The Scent of Water Read Free

at the first crash of a banging door. “It’s noisy in London,” she said. “There are no trees in our street, and the birds don’t sing like they do here. They wouldn’t like it.”
    “Perhaps not,” said Cousin Mary. “No, I don’t think they would. I’ve never wanted to give anything away before, except once when I wanted to give the dwarf to a little boy, but you’re different. You’re my namesake. You’re Mary Lindsay like me. My dear, I want to tell you—”
    But Mary never knew what her cousin wanted to tell her because the church clock struck four, the door opened and her father came in, followed by the old maidservant with the tea. Cousin Mary lifted the glass case back over her treasures and turning around said to Mary’s father, “She has seen my little things.” She spoke gravely, in awed tones, as though something tremendous had happened, but he only nodded pleasantly and standing with his back to the fire he began to chat about the weather, and he did not even glance at the little things. But Mary knew he was wrong and Cousin Mary was right. Something very important had happened.
    Then tea was over and they were saying good-bye in the hall, and Mary was in Cousin Mary’s arms and they were both crying bitterly. “Bring her to see me again, Arthur,” sobbed Cousin Mary.
    “Yes, we’ll come again,” said Mary’s father. “Cheer up now, both of you. We’ll come again.”
    But they did not come again, for soon after that Mary’s father died, and her mother, hard at work launching her clever children into the world on the wings of scholarships, lost touch with her husband’s family. She had never liked them anyway. They were a queer lot.
3
    Mary was once more sitting at her desk, very much shaken by the wave of forgotten memories that had broken over her, and slightly scandalized by the way she had abandoned herself to them. She had, literally, forgotten where and who she was. She had been again that little girl of—how many years ago? She must have been about eight years old. Forty-two years ago. All that time gone by, and now those flowers in the silver tankard were more real to her than the pile of official letters waiting on her desk. She straightened her shoulders, took the first one off the pile and then dropped it on the blotter. Was the child she had been five minutes ago an imaginative child? I must be, she thought. I mean, I must have been, or I wouldn’t have felt like that about the trees, or thought as I did about going into a picture, into a hidden country. Father was imaginative, I think, but not Mother. I’ve always thought I was more like Mother.
    It had been her father’s brains but her mother’s drive that had taken her to a good school, to Oxford, where she had won a first in modern languages, to the top of the teaching profession before the war and after it into government service. When she retired it would be on a good pension, augmented by an annuity left her by a man who had died in the war, and she would have all she wanted. But she would not want a house in the country. When she had her next leave she would go down to Appleshaw and sell the house and dispose of any furniture she did not want to keep. She would write to a lawyer now and tell him, and then it would be off her mind and she could concentrate on her work. She pulled a piece of notepaper toward her, and then suddenly found herself with her hands covering her face, remembering a frail blue glass tea set and an ivory coach. Were the little things still there after forty-two years? It did not seem likely but if they were she would bring them back to London, to the flat. No. How could she? She had not been able to do it before and she could not now. They belonged there, not here. There and here were two different worlds. Though could you call that a world, that enchanted country in which a child had lived for a few hours forty-two years ago?
This
was the world, her world, the other was merely the