Patricia and Malise Read Free

leather bag, ‘We are not foolish shoppers, as they say.’

 
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5
 
    Many weeks and months were struggled through, but Christian’s heart missed several beats as a certain summer holiday drew near. He cancelled all choir practices and camps. Eight weeks or thereabouts with Malise to hand. Their romps had, of course, come to an end but the hero worship endured.
    He was destined to join him at boarding school when these particular holidays were over.
    Christian, Alyson and the dog (a black Labrador called Digger) met Malise at the station all of eight miles away. Malise had spent one night with a cousin of Alyson’s in Hampstead on his way back from school. He was tall even though his growth spurt hadn’t completed. His father and Alyson had planned that he visit a London branch of an Edinburgh tailor in order to be fitted for a kilt. By Christmas it was likely that he would be invited to more than one local ‘hop.’
    Now sixteen, Malise surveyed the farm house as the car turned into the drive. Wysteria dripped over the porch. At foot level by the front door, stood a wrought-iron shoe-scraper and a giant cannonball. He awoke to the fact that it was not altogether an undesirable place. Farm buildings, cottages, antiquity. His father had already been old when he was born. It was certain, one day, to belong to him. He’d see to it that Christian and Alyson were both suitably housed in farm cottages. Standing to full height, he planned to pull his weight and to behave with correctitude. He was delighted by his looks and the prospect of a professionally put-together kilt (with sporran and socks) to be sent to the farm in good time for the Christmas holidays to start. Christian followed him around and occasionally, when he dared, asked what was likely to become of him when he joined his brother at boarding school the following term.
    â€˜Don’t fwet Chwissy.’ Malise smiled. ‘We have to fend for ourselves in the big world. No more sitting around listening to Just William.’
    Most days Malise wandered in the garden and took stock of its charm – noting that it was extremely well tended. It was filled with a mixture of flowers, vegetables, (mostly looked after by Christian), bamboos, grasses and fruit trees. He had learnt that it was almost entirely cared for by one toothless old man. Not extravagant, he noted. Alyson did her bit and even the ageing father pruned roses in summer months. The trees were fluffed out with blossom and the smell of lilies was stupefying. Against one wall stood a creaking greenhouse, bulging with ripening grapes. Altogether a reasonable inheritance. Nothing tremendous, of course, but some of his school mates lived in town terraces.
    One afternoon he heard Alyson say, as she led a visiting neighbour, a Mrs Ruggles who came to take cuttings, round the paths ‘We own, they say, two hundred acres.’
    The Ruggles family owned two thousand acres and lived in a truly impressive house. Mrs Ruggles had smiled in discreet pride as Alyson told her about their modest plot and Malise squirmed with shame on behalf of his father and his illustrious ancestors.
    Malise’s mother’s teaching had not taken root and, only last term, he had responded to a tract, smuggled in by Mr Scarlatti, on positive atheism by Bertrand Russell. This tract told him that his mother had barked up the wrong tree. Christian would do well to change his name. His own was less telling to the world at large.

 
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    Christian, clutching his Teddy bear, was terrified. He started his first term at boarding school while Malise made it clear that they were to see little of each other. ‘Learn to stand on your own two feet’, he advised as the train stopped at the school station before they shuffled off it with their trunks.
    Mr Scarlatti, frustrated to a point of near madness by the emotional remoteness of his