Dolly Read Free Page B

turned round, and then put into the van.
    ‘Two hours.’ The guard had several missing teeth and the rest were brown.
    After that, there was nothing. No one looked at or spoke to him, he had nothing to eat or drink. The train steamed on. He saw cows and churches, fields and houses, dykes and people on bicycles. He did not think and he did not feel, he simply accepted, having learned that accepting was the best and safest way.
    He was neither happy nor unhappy: he was a frozen child, as he had been since he had arrived at the house of a half-brother who neither loved nor wanted him but who, with his wife, had looked after him dutifully, without fault or favour.
    He was a pale, fair, thin boy, small for his age but fit and wiry now and with a sensitive and intelligent face. He was liked. It was taken for granted that he would find his way easily in life, that excuses would never need to be made for him.
    But, looking out at the cows and sheep and churches and dykes and people on bicycles, he was unaware of any of this. He wrapped himself in a bubble of unknowing.
    Leonora van Vorst travelled alone from Geneva the same day, with her name on a badge pinned to her coat and a brown suitcase covered in shipping linelabels, thrown from porter to porter and, finally, to the driver of a hire car which was to take her from Dover to Iyot Lock. To anyone watching her follow the last porter with her case on his shoulder and her round overnight bag in his left hand, across the dock from the boat, she looked small, solemn and lost, but within herself, she was tall, confident and superior. She had money inside her glove for the last tip. The driver loaded her cases and pinched her cheek, feeling sorry for what he thought of as ‘the little mite’. Leonora frowned and climbed into the back of the car without speaking. She was self-possessed, calm, haughty, and without any sense that there was such a thing as love, or vulnerability.
    The car sped east and after only a few miles she began to feel sick, but fearing to mention it, and seem weak, she closed her eyes and imagined a sheet of smooth black paper, as her mother had once taught her, and eventually the nausea faded and she slept. Through the rear mirror the driver saw a white-faced child with a halo of red hair spread behind her on the back of the seat, lips pinched together and an expression he could not exactly make out, partly of detachment, partly of something like defiance.

4
    How do you do?’ The boy put out his hand, Aunt …’ But his voice wavered on the ‘Kestrel.’
    ‘Lord, I’m not your aunt. You’d better come in.’ Mrs Mullen looked down at the boy’s bags, both small. The taxi had already turned and started down the long straight road twelve miles back to the station.
    ‘Well, pick them up.’ She had no intention of waiting on two children.
    ‘Oh. Yes.’
    She did not know how a boy of eight should look but Edward Cayley seemed thin, his knee-caps protruding awkwardly from bony little legs. His hairwas freshly cut, too short, leaving a fringe of bristle on his neck.
    ‘Put them down there.’
    ‘Yes.’
    They stood in the dimness of the hall staring at one another in silence for a full minute, Mrs Mullen struck by an unfamiliar sympathy for a child who was not like the few children she had known, who had been sturdy, loud, greedy, grubby and disrespectful. That was how village children were. Edward Cayley was the opposite of all those things and though she did not yet know about his appetite, no boy so thin, and pale as a peeled willow, could surely be a big eater.
    Edward looked at Mrs Mullen, and then at his own feet, knowing that staring round a strange house was impolite. He could think of nothing to say, though he wondered who the woman was and where his Aunt Kestrel was, while knowing that the behaviour of adults was generally inexplicable.
    The house smelled strange, half of living, breathing smells, half of age and damp.
    ‘Wait