The Bohemian Girl Read Free Page B

positions, while the nannies talked among themselves with their highest collar-buttons undone.
    Diana Blentham sat cross-legged on the grass, yawning to herself with one black stocking down. There was a ginger-beer stain on her pink-and-white-striped front, and the bunched back of her skirt was very badly creased. She noticed, as she glanced round, that two of the smaller girls near her were beginning to grow fractious, but their mood did not affect her: she was, as usual, contented but a little bored. She was pleased that Thomas Pagett had pulled her hair, for she liked unusual attentions: she turned her head and saw that he had not come back. Everyone else was occupied in some uninteresting way.
    Diana pulled up her stocking, but did not fasten it in place. She got up and walked slowly, in order to attract no attention from the nurses, round the huge clump of rhododendrons which gave the children shade. Before the picnic began she had observed an opening between two lower branches, which had intrigued her, for the rhododendrons at her own home in Kent were not much larger than rose-bushes.
    She found the slender gap, pushed aside the branches, and suddenly found herself perfectly enclosed in an open space like a hot and dusty room. Diana stood up, raised her head to the blaze of sky, and hitched her stocking up again. She stuck her finger in her mouth and looked quickly about her.
    Stiff leaves and brown flowers with long withered stamens littered most of the ground, and the four low twisting roots were pale as dry earth. When she saw these, Diana realised that the rhododendron was not one miraculously large plant, but several, each of which grew in a different direction. She saw another space ahead, and decided to go further on, and pull apart more barriers.
    Diana was six years old, and she had never done anythingso tomboyish as this before. Her own enjoyment of dirt and difficulty surprised her, and she thought of herself as Snow White, deserted in the forest by the huntsman who had just refrained from murdering her. Presently she came to what seemed the last of the dull little glades; she could hear the chink of china and grown-up conversation.
    Diana sat down on a low branch and looked through the screen of leaves at the main picnic. At that moment, she saw Thomas’s sister Miss Sophie Pagett dart forward with her arm  through a young man’s, pause, and quickly kiss him. Diana blew out her cheeks to stop a giggle, then frowned: for on her way up to the folly she had seen Sophie Pagett flirting in a very fast way with the local rector. Nurse had even remarked on it.
    When the couple passed, Diana leant further forward, and caught a glimpse of her parents. They were standing in the sun, quite some way away, and seemed to be worriedly debating.
    She drew back, and began gently to rock up and down on her branch. Then she straddled it, and found that an improvement. The rough thin wood felt strangely pleasant, there between her legs, and she rocked more vigorously, until a piece of broken twig scratched, too hard, at the bare stretch of thigh between her loosened stocking and pushed-up knicker leg. She thought, meanwhile, of kisses, and of rescuing some handsome man from death.
    Diana saw the stocky, freckled Thomas Pagett kneeling to her right. She stopped rocking altogether.
    â€˜What are you doing here?’ he said.
    â€˜Riding!’
    â€˜No you’re not.’
    They spoke in whispers, because the grown-ups were so near. Thomas got to his feet and came closer. His Norfolks, Diana saw, did not show the dirt as her frock did.
    â€˜You are in a pickle,’ he said in a slightly affected voice, as though he were acting.
    â€˜Why should I be? I wasn’t disobedient,’ said Diana. ‘I wasn’t actually told I couldn’t – do it.’
    â€˜But you know you shouldn’t. That’s disobedience just the same.’
    â€˜No it’s not. Disobedience is different,