Starlight Read Free Page B

warming of it, the modest washing, while she slowly and painfully stretched her arms to bathe neck and face, and even managed, at the cost of an actual, though brief, agony, to wash her feet. Nurse came twice a week to bath her but she liked her wash every night.
    She would never allow her sister to help her unless she was too ill – ‘like that time I had the pewmonia’ – to move. A country cleanliness, though overlaid by sixty years of life in London, still chirped feebly in her spirit.
    When she was ready for sleep, the usual exchange took place.
    ‘Glad? Coming?’
    An absent answer from the next room, where already a faint air of festival prevailed; a mouth full of biscuits, a chair drawn nearer to the flaring gas-fire, and Gladys sprawling in it with a copy of that week’s Reveille .
    ‘Shan’t be a sec. Just having a read of “Revel”.’
    ‘That means twelve o’clock,’ her sister observed, ‘wasting the gas.’
    A biscuit-y mutter, then silence.
    ‘Glad! I’m ready.’
    Gladys got up, without a shade of irritation on her face, brushed away quite a lot of crumbs from her chin, and went into the next room and bent over her sister, as she lay, small and muffled in many nightclothes, on her side of the bed.
    ‘’Night, Annie. Don’t you worry, old dear.’
    ‘’Night, Glad.’ They exchanged the brief dry kiss of age.
    ‘Oh, Glad – isn’t it awful, isn’t it awful?’ Annie suddenly wailed, raising herself on her elbow, ‘what shall we do? There ain’t no-body , there ain’t no-body .’
    ‘Then we’ll ’ave to ’elp ourselves, won’t we?’ said Gladys, giving her a second, warmer kiss. ‘Now you go to sleep.’ She gently pressed the trembling body back into the bed.
    Soon there was silence in the darkened room. Gladys sat on, studying the jocular pages of Reveille with eyes that could read perhaps two-thirds of the joke-captions and snippets of information and news.
    But she could not enjoy it, as she usually did, for Jean’s news hung and gloomed at the back of her mind, darkening every picture she looked at and every thought that came into her head. At last (and it was twelve o’clock, as Annie had foretold; the wind was their way and she just heard the bell of Saint Barnabas’s, across the Archway Road, striking the hour) she scattered Reveille all over the floor with a despairing gesture and turned off the light. She had decided nothing, but that she would go to-morrow to see the Vicar.

3
     
    Whenever Gladys walked across the small churchyard of Saint James’s towards its hospitably open door, she felt as if she were in the country. There were so many trees about, and the Fields were near at hand.
    The Vicarage was an enormous house, built of dark-grey brick, standing in a large garden beside the church; comfortable, dignified, even secluded. The hell of the traffic pouring ceaselessly up and down the hill was separated from it by only a few yards, but the garden was laid out with the Victorian lavishness in the use of land, and its thick laurels and its bushes of bay whose rich green was dimmed with soot did create a privacy: threatened, perpetually broken by noise, but nevertheless a prevailing privacy.
    Gladys had not reckoned with having to march up to the door of the Vicarage; she had had some vague idea of a chat with the Vicar at the door of the church, where their encounters always took place.
    But she was not intimidated by the house. Before the 1914 war, she had been in service in a mansion in Belsize Park, and again, between the wars, had worked as daily help in two good places in Hampstead, and she knew what the inside of a big house was like.
    But she had not been prepared for the new curate opening the front door.
    Tall and grave, and looking even more severe than at church on the previous evening, he stood, seeming seven feet tall in his long black cassock, and said, ‘Good-morning.’
    And no more. Behind him, cavernous passages and closed doors and high