Opal Plumstead Read Online Free Page A

think you know it all, Miss Clever-clogs, don’t you?’
    I felt I
did
know it all. I knew Father was a very clever man, much cleverer than me. He’d won a scholarship when he was a boy, taken his Higher Oxford exams and gone to the university. That was when he met Mother. Her parents owned a little stationer’s supplying all the young gentleman scholars. She was only sixteen and I suppose she looked very fetching. It’s difficult to imagine this, because now Mother is frankly stout, so tightly corseted she creaks when she moves, and her bright hair has faded to pepper and salt, scragged back into a tight bun that exposes the lines on her forehead. Even so, I can see that when she was a girl she might have had her fair share of Cassie’s charm.
    There was a courtship and then a hasty marriage, disapproved of by both sets of parents. Cassie and I had never met any of our grandparents. Father didn’t get to finish his degree. He had to go and teach in an elementary school, which he hated. He had been a silent, scholarly child. He couldn’t understand these rough rowdy pupils. He couldn’t control them at all. It made him so ill that he had to stop work altogether for a while.
    He started writing when he was lying in bed at home – first tortured confessional pieces, and then fiction, though this was frequently autobiographical. He also wrote children’s stories for Cassie and me. They were melancholy moral tales about little children who misbehave once and consequently suffer terrible disasters and death. Cassie didn’t like these tales and put her hands over her ears and chanted la-la-la so she couldn’t hear. I couldn’t get enough of them, and begged Father to tell me the tale of the boy who ran into the road and got trampled to death by horses, or the story of the little girl who went paddling in a stream and fell into deep water and drowned.
    ‘Stop telling the children such morbid nonsense!’ Mother said, whenever she overheard.
    Perhaps she’d thought the world of Father once, when he was a varsity man and seemed to have prospects. She was full of resentment now. It seemed so unfair, because he was always the sweetest man with the mildest manner, even when she shouted at him. He tried very hard to sell his stories, but without any success so far.
    He took a position as a clerk in a shipping office in London. He bent over his desk nine hours a day, entering information in a big ledger, to try to clear our debts. He wrote his stories in the evening after supper. He had a large callous on the middle finger of his right hand from all his penmanship, and developed a permanent headache, so that he often held a cold wet cloth to his temples.
    I hated to see him so afflicted. At times I couldn’t help wishing that he was an ordinary father, a bouncy red-cheeked shop man like Olivia’s, who always had a chirpy quip and walked with such a spring in his step that his boots tapped out a tune on the pavement. Then I felt guilty and tried even harder to be a sympathetic daughter, though at times I wanted to seize him by the shoulders and give him a serious shaking.
    When supper was ready (sweetbreads and onions and mashed potatoes, an unattractive meal that made me shudder), I said I’d fetch Father.
    ‘That’s right, ginger him up, Opal. And take that look off your face. I dare say you’d prefer a prime cut of steak, but beggars can’t be choosers.’
    ‘But why do we have to have
sweetbreads
, Ma?’ said Cassie, for once winking in sympathy with me. ‘They’re cow’s innards, all slimy and disgusting! You chew and chew, and you still can’t swallow them.’
    ‘You girls should be grateful I stand sweet-talking the butcher so he’ll save me the cheaper cuts,’ said Mother indignantly. ‘He’s promised me a sheep’s head for the weekend.’
    Cassie and I made simultaneous vomiting noises and I ran upstairs to Father.
    He was sitting on the side of his bed, his rejected manuscript on his knee. He had a