The Sunlight on the Garden Read Online Free Page A

to go home?’
    â€˜No. Of course not! Don’t be such an ass. But it’s’ – he smiled up at me – ‘inconvenient.’
    For the rest of the day he was more cheerful than I had ever known him. After the match was over, I wheeled him from one group of people to another. Since he was not merely the son of the squire but also the local hero, there was a certain obsequiousness in everyone’s behaviour to him. At the high tea that followed back at the Hall, he made a speech that, unlike his father’s portentous one, was exactly right for the occasion in its judicious blend of humour, self-deprecation and love for the village in which his family had lived for so many centuries. I realised that he could easily have followed his father into politics.
    â€˜Well, that was a good day, Mouse,’ he said, as I put my hand to the switch of the overhead light, before leaving him, propped up on three pillows, on his orthopaedic bed. I slept in the next-door dressing-room – always lightly, so as to be ready for his summons.
    â€˜Yes. Wonderful.’
    â€˜But cricket’s not quite your thing, is it?’
    â€˜That’s true. But – but – yes, it was wonderful. A wonderful day.’
    Nanny and I sat facing each other in the middle of the table that seemed to stretch endlessly away in the light from two forty-watt bulbs. In those years to save electricity, as to save everything thing else, had become a patriotic duty. Neither of us had had any appetite for what Lady Hammond had referred to as ‘cold cuts’ – thin greasy slices of ham and shiny chicken interleaved with each other, purple on white. She had driven to Manningtree to meet the last train from London. For once Sir Lionel was coming back to the Hall on a weekday, bringing with him the famous specialist, now an octogenarian, who had come out of retirement because of the war. Hammond was asleep upstairs. He now had two nurses, both stout, elderly woman in white starched uniforms, to nurse him round the clock.
    Nanny munched, looking not at me but sideways and over her shoulder as though in a dealer’s appraisal of the boulle cabinet under the window to her left. As so often when we were alone together, there had been a long but not uncomfortable silence between us. I had been lost in thoughts of Hammond. Perhaps she had too. Certainly it was of him that she now began to talk, with her slight West Country burr. ‘It’s the kidneys. That’s the trouble. They were crushed, you know. Kidneys can’t grow again. And you can’t replace them, can you? If they’re not working properly, then the system is poisoned.’ She put down her knife and fork and then raised her napkin to her lips. ‘ He was such a strong little boy. Never ill. And he never cried. Never. Even after he had had a fall into the empty swimming-pool he never cried. We thought then that he might have broken a leg, but it was only a bruising.’ Her mistily pale blue eyes, with their inflamed upper lids, stared at me, as though trying to sum me up.
    â€˜Do you think this specialist can do something?’ I think that I already knew the answer to that question: no.
    â€˜Well, dear, we must go on believing that he can. Mustn’t we? We have to have that faith. If we believe enough …’ A Roman Catholic, she would each Sunday walk three miles across the fields to the nearest Roman Catholic church and then walk back again. Once I said to her: ‘Couldn’t you bicycle?,’ to receive the firm answer ‘ No, I couldn’t do with that.’
    I, too, now put down my knife and fork.
    â€˜Maureen has left an apple tart.’ She got to her feet and peered. ‘And some custard by the look of it. Too thin, as always. How about that?’
    â€˜Thank you, no. I don’t feel all that hungry.’
    She sat down again.
    â€˜Wouldn’t you like some?’
    She shook her head.