A Small Country Read Online Free Page B

father’s chest. ‘Dead?’
    ‘Do you remember when Blackbird died?’ he asked his mother.
    ‘You were very brave.’
    ‘Brave? I cried myself to sleep for weeks and weeks. Don’t you remember how I started wetting the bed?’
    ‘Wasn’t that when Grandfather died?’
    ‘No, I didn’t care a bit about that. You were so sure he’d gone to Heaven and it seemed such a good idea.’
    ‘He was a good man.’
    ‘I suppose so.’
    ‘Go downstairs now. Edward will be here soon, surely. It must be half past ten.’
    ‘Shall I take the letter? Show it to Catrin?’
    ‘Isn’t she too young to see it?’
    ‘No. She knows things, it seems.’
    ‘Show it to her, then. Read it to Nano too.’
    ‘Right. You must take some beef tea, now, or she’s going to have Doctor Andrews along in the morning.’
    ‘Read it to her first, then. She’ll be kinder about the beef tea afterwards, I can’t keep anything down, Tom, I really can’t.

    Catrin read the letter, showing as little emotion as if it were a shopping list.
    ‘Never,’ she said at the end as if the total had been incorrectly reckoned.
    ‘What do you mean?’ Tom asked
    ‘I’ll never forgive him,’ she said. ‘Will you? How I wish Edward would come, the lamb will be dry, everything will be spoiled. The girls are in bed, and Nano should be, too.’
    ‘I’ll send her off now,’ Tom said. ‘You can see to the meal, surely.’
    He went to the kitchen, the letter in his hand. Nano was sitting on the settle at the side of the range, her hands in her lap.
    ‘You can take her the beef tea now,’ Tom said. ‘And then you get along to bed.’ He found he wasn’t able to read the letter to her after all. ‘Father’s written to say he’s setting up house with Miss Lewis, the Rhydfelen school mistress. Baby, it seems. Take her the beef tea now, just a little. Spot of brandy in it, perhaps. Not so much that she’ll notice.’
    ‘Right,’ Nano said, putting the little saucepan back on the fire and touching her eyes with her apron. It was true then, what people said.
    ‘Why don’t you have a little basinful with her?’ Tom said. ‘Spot of brandy. Do you good, too.’
    ‘Right, right,’ Nano said, wanting to be rid of him. He left her stirring the beef tea on the fire; muttering to it.

    It was another hour before Edward arrived. By that time Tom and Catrin, too hungry to wait any longer, had had their supper. But so had he, he assured them, waving aside their apologies, so had he. While some good fellow at Llandre had mended his puncture, done an excellent job on it. And he’d had a wonderful trip; cloudless skies, memorable meals in roadside inns, the utmost courtesy from everyone. He couldn’t stop smiling.
    To Catrin, Edward seemed like a visitor from a distant, untroubled world. That’s what it is to be English, she thought. Assured, self-confident, never brash, never on the look-out for insult, never brooding on imagined slights; victorious somehow, blessèd.
    ‘I’ll get you a basin of soup, anyway,’ she said. ‘It’s a long way from Llandre. I’ll get you a basin of soup and then I’ll be off to bed.’
    Edward was so full of good cheer, so high-spirited, so triumphant to have cycled from London in only five days, that Tom felt obliged to show him his father’s letter. In a way he felt disloyal to be so fully exposing a family grief, but it was clearly going to be impossible to be with Edward without saying something, and saying everything seemed far less complicated.
    His friend read the letter without a word and then handed it back.
    ‘Right, then, soup,’ he said when Catrin returned. ‘That smells wonderful. Soup of the evening, beautiful soup. Thank you. We’ll talk in the morning. I’m sorry to have kept you up so late.’
    ‘Good night, Edward.’ They shook hands.
    Catrin was pleased, after all, that he had come. She’d almost forgotten the warmth of his presence. ‘And now, no more the frost candies the grass’, she