The Happy Prisoner Read Online Free Page A

helping Mrs. North with the dinner as soon as I’ve taken off my overall.” She was folding towels and gathering up his dirty pyjamas.
    â€œWell, you don’t have to brood over it like a witch, do you? You can come in and out. Ma always manages to. Come in!” he bellowed to a scrabbling at the door. The latch jumped madly and there was a thud and a precarious tinkle as Mrs. Cowlin entered bowed over the tray of drinks. She put it down on a table, glanced furtively at Elizabeth from under her arras of hair and crept out as if the floor of this room were made of thin ice.
    â€œThere you are,” said Oliver. “Have one before you go.”
    â€œI don’t drink, thank you, Major North.”
    â€œWhy not? Taste or principle?”
    â€œI won’t have one, thank you. I don’t drink,” she repeated, not answering his question. She took the washing-bowl out to the downstairs cloakroom to empty it. Oliver hoped she was not going to turn out to be like the nurse in hospital who was always smiling because she was pleased to find herself so holy. She used to tell him he must be born again, and he had caught her praying over him once when she thought he was asleep.
    .…
    A miniature oak armchair, relic of some Elizabethan nursery, was kept in Oliver’s room for David. At supper-time, he would carry it over to the bed and drag up the stool which he used for a table. As the window recess into which Oliver’s bed was built was a step higher than the floor of the room, he had a bird’s-eye view of the little boy on his low chair. He could see the cow-lick on top of his head, where the black hair gave a swirl before it shot the rapids of his forehead. When David’s head was bent over his biscuit or the knot hole in the stool, Oliver could seethe arc of his lashes lying on the bulging, boneless cheeks; when it was tilted back to obey his mother’s interjections of “Drink up,” most of him was hidden by the big white china mug, except for two wet black eyes, which stared and stared and went on staring after he had lowered the mug and let out the breath he had been holding while he drank.
    â€œWipe your moustache,” said Oliver, throwing down his handkerchief.
    â€œYes,” said David, thinking of something else. “Uncle Oliver, I want to tell you something. How do you cut your toe-nails, if you haven’t any toes?”
    â€œI don’t. I file them usually. It’s safer, when you can’t see them.”
    â€œI want to tell you another thing—”
    â€œYou mean ask,” said Heather, from the table where she was mixing Oliver a drink.
    â€œHow do you know if you’ve got a hole in your sock if you can’t see your big toe sticking out?”
    â€œI can feel it. The edges of the hole cut into my toe when I wiggle it.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t stuff him up, Ollie,” Heather said, bringing his drink over. “It’s going to be awfully awkward when you get up and he sees you really have only got one leg.”
    â€œPerhaps I shal.’ have my cork one by then. That’ll be a great thrill. He’ll be able to kick it as much as he wants.”
    â€œYes, till he kicks the good one by mistake.”
    David had got up and gone to stare at the tent of bedclothes between the cradle and the foot of the bed. “Are you wiggling them now? Are you? May I look under the sheet?”
    â€œYou may not,” said his mother, and bent to pick him up. “Come on, you can go to bed if you’ve finished your milk. I’ve got heaps to do before dinner.”
    David’s face went scarlet and began to disintegrate. He beat his mother off with both hands. “David—stop it!” She jerked her head away, her face as red as his from the same quickly-roused temper. “Look what you’re doing to my hair, you little fiend. You are
not
to kick me! Oh, Ollie—what does one do? I’m