Rule Britannia Read Free Page A

her career had finished.
    “I won’t help her anymore. She must find someone else. I will not let my life be ruined. I’m far too young.”
    Emma bathed and dressed—same old tunic, same old jeans, no one here to care how she looked—and then went downstairs into the kitchen, to be greeted by the revolting smell of eggs and bacon. Dottie insisted that growing boys must start the day with a good breakfast, otherwise they would lose their strength, and as she had the cooking of it she took responsibility.
    Dottie had been Mad’s dresser for forty years, and now, torn from the world of theater she had made her own, was installed as cook, housekeeper, cleaner, nurse, or whatever else she might be called upon to do through the sudden demand of the employer she adored. You could hardly imagine, so Emma had decided long ago, the one without the other. If memory was a photographic plate, as she sometimes felt it must be, then her first memory was of the dressing room at the Theater Royal, with Mad turning round from the stool in front of the wide mirror, holding out her arms to Emma at the age of three or four and saying, “Darling…” with that radiant, wonderful smile, and Dottie bustling in the background behind a screen, putting some incredible costume on a hanger. Madam must have this… Madam must have that… Madam is on top of the world… Madam is in one of her moods. And so it was that Dottie’s appellation of “Madam,” which through the years spread down the theater hierarchy, from director, author and leading man to callboy and sceneshifter, became shortened at some forgotten moment, on the lips of a child, to the Mad of today. It was significant, though, that nobody was allowed to use the name but Emma. If anyone else had dared… the heavens would have split asunder.
    The heavens were going to split any moment, as a matter of fact, so Emma decided as another wave of planes passed overhead. There must be scores of them, probably some exercise or other, and perhaps that was what was causing interference with the radio. Dottie was trying to squeeze her rotund form into the narrow gap between dishwasher and kitchen sink, head uptilted to the window beyond.
    “What’s going on?” she said to Emma. “The blessed things don’t give one a moment’s peace. I didn’t need my alarm clock this morning. It was one long throb-throb before six. They ought to have more consideration for the general public.”
    “Who do you mean by ‘they’?” asked Emma.
    She began laying the table for the boys. Plates, knives and forks, cereal bowls.
    “Well,” Dottie replied, returning to her fry, “the powers that be, whoever they are. They’ve no right to do it. Now I’ve burned the toast. It’s going to be one of those mornings. The post’s never come and I had to send Terry on his bike to look out for the van. If Madam doesn’t get her post with her orange juice there’ll be murder in the house. I’ve been expecting her bell for the past half-hour as it is. Get those boys moving, Emma dear, I’m all behindhand. And tell Andy to clean his teeth with the toothpaste, not the soap.”
    A moment’s respite from the droning overhead. A sudden lull. I ought, thought Emma, to be doing something truly worthwhile, like nursing old people with leprosy, or feeding famine-stricken multitudes after a tidal wave… Oh hell, she thought, what a load of rubbish. This is what TV documentaries do to one, Mad is perfectly right. All judgment goes.
    Deathly silence from the little boys’ room. Surely they were not still asleep? She opened the door. The curtains were tightly drawn, but the light was on. Ben was sitting in the far corner of the room on an upturned chamber pot to serve as stool. He was stark naked except for a pair of gloves and a discarded hat of Mad’s, sent to a jumble sale and never sold. He was ebony black and beautiful, and looked less than his three years. It was not only because of his color that Mad had