Prisoner's Base Read Online Free

passed over to Claudia his never-ending worries and watched them being made magically light in her hands—watched guilelessly, like a child at a conjuring show, still inexperienced enough to believe that it really is magic, and not just sleight of hand and practice. It made her a staunch friend, too. To her friends Claudia was not only loyal, but imaginatively generous and sympathetic; her sympathy expressed itself not only in words, but in real, practical help. Look at Mavis Andrews, for instance, and her loathsome little boy. Well, her deprived, her unhappy little boy, Margaret hastily revised her thoughts into more charitable form. Look how Claudia, with unqualified kindness, had invited the pair of them for Christmas because they had nowhere else to go, and here they still were. Still. In the middle of May. Margaret realised that the contemplation of her daughter’s kindness to Mavis Andrews was rousing in her feelings less of admiration than of maddened irritation. Hastily recalling that it was Claudia’s good qualities that she was making a list of, she tried to force her mind on to other, less infuriating, generosities; generosities which, above all, had nothing to do with Mavis Andrews. But it was hard. Mavis Andrews, once thought of, clung in the mind, just as she clung in real life … and as if confirming this ubiquity, there was at this moment a knock on Margaret’s door.
    But it wasn’t Mavis; it was Claudia. She must be feeling remorseful—apologetic—about her high-handed behaviour over the field? Perhaps she was even going to apologise? Though that wouldn’t be like Claudia at all: when Claudia gave up a fight, for whatever reason, she usually did so without comment, and never referred to it again, as if the whole thing had been of no account.
    “Hullo, Mother,” she said, with a sort of cautious breeziness which warned Margaret that something or other was going to be asked of her. After a few softening-up remarks, she would hear what it was. Yes, here they came:
    “I just thought I’d better tell you, Mother, that I shan’t be in for lunch after all. Something’s cropped up at the office—it’s maddening how this sort of thing always happens on my day off, isn’t it?—” Margaret waited, grimly. “Is that all right?” Claudia persisted, with unusual solicitude; “You don’t mind? You haven’t begun cooking anything?”
    “No, of course I don’t mind, dear,” said Margaret, wondering if after all her suspicions had been over-subtle. “That’s perfectly all right. I wasn’t going to do anything much, anyway, just an omelette. But if you’re not going to be here, I won’t even bother with that. I’ll just have a piece of cake and some coffee.”
    “No, well—” the cautious breeziness returned, and Margaret grew tense: “Well, actually, Mother, I hope you don’t mind, but, you see, Mavis will be all on her own. Of course, she can do her own lunch for herself, if you like; but it would be nice, really, if you could have something together. You know how easily she feels rejected.”
    Margaret did. She was sick of Mavis’ inferiority complex. It seemed to her that someone who could extend a Christmas visit to halfway through the summer must have a hide like a rhinoceros; if that was what Mavis was like with an inferiority complex, then the mind reeled at the contemplation of what she would have been like without one. But she wasn’t going to spoil Claudia’s newly softened mood by saying any of this. Instead she put a smile on her face, forbore to mention just how often all this had happened before, and agreed with a tolerable show of good humour. Thank goodness, anyway, that the unspeakable Eddie no longer had to be included in the arrangements . Just before Easter Mavis had decided, at long last, and after what seemed to Margaret a ridiculous amount of hesitation and futile deliberations about his ego far into the night, to send Eddie to boarding school; and thither, a