Summer at the Haven Read Online Free Page A

time and space. Gradually these impressions became more vivid and more compelling. Frances Dawson was now a girl in her father’s garden, listening to the promise of summer in the evening bird chorus all about her, excited beyond measure at the mysterious summons oftheir song. Almost simultaneously she was a much older but a no less happy Frances Dawson. The curtains of her room had changed to the canvas flaps of a tent open to vast distances glimpsed through a fringe of Himalayan pines, standing like huge sentinels round her camping site. She was so high up in the world that she felt almost as free as the bright tropical birds she had been watching all that day. The deep peace of that freedom enveloped her. She turned and stretched luxuriously on her campbed – she nodded and slipped down in her old chair at The Haven and slept deeply and dreamlessly at last. Her miracle had worked once again.

3
MISS NORTON, MISS BROWN, MISS FORD
    MISS NORTON negotiated the hall and passage and stairs successfully with the help of her stick which she used for guidance only; she was still erect and agile and needed no prop. She shut the door of her room with relief and triumph. Another day conquered and she could relax completely.
    Mrs Thornton, who was the only person likely to visit her, would tonight, as she knew, be listening to a favourite music programme. Since her sight had worsened, each day was a battle to retain her dignity and independence. But she came of fighting stock in which self-pity in misfortune had had little part, though she allowed herself the indulgence of exasperation now and again. For instance, when she realised that she could no longer play her endless games of Patience, that it really was no good (even the largest cards got muddled up), she threw the pack across the room and it took her a long while to locate and retrieve each card. “That’ll teach me,” she said to herself. But such outbursts were few. In her own room, unless someone had moved any of her things from their accustomed places, she could manage pretty well still and she remained the most immaculately neat, clean and well turned out of all The Haven’s residents.
    She did not sit down now before she had taken off her beautifully fitting though ancient black velvet gown(definitely a gown and not a mere dress) and hung it carefully in her cupboard. She folded the little muslin scarf she had worn round her shoulders and placed it in her top right-hand drawer among her lavender-scented embroidered handkerchiefs. She took off a pair of elegant pointed shoes and fitted them with their trees, then felt for her slippers beside the bed. They were warm and comforting to her cold feet. Then she put on a loose wrapper and at last seated herself in an upright armchair and switched on her radio to hear the sporting news.
    The picture which had caught Gisela’s attention dominated the room. It was an oil painting of her father on his favourite hunter with two cavorting foxhounds in the foreground and, behind, a grey stone house of pleasing proportions. Though Miss Norton’s eyes could no longer see the picture well, she did not need them to recall its every detail. Beneath it hung two miniatures, one of two children, a boy and a girl, the boy with an arm flung protectively round his sister, for it was easy to see the likeness between the two, though he was dark and straight-haired and she had pale brown curls. It was not difficult either to trace in old Miss Norton the same fine bone structure and the same small head set on a long neck, as in the child’s portrait.
    The other miniature was of a very fair young man in an army officer’s uniform which seemed to eclipse his identity. He looked too young for it. He was indeed, like so many of his contemporaries, too young for what it signified at the time when the picture was painted. Miss Norton had been engaged to him once. He was her twin brother’s closest friend and both had passed out of Sandhurst