The Shell Seekers Read Free Page B

her, rising from the flagged floor, seeping up the stairs to the icy voids of the landing.
     
    It had been a bitter winter. From time to time, Nancy stoutly told herself—or any person impelled to listen—that she did not mind the cold. She was a warm-blooded creature, and it did not bother her. Besides, she enlarged, you never really felt cold in your own house. There was always so much to do.
     
    But this evening, with the children being so disagreeable, and the prospect before her of having to go along to the kitchen and "have a word" with the morose Mrs. Croftway, she shivered and pulled her thick cardigan closely about her, as she saw the worn rug lift and shudder in the draught that poured in from beneath the ill-fitting front door.
     
    For this was an old house that they lived in, an old Georgian vicarage in a small and picturesque Cotswold village. The Old Vicarage, Bamworth. It was a good address, and she took pleasure from giving it to people in shops. Just put it down to my account—Mrs. George Chamberlain, The Old Vicarage, Bamworth, Gloucestershire. She had it embossed, at Harrods, at the head of her expensive blue writing paper. Little things like writing paper mattered to Nancy. They made a good impression.
     
    She and George had moved here soon after they were married. Shortly before this event, the previous incumbent of Bamworth had all at once had a rush of blood to the head and rebelled, informing his superiors that no man . . . not even an unworldly man of the Church, could be expected, on his painfully meagre stipend, to live and bring up his family in a house of such monstrous size, inconvenience, and cold. The Diocese, after some deliberation and an overnight visit from the Archdeacon, who caught a cold and very nearly died of pneumonia, finally agreed to build a new Vicarage. A brick bungalow was duly erected at the other end of the village, and the old Vicarage put on the market.
     
    Which was bought by George and Nancy. "We snapped it up," she told her friends, as though she and George had been enormously quick off the mark and astute, and it was true that they got it for peanuts, but in time she discovered that was only because nobody else wanted it.
     
    "There's a lot to do to it, of course, but it's the most lovely house, late Georgian, and quite a bit of land . . . paddocks and stables . . . and only half an hour to Cheltenham and George's office. Quite perfect, really."
    It was perfect. For Nancy, brought up in London, the house was the final realization of all her adolescent dreams—fantasies nurtured by the novels that she devoured, of Barbara Cartland and Georgette Heyer. To live in the country and to be the wife of a country squire—these had long been the. peak of her modest ambitions, after, of course, a traditional London Season, a white wedding with bridesmaids, and her photograph in the Toiler . She got it all except the London Season and, newly married, found herself mistress of a house in the Cotswolds, with a horse in the stable and a garden for Church fetes. With the right kind of friends, and the right sort of dogs; with George Chairman of the local Conservatives, and reading the lesson on Sunday mornings.
     
    At first all had run smoothly. Then, there was no lack of money, and they had done up the old place, and snow-cemmed the outside, and installed central heating, and Nancy had arranged the Victorian furniture that George had inherited from his parents and happily decorated her own bedroom in a riot of chintz. But as the years went by, as inflation ballooned and the price of heating oil and wages rose, it became more and more difficult to find anyone to help in the house and garden. The financial burden of simply keeping the place going grew heavier each year and she sometimes felt that they had bitten off more than they could chew.
     
    As if that were not enough, they were as well already into the horrifying expense of educating their children. Both Melanie and