Faces of Fear Read Free

house to keep and Toby to take care of. I do expect you to lend a hand.”
    Gillie reluctantly followed her father downstairs. They lived in a large four-storey house in Charlotte Square which they had inherited from mum’s parents when they died and which they could barely afford to keep up. Most of the decorations were still unchanged from granny and grandfather’s day: brown floral wallpaper and brown velvet curtains, and large gloomy paintings of stags at bay. About the most cheerful picture was a view of Ben Buie in a thunderstorm.
    Her mother was in the large, yellow-tiled kitchen, strapping Toby into his highchair. She was slender and slight, like Gillie, but she was fair-haired rather than dark, with very sharp blue eyes. Toby had inherited her fairness and her eyes, and he had a mop of curly blond hair as fine as cornsilk, which her mother refused to have cut. Daddy didn’t like it much because he thought it made Toby look like a girl; but Gillie knew better. Alice would have been gentle and dark, like her, and they would have spoken together in giggles and whispers.
    â€œHis hotpot’s ready,” said mum, and gave Gillie the open jar, wrapped in a cloth because it was hot. Gillie drew up a chair at the large pine kitchen table and stirred the jar with a teaspoon. Toby smacked his fat little hands together and bounced up and down on his bottom. He was always trying to attract Gillie’s attention but Gillie knew who he was and she didn’t take any notice. He wasa cuckoo. Dear dark Alice had never been allowed to see the light of day, and here was this fat curly
thing
sitting in her place. He even slept in Alice’s crib.
    Gillie spooned up pureed hotpot and put it up against Toby’s lips. The instant Toby tasted it he turned his head away. Gillie tried again, and managed to push a little bit into his mouth, but he promptly spat it out again, all down his clean bib.
    â€œMum, he doesn’t like it.”
    â€œWell, he has to eat it. There’s nothing else.”
    â€œCome on, cuckoo,” Gillie cajoled him, trying another spoonful. She held his head so that he wouldn’t turn away, and squeezed his fat little cheeks together so that he
had
to open his mouth. Then she pushed the whole spoonful onto his tongue.
    There was a long moment of indignant spluttering, while Toby grew redder and redder in the face. Then he let out a scream of protest, and hotpot poured out of his mouth and sprayed all over the sleeve of Gillie’s jumper.
    Gillie threw down the spoon in fury. “You cuckoo!” she screamed at him. “You horrible fat cuckoo! You’re disgusting and I hate you!”
    â€œ
Gillie
!” her mother protested.
    â€œI don’t care! I hate him and I’m not feeding him! He can die of starvation for all I care! I don’t know why you ever wanted him!”
    â€œGillie, don’t you dare say such a thing!”
    â€œI dare and I don’t care!”
    Mum unbuckled Toby from his highchair, picked him up and shushed him. “If you don’t care you’d better get to your room and stay there for the rest of the day with no tea. Let’s see how
you
like a bit of starvation!”It started to snow again. Thick, tumbling flakes from the Firth of Forth.
    â€œThey really believe that I don’t know what they did to you, Alice.”
    You must forgive them, for they know not what they
do.
    â€œI don’t want to forgive them. I hate them. Most of all I hate them for what they did to you.”
    But you’re a nun now. You’ve taken holy vows. You must forgive them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit amen.
    Gillie spent the afternoon lying on her bed reading
Little Faith
which was a novel about a nun who started a mission in the South Seas and fell in love with a gun-runner. She had read it twice already, but she still loved the scene where the nun, who has fasted for five days and