Rule Britannia Read Free

nothing but an interminable hum that must mean there was a fault somewhere, and it wasn’t any better when she tried the national program. The hum persisted, with crackling and spitting thrown in for good measure. “Oh, to hell with it!” She pushed the transistor aside and lay back on her pillow, her hands behind her head, transposing “To be or not to be” from
Hamlet
into a critical assessment of her own ambivalent life. To leave or not to leave, that is the question; whether ’tis nobler to continue living, sharing Mad’s life, her home, her whole existence, or to break here and now with all dominion, cut myself loose, start on a separate road…
    The trouble is, which road? That was the rub. No openings for girls with or without the right exams behind them. Secretarial pools all jammed with applicants. Men, women, boys, girls, jostling for position, scrambling to obtain the few jobs worth the holding, and ever since the government had back-tracked and pulled out of Europe—dissension among the Ten was the official reason, and a national referendum had given the government of the day a thumping majority—things seemed to have gone from bad to worse. So Pa said, and he ought to know, being a merchant banker.
    “Travel the world,” he told her. “I’ll pay.”
    “I don’t want charity,” she replied. “I’ve turned eighteen.”
    And so the inevitable and abortive effort to make the grade on the stage. Mad’s influence, of course. But despite the recurring dream she had made no headway. And unless she could get to the top bang off, then there was nothing doing. Not after all those childhood years with applause sounding in her ears. TV commercials or regional announcing? No, thank you, ladies and gentlemen and viewers everywhere. Let us rather bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.
    Emma tried the radio again, with the same result, a prolonged hum. She got out of bed and went along the passage to turn on the bathwater. Glancing out of the window she saw that the curtains of the little boys’ room were still tightly drawn. Thank heaven for that—with luck they might still be asleep. The side door slammed, well, that would rouse them, if the sound of the planes hadn’t. It was Terry, wheeling his bicycle out of the side hall—where he was not supposed to keep it—and careering away up the drive. Terry was a poor early riser as a rule, unlike Joe, who was always up by seven, chopping wood or digging in the garden, and curiosity impelled Emma to throw open the window and call after him.
    “Where are you going?”
    He took no notice, of course, merely waved a careless hand, grinned over his shoulder and continued on his way. She was about to close the window again when she noticed that a slate on the sloping roof above the little boys’ room had worked loose and was sliding down into the guttering. It was followed by a second, and then a third. Rage filled her. She knew what it meant. Andy had climbed onto the roof from his bedroom on the other side of the house and was squatting on the disused chimney that was his favorite spy-place. He must somehow have dislodged the slates. “I can’t and I won’t stand it.” The memory of the dream, so different from reality, infused Emma with the sense of frustration that can only be appeased by instant action of a useless sort. Deliberately she let her tooth-glass fall into the washbasin with a crash. The splintered fragments gave her satisfaction. “Serve her right,” she muttered. Serve who right? Herself or Mad? The bathwater was tepid—the immersion heater must have gone wrong again. And this, she told herself, is what comes of living in a madhouse, rightly named after its owner, who, on retiring from the stage some years ago after a brilliant career, could think of nothing better to do than to adopt six parentless, maladjusted boys and let them run riot in her home, believing, by so doing, that she had justification for living when