Muriel's Reign Read Free Page A

some?’
    Phyllis would have loved some but never knew when to strike or even whether or not the iron was hot. She had no knack.
    ‘Write down,’ he insisted. ‘Write it down. Write down what you want.’ But it was not for her to do the writing. Once he did hint that he had asked Arthur Stiller to draft something in her favour but she was never able to find out more about it.
    He became ever more taunting and unpleasant and she performed her tasks with less enthusiasm – allowing his clothes to become rank and his shoes scuffed.
    Several years had passed and Phyllis had become a part, albeit a lazy and discontented one, of the household and,with the possibility of Jerome ‘doing something for her’ nothing better had cropped up.
    Then the blow. As Jerome’s mental powers deteriorated, this flipping Muriel had been sent for. Heiress as it turned out. Jerome had mentioned a ‘niece’ occasionally but never with conviction.
    Phyllis searched for any form of concealed codicil but nothing showed. Nothing promised. Nothing but loneliness and insecurity. Even her mother had died. She didn’t know if her auntie still lived in the small town in Wales where she had spent her childhood.

Chapter 4
    Muriel, comparing the date with her first terrifying Christmas as owner of Bradstow Manor, was very nearly contented. It was excellent to have Peter to help in all matters. What was not so good but indeed a horrible hindrance, a constant embarrassment and nagging reminder of dire days, was to have Hugh living in barely suppressed fury in the squash court.
    Muriel had fallen in love with Peter, gradually but passionately, during the years of her husband’s infidelities and had, after many a complication, become his lover and constant companion.
    Peter had braved himself to allow for the unorthodoxy of the circumstances and to rise above the dilemma relating to his personal footing in the house.
    Being blind – he fancied himself, too, to be invisible. He doted on Muriel and was assured of the inexorability of the reinforcement that he provided for her. He lived in accord with a strange compensatory law that allowed him to enjoy what was on offer.
    Hugh had always, since childhood, been foul to him– condescending and prickly. Foul, too, in Peter’s view, to Muriel – subjecting her to humiliation and contempt, grotesquely underestimating her magnificence.
    Peter planned to lie low. After all he cost nothing. Hugh could never charge him with venality. Even after waiving the rent from his London house in order to provide his futile nephew with an income, he was able to support his own modesty of financial need. Neither Hugh nor Marco had a case of that nature for him to answer. He was tremendously happy.
    Muriel had lived in the house for over a year but didn’t count the Christmas gone by as a true one for she had been beset with problems that lacked pattern.
    She’d had no idea, then, who was supposed to drag in the tree; where it was normally placed or if, indeed, there had ever been a tree in the house at Christmas.
    This year she was more organised in her crowded brain but sincerely wished that Mambles wasn’t coming and bringing ‘Mummy’, Cunty, Farty and Moggan the driver.
    Then there was the problem of her son Marco, her daughter-in-law Flavia and Cleopatra the baby – nearly a year old and badly behaved. They lived in a converted barn – also organised for them by Muriel in bossy association with Mambles. The trouble was that she had difficulty in persuading the young family to use it.
    ‘No one to babysit, Ma, and Flavia’s hopeless athouse-running,’ Marco often told her as he dumped a furious Cleopatra on the floor of the kitchen and bounded with Flavia to one of Muriel’s comfortable spare rooms.
    Mambles and her mother intended to stay for an indefinite number of nights but refused to say how many.
    ‘It’s awful at Windsor now,’ Mambles had yawned down the telephone. ‘Not like it was when the King