face aglow, her young face veiled in a radiant wonder which Miriam had recognized – oh yes, how could one fail to know it? – but had never actually felt since one needed youth to sustain such total enchantment, and Aaron –. Ah well. Aaron had given her other things. And if it had troubled her that Jeremy had chosen a bride so unlike herself in every possible way she decided to ignore it now.
    â€˜Mother – isn’t she wonderful?’ No. Miriam had not thought her wonderful. But if the girl should possess a capacity for devotion, as Jeremy had seemed to think – ‘She adores me mother. Aren’t I the luckiest chap on earth?’ – then why should she not now devote herself, in Jeremy’s absence, to his mother? What could be more fitting, or more natural? Indeed, what