The Borrowers Read Free Page A

difficult under the floor; water they had in plenty, hot and cold, thanks to Pod's father who had tapped the pipes from the kitchen boiler. They bathed in a small tureen, which once had held
pâté de foie gras.
When you had wiped out your bath you were supposed to put the lid back, to stop people putting things in it. The soap, too, a great cake of it, hung on a nail in the scullery, and they scraped pieces off. Homily liked coal tar, but Pod and Arrietty preferred sandalwood.
    "What are you doing now, Arrietty?" called Homily from the kitchen.
    "Still writing my diary."
    Once again Arrietty took hold of the book and heaved it back on to her knees. She licked the lead of her great pencil, and stared a moment, deep in thought. She allowed herself (when she did remember to write) one little line on each page because she would never—of this she was sure—have another diary, and if she could get twenty lines on each page the diary would last her twenty years. She had kept it for nearly two years already, and today, 22nd March, she read last year's entry: "Mother cross." She thought a while longer then, at last, she put ditto marks under "mother," and "worried" under "cross."

    "What did you say you were doing, Arrietty?" called Homily from the kitchen.
    Arrietty closed the book. "Nothing," she said.
    "Then chop me up this onion, there's a good girl. Your father's late tonight...."

Chapter Three
    S IGHING , Arrietty put away her diary and went into the kitchen. She took the onion ring from Homily, and slung it lightly round her shoulders, while she foraged for a piece of razor blade. "Really, Arrietty," exclaimed Homily, "not on your clean jersey! Do you want to smell like a bit-bucket? Here, take the scissor—"

    Arrietty stepped through the onion ring as though it were a child's hoop, and began to chop it into segments.
    "Your father's late," muttered Homily again, "and it's my fault, as you might say. Oh dear, oh dear, I wish I hadn't—"
    "Hadn't what?" asked Arrietty, her eyes watering. She sniffed loudly and longed to rub her nose on her sleeve.
    Homily pushed back a thin lock of hair with a worried hand. She stared at Arrietty absently. "It's that tea cup you broke," she said.
    "But that was days ago—" began Arrietty, blinking her eyelids, and she sniffed again.
    "I know. I know. It's not you. It's me. It's not the breaking that matters, it's what I said to your father."
    "What did you say to him?"

    "Well, I just said—there's the rest of the service, I said—up there, where it always was, in the corner cupboard in the schoolroom."
    "I don't see anything bad in that," said Arrietty as, one by one, she dropped the pieces of onion into the soup.
    "But it's a high cupboard," exclaimed Homily. "You have to get up by the curtain. And your father at his age—" She sat down suddenly on a metal-topped champagne cork. "Oh, Arrietty, I wish I'd never mentioned it!"
    "Don't worry," said Arrietty, "Papa knows what he can do." She pulled a rubber scent-bottle cork out of the hole in the hot-water pipe and let a trickle of scalding drops fall into the tin lid of an aspirin bottle. She added cold and began to wash her hands.
    "Maybe," said Homily. "But I went on about it so. What's a tea cup! Your Uncle Hendreary never drank a thing that wasn't out of a common acorn cup, and he's lived to a ripe old age and had the strength to emigrate. My mother's family never had nothing but a little bone thimble which they shared around. But it's once you've
had
a tea cup, if you see what I mean...."
    "Yes," said Arrietty, drying her hands on a roller towel made out of surgical bandage.
    "It's that curtain," cried Homily. "He can't climb a curtain at his age—not by the bobbles!"
    "With his pin he could," said Arrietty.
    "His pin! I led him into that one too! Take a hat pin, I told him, and tie a bit of name-tape to the head, and pull yourself upstairs. It was to borrow the emerald watch from Her bedroom for me to time the cooking."