The Feast Read Free Page A

I do not know. He had private means and this, coupled with indolence and a total lack of ambition, may have been the ruin of him.
    I ought to be thankful that I never had a penny, thatI have never accepted help or support from anyone. I have always had to depend entirely upon myself.
    I blush when I meet him. For the most part he is invisible. But sometimes he appears on the terrace, or in the public rooms, very ready to talk to anyone who will listen to him, ill-shaven and none too clean. He has three sons who despise him. I have no child. But I would not change places with Siddal….
4. One Pair of Hands
    Nancibel Thomas was a little late, but she walked across the sand, as Mr. Paley had noticed, very slowly. It was the same every morning. She could not hurry over this last part of the walk. As soon as she came within sight of the house her spirits sank; they sank lower with every step she took, as though she were walking into a fog of misery and depression. And every day she felt a greater reluctance to go on.
    She could not tell why this should be. For the work at Pendizack was not hard or disagreeable and everybody treated her well. She did not like Miss Ellis; but life in the A.T.S. had taught her how to get on with all sorts of people, including those whom she disliked. Miss Ellis could scarcely be responsible for this aversion which assailed her whenever she approached the house, this feeling that something dreadful, something indescribably sad, was happening there.
    Sometimes she thought that it might merely be a sadness which she herself had brought back to this place, where she had once been a child and happy, running errands between Pendizack and her father’s cottage on the cliff. For she had come home with trouble in her heart and the winter had been a heavy one. But if it was me, she thought, as she dragged her feet across the sand, it would be getting better. Because I’m getting better.I’m getting over it. I don’t think of it but two or three times in a week now. But the house gets worse.
    Yet the house had an innocent and helpless appearance this morning. All the curtains were drawn and there were no bright splashes of bathing dresses hanging out of the windows, for nobody bathed now that the Bergmans had gone. And she remembered how she had once met Mr. Bergman by the rocks, as she crossed the sands. He was going down to bathe. He had looked very hard at her and hesitated, as though he might be going to make a pass at her. But he did not. He said good morning quite respectfully and went on down the rocks. Nobody now made passes at her any more. Her trouble, and the fortitude which had carried her through it, had turned her into Somebody. Even coarse Mr. Bergman could see that she was not just another girl, just another plump, pretty, black-haired girl. Even her mother seemed to see it for she had left off offering advice to Nancibel and sometimes actually asked for it.
    Not all the curtains were drawn, as she saw when she got closer. Poor Mr. Paley was sitting, as usual, in the big bay window on the first floor. He looked like a statue, staring out to sea. And there was a flicker from an attic casement, just under a row of cormorants which sat on the ridge of the roof. Miss Ellis had peeped and dodged back.
    Nancibel quickened her pace and ran up the steps carved in the rock. A gate at the top took her on to the garden terrace whence a path led round to the back of the house. Her white overall hung on a peg, just outside the kitchen and her working shoes stood on the floor beneath it. She put them on quickly and went into the kitchen. A kettle was already simmering on the stove. For this she knew she had to thank Gerry Siddal and not Fred, the waiter. Work at Pendizack was always far easier when Mr. Gerry was home on his holiday. He not only did a great deal of it himself, but he saw that Fred, who also slept in the stables, got up in themorning. As she came round the house she had heard a rhythmic