The Merciless Ladies Read Online Free

ignored. Fortunately for Dr Lynn, his work was considered of sufficient national importance for him to be left unmolested. And with the arrival of conscription the white feather ladies disappeared.
    As the Kennet ran almost at the bottom of’ the garden, there was constant bathing for the young and much paddling about the reach in an old rowing boat and a leaky canoe. Mrs Lynn would also immerse herself in the river every morning at seven o’clock. The irreverent Holly, when she was older, said it was her mother’s spiritual Ganges.
    The four of us would scrape together a snack lunch and go off for the day to some shady spot further up the river, to bathe and play wild games and fish for trout. Then we would return about seven, ravenously hungry, to find the kitchen fire out and the breakfast things unwashed. Mrs Lynn, in a much darned jumper, short skirt, ankle socks over lisle stockings, and red morocco slippers, would be in the study playing over one of Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas for the violin; and Dr Lynn would be upstairs in his room working out some theory to do with the relativity of acceleration.
    The strange part of such a discovery would be that Holly would forget her hunger and cling with one arm round her father’s neck wanting to know in simple terms what he was about, and Leo would immediately begin to argue dogmatically with his mother on just how the sonata should be played, leaving the only practical one, Bertie, and myself, to gather together a semblance of a meal.
    When she was eleven Holly climbed an oak tree at school, and fell out of one of the branches. She was laid up for some time and was sent home where she would receive ‘the best attention’. Thereafter she bowled, batted and walked with a slight limp.
    â€˜On my birthday too’, she said. ‘ Mummy had sent me a birthday cake she’d made herself. It’d caved in in the middle the way Mummy’s cakes always do, but it was frightfully rich. I got none for a week.’
    â€˜I thought your birthday was at Christmas. Otherwise, why the name?’
    â€˜Oh, didn’t you know? It was Daddy’s doing. He decided to call me Horace after his favourite poet. When I wasn’t a boy he made it Horatia, which was the nearest he could get. But the boys thought it foul, so everyone calls me Holly.’
    â€˜Yes, Horatia is a bit awful’, I agreed.
    She stared at me a moment. ‘And if you want to know, Bertie is called after Einstein and Leo’s real name is Galileo. Only don’t ever tell them I told you. Who were you called after?’
    â€˜My mother’s father.’
    â€˜Did he wear a kilt and paint his legs yellow?’
    â€˜Don’t be a young ass’, I said.
    Holly was twelve the year Leo and I were seventeen. Boarding school had given her a chance of regular meals – however stark and unappetizing, they were more use to her than what she got at home – and regular hours, and she grew and strengthened under the regime. But she was not remotely good-looking; her legs, it seemed, would always be like the cricket stumps she so regularly bowled at; her face had filled out sufficiently to make her spectacles seem less disproportionate; but her complexion was sallow and her large eyes were a muddy grey. And her hair grew no less lank as the years passed. She would make an excellent teacher like her parents, for she had more brain than the two boys put together, and even a certain sense of responsibility that her parents lacked. Nature had made one of its frequent mal-arrangements; if Holly had had Bertie’s looks and Bertie Holly’s brains they would each have been better fitted for the world.
    But we were the lucky generation. The young men who had been our immediate seniors at school were dying at Passchendaele, La Bassée, St Quentin, Péfonne. It would soon be our turn to fill the gaps. Yet of the four of us, although we were called up, only Paul