Swords and Crowns and Rings Read Free

paintings of pale-eyed, potato-nosed Flemish dwarfs; arrogant, richly clad diminutive women who belonged to queens and duchesses; Italian feasts, all lanterns and shadows and flushed revellers, gathered about a jolly little monster who sprang from an ornamented pie. With a cry of outrage he slammed shut the book.
    â€˜We’ve got no choice, Walter, don’t you see?’ said Mrs Hanna with pity. Almost for the first time she sympathised with his shame and suffering. ‘I’ve been heedless,’ she said, ‘heedless and hard. But it hasn’t been easy for me, either, you know. Last month when Mrs Moy over the road had her little girl, like a doll, perfect like a doll, I was so jealous I could have chewed rope. But it wasn’t to be. We got Jackie the way he is and we have to help him all we can.’
    Without a word her husband left the room, and the books were not discussed again between Mr and Mrs Hanna. Sometimes the mother hoped that he listened while she read to the enthralled Jackie tales of clever and heroic dwarfs, dwarfs that were the finest goldsmiths and jewellers in the world.
    â€˜He understands every word I say, I do believe,’ Mrs Hanna told the doctor. The doctor rolled over the two-year-old child, already muscular and extremely active, prodding him till he shrieked with laughter.
    â€˜Of course he does,’ he said. ‘If brain weight is important, and many scientists think it is, Jackie’s is about one-nineteenth of his body weight. Mine is only one-thirty-second; yet it’s served me well enough.’
    Sometimes, too, the mother slapped Jackie as she recited the list of his blessings, his good eyesight, his strength, his home, his ability to be like those other heroic little people in the books. She slapped him to make him remember and wept stormily because she had to. The doctor shook his head over this but admitted she had to work with the child according to her own nature.
    Walter Hanna died when Jackie was five, never having really recovered from the birth of his only child. He came down with bronchitis, and went off with double pneumonia, very angry, fighting for breath, his last words to his wife being: ‘Wind clocks. Schedule on mantelpiece.’
    In his later years, when forgotten memories of childhood began to return to him, Jackie often recalled his father, clear as day, sitting on a stump with a rabbit rifle across his knees, hoarsely crying, ‘Why?’ Jackie remembered, too, that he was a man with a rupture, and wore a clumsy truss that bulked out his trousers and often gave off a smell like a hot-water bottle. He sometimes had mentioned that his feet hurt, and he had had flat, thin hair that smelled rather sweetly of sweat and pomade. The older Jackie ached for that man, the questions unasked, the sorrows and disappointments never understood or lamented by his only son.
    Mrs Hanna had loved her husband with a pitying, exasperated love. Her grief after his death was genuine and unbearable. She threw herself into it as though into the path of an oncoming train, hoping it would destroy her quickly. She carried on with the rundown shop, trying to scrape a living out of it, and out of sympathy many of the old customers came back. She spoke freely to them of her bereavement, explaining her guilt and remorse over the estrangement that had existed since Jackie’s birth, her inability to get the child’s father to see things her way and help her to make Jackie as normal and carefree a child as possible.
    But that was not the whole story. Part of her grief was because her youth had gone into the grave with him, years and years, pell-mell, packed into the coffin, into the grave, under the sod, with nothing to show that it had ever existed at all.
    After all the customers had gone and she had locked up the shop, the false consolation of their compassion faded and sorrow submerged her once more. Puffing cigarettes until her throat burned,