The End of the Point Read Online Free Page A

“Go!” Sometimes they’d meet up with another nurse, or Agnes would come with the big girls on their bicycles, or Charlie would appear suddenly, swoop upon his sister (Bea had to drop the harness, give her up) and fling her to the sky. Ashaunt, so narrow across, was nearly two miles long, and Bea and Janie would often walk the length of it with Blackie at their heels, stopping to pick blackberries. On sunny mornings, they met up with other nurses and children at Garrisons—the only sandy spot, the rest a pile of rocks—and spend an hour there before lunch and nap.
    Then Janie turned four, then five, and now (how fast it happened, even as it felt like several lifetimes ago that Bea had arrived at the family’s door) was eight. She was at school nearly all day during the year. She had a best friend, secrets, a diary with a lock. Moods. She had arithmetic homework that Bea left to the tutor to sort out. She sometimes grew bored with long summer days with her nurse, yet she was too young—and for this Bea was grateful—to keep up with her sisters. “Where is everybody?” she kept asking that summer, for there were few children about, just the Andersons, Stricklands and Childs come down for a stretch, and each with only boys.
    Let’s sew a pillow for Rose, Bea would suggest. Let’s go for a swim. Or walks and baking, checkers, shell crafts; like a suitor, she offered things forth. Sometimes Janie would frown or shake her head, but other times she’d sit by Bea and stitch her rows, or jump her checker piece across the board, or walk (skip, scooter, jump rope, as Bea hurried breathless behind) along the road. Once in a while, Janie would even ask Bea to play Rose and Teddy, or Rose, Annabel and Laura, though not if her sisters were around. Still, it was not like other years when they’d been, well, in love was the way Bea had once described it to Agnes, then wished she had not, for something—jealousy? judgment?—had crossed Agnes’s face. Agnes was, of the two of them, the more professional, the crisper; if you didn’t know her, you might even be afraid. In love , but in the easiest, most companionable way.
    Lately, Janie’s blue eyes had darkened in color, becoming cloudier, almost bruised and who could blame the child, with everything going on and the push and pull of growing up besides? But what to do? And did anyone notice? Janie might have been a half-tamed hedgehog for all her parents seemed to worry about her whereabouts or even Bea’s role in looking after her. Set out a bowl of milk; keep an eye out for foxes. But she would grow wild, but she would turn rude and prickly like her sisters. The family would (as was their right; still it felt like thievery) claim her as their own.
    When Bea was Janie’s age, she had minded her brother each afternoon while their mother finished her shift. She had put the ticket in the window, spread newspaper on the floor for the coal man, taken Callum round to the shops and Green, done everything but iron and cook, as her mother did not let her near the stove. At her grandparents’ in the country, she’d fetched water from the well, the buckets attached to a metal hoop that kept the splashing from your legs. In town, she had run messages to her mother’s sister in one direction, to her father at the goods yard in the other. She’s built like a boy, her father said once in front of Callum, insulting both of them at once. Bea had known how to swim—her mother, who’d lost a sister to drowning, had seen to that—and Janie was a strong swimmer herself, though she was not to go in alone (about this, both Bea and her parents stood firm). At eight, Janie still listened, but there was an out-of-sorts-ness to her that summer, an itchiness, that later Bea would view as partly her own fault—first, for hovering too close, then for letting her attention split in two.
     
    YEARS LATER, BEA, AGNES AND MRS. P. were drinking sherry in Bea’s room before lunch—it had become a