The Empty House Read Free

yesterday. I expect you are swimming in Alice's pool, such a joy not having to drive to the beach every time you want to swim.
    The children are both well and send their love. Nanny takes them into the park every day and they take their tea with them and eat it there. I took Cara to Harrods this morning to buy some new dresses, she is getting so tall and was quite out of her old ones. One is blue with appliqued flowers, the other pink with a little smocking. I think you would approve!
    Tomorrow they are going to tea with the Manning-Prestons. Nanny is looking forward to a good gossip with their Nanny, and Susan is just the right age for Cara. It would be nice for them to be friends.
    My regards to Alice, and let me know when you decide to come back to London, but we are managing beautifully, and don’t want you to cut short your holiday at all for any reason. You really were due for one. Affectionately, Dorothea Keile
    She read the letter twice, torn by conflicting emotions. Double meanings sprang at her from between the meticulously-penned, well-turned sentences. She saw her children in the park, the baked London grass turned yellow in the heat, trodden and tired, and fouled by dogs. She saw the white-hot morning sky high above the roof tops and the little girl being fitted into dresses that she would neither like nor want, but would be too polite to reject. She saw the Manning-Prestons's tall, terraced house, with the paved garden at the back where Mrs. Manning-Preston held her famous cocktail parties, and where Cara and Susan would be sent to play while the Nannies talked about knitting patterns and what a terror Nanny Brigg's little charge was going to be. And she saw Cara standing silent, petrified with shyness, and Susan Manning-Preston treating her with contempt because Cara wore spectacles and Susan thought she was a ninny.
    And "we are managing beautifully." The statement seemed to Virginia completely ambiguous. Who was "we"? Nanny and the grandmother? Or did it include the children, Virginia's children? Did they let Cara sleep with the old Teddy that Nanny swore was unhygienic? Did they remember always to leave the light on so that Nicholas could get himself to the bathroom in the middle of the night? And were they ever left alone, disorganized, dirty, untidy, to play secret, pointless games in small corners of the garden, with perhaps a nut or a leaf, and all the imaginings that were contained within their small, clever, bewildering brains?
    She found that her hands were shaking. She was a fool to get into this state. Nanny had looked after the children since they were born, she knew all their idiosyncrasies and nobody could cope with Nicholas's sudden rages better than she.
    (But should he have such rages? At six, shouldn't he have grown out of them? What frustration sparks them off?)
    And Nanny was gentle with Cara. She made dolls' clothes and knitted scarves and sweaters for the teddies out of left-over bits of wool. And she let Cara wheel her doll's perambulator into the park; over the crossing by the Albert Memorial, they went. (But did she read to Cara, the books that Cara loved? The Borrowers and The Railway Children and every word of The Secret Garden.) Did she love the children, or simply possess them?
    These were all familiar questions which, lately, had been raising themselves with ever-increasing frequency within the confines of Virginia's own head. But never answered. Knowing that she was evading a vital issue, she would shelve her own anxiety, always with some excuse to herself. I can't think about it now, I'm too tired. Perhaps in a couple of years when Nicholas goes away to Prep. school, perhaps then I'll tell my mother-in-law that I don't need Nanny any longer; I'll say to Nanny it's time to go, to find another new baby to look after. And perhaps just now I'm too emotional, I wouldn't be good for the children; they're better with Nanny: after all, she's been looking after children for forty