The Snow Globe Read Free Page B

her tenth birthday.
    And Stephen knew everyone, too, even those passing through, like the tramp who had once marched up and down at the crossroads with a stick on his shoulder, sometimes shouting up at the sky. Another casualty of the war, Stephen had explained.
    â€œHe thinks his name’s Fletch, but he can’t remember much else.”
    â€œYou mean he doesn’t know where he lives?” Daisy had asked.
    â€œWhere he
lived
,” Stephen had corrected her. “No, he can’t recall where he’s from, or where he was before the war, but he thinks it may have begun with a
B
. Of course, he thinks he’s still in the army, on duty, which is why he marches up and down like that. He’s keeping watch.”
    â€œBut he might have a family somewhere . . . looking for him.”
    â€œOr more likely presuming him dead.”
    Daisy had suggested that perhaps Captain Clark could help Fletch, but Stephen had said he didn’t think so, that Captain Clark, too, was “damaged.”
    Captain Clark lived in the same lodgings as old Mrs. Reed, the former cook at Eden Hall, and was another who walked in that soldierly way, following a line, lifting his feet a little too high, his arms straight down by his sides. Daisy had seen plenty of war veterans, particularly up in town, where they slept on park benchesand sat about on the pavement or in wheelchairs outside tube stations, selling matches or begging. And even those with limbs—without any obvious physical injury—were easy enough to spot because of that walk . . . or the strange haunted look in their eyes . . . or the tics.
    It had been the previous winter, when food was disappearing from the larder and Nancy, the housekeeper, had told Mabel and Mabel had told Daisy and Daisy knew that it was Stephen—taking it for Fletch, because she had been the one to suggest it—that Captain Clark shot himself. He had gone in to lunch as usual, then gone for his constitutional up on the hill and put a bullet in his head. Mrs. Jessop had said it was sad but at least he had no family and hadn’t done it in poor Mrs. Reed’s earshot (which, and regardless of the pun, struck Daisy as a stupid remark because everyone knew Mrs. Reed was quite deaf). It had been in the newspaper, and there had been an inquest, which told them what they all knew anyway: that it had been suicide resulting from “unsound mind.” Shortly after that, Fletch had disappeared.
    Long before Fletch, during the war, Stephen had attended lessons in the schoolroom with Daisy and a few other local children. And he had been included in every birthday party, each nursery tea: teas with the ruddy-faced, tartan-clad cousins from Scotland, and teas with the silent children recently moved to the area whom Daisy’s mother had taken a shine to. “New friends!” Mabel would say, clapping her hands together. Those had been the worst teas: tense affairs with spilled drinks and red faces and curious, resentful stares.
    And then there were the pea-flicking, bread-throwing children from London.
    They weren’t all orphans, Stephen had explained; some of them had parents, but they were too poor to look after them. These children had continued to come each summer during the war, and for a few years after it, sleeping in the night nursery—turned into a dormitory—at the top of the house, a different group each year.
They
were anything but silent. They came through windows rather than use doors and slid down the banisters rather than use the stairs. They loved fighting and swearing and climbing—walls, trees, drainpipes and the greenhouse roof, until two of them fell through. They all had nits, and rivulets of green running from their noses to their mouths, wiped onto their sleeves. Almost all of them smoked, and they liked to start fires and give people frights, and they were always hungry. “Bleedin’