A Story Lately Told Read Online Free

and carried me downstairs. The house was dark and silent. Outside on the front steps in the frosted night, Dad held Tony in his arms. The sky was raining meteors. I remember Mum saying, “If you make a wish, it will come true,” and together, the four of us watched the mysterious passage of dying stars fading through the firmament.
    Tony and I were given rocking horses at Christmas. At least his rocked—it was dark, dappled gray, had a red patent-leather saddle and bridle, and plunged back on its base like a bucking bronco. My horse was heavy, mottled brown, made of painted tin. It humped up and down according to the pressure applied to its foot pedals, and groaned like something in pain. I found the disparity between them highly irritating and cried pitifully when Tony refused to let me up on his, even for a few minutes.
    The famous combat photographer Robert Capa came to Courtown and was one of the first to take pictures of Tony and me as toddlers, crawling on a polished wood floor, wide-eyed, like two little birds that had fallen out of their nest.
    Tony and I would sit on the upstairs landing at the top of the long quadrangle staircase of Courtown House and watch Dad at work from above, as he stalked slowly back and forth on the black-and-white inlaid marble squares that paved the hallway. This was a serious process. His secretary, Lorrie Sherwood, told us he was writing and never to interrupt.
    Early on, we were warned that certain things should by no means be touched. One such item was an automatic clotheswringer, a contraption screwed atop the washing machine, consisting of two porcelain rollers that squeezed the last drops of water from washed clothes before they were hung on the line. I have no idea why this object held me in a seductive thrall, but the attempt I made to send a towel through it one morning when backs were turned ended traumatically with my entire arm mashed up to the armpit between the wringers. Likewise, an attempt to rescue a daisy before the lawn mower got there resulted in losing a chunk of my little finger.
    Once in a while, the adults would agree to play us the score of Peter and the Wolf, which I found both thrilling and terrifying, and from which we invariably ran away screaming to hide in the nursery. There was a frightening book called Struwwelpeter —a German cautionary story about a child who sucked his thumb and had all his fingers cut off by a tailor, which included a horrible illustration of the poor boy, his hair standing on end, bleeding profusely from his severed digits. This alarmed me, because I was a confirmed thumb-sucker, although I noticed a certain grim amusement my parents seemed to derive from the book, and I guessed I would be spared the tailor’s pinking shears.
    Tony and I were fed breakfast in the nursery. Molly, a member of the kitchen staff, tall and lank, with the hint of a dark mustache, served us cold porridge floating in milk. I had a loathing for milk, even the way it looked in the bottle, opaque and thick with a blue tint at the edge of the glass—my diaphragm constricted at the sight of it. My place mat had illustrations from the rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” I knew what the words meant, and I would read the text over and over as I waited to be released from the table. For some unknown reason, it was considered appropriate to present children with foods they hated and then to keep them prisoner until they ate.
    In a corridor next to the dining room stood the highly sophisticated dollhouse that belonged to our landlord’s daughter, which I was forbidden to touch. I would peer through its perfectly curtained windows, marveling at the world in miniature—the tiny grand piano, the little stuffed armchairs. I dreamed of being a fairy and taking up residence inside.
    When I was three, Kathleen Shine came to look after us. With a small, tidy frame, calm blue eyes, short frizzy brown hair, and high cheekbones, she looked very much like Katharine Hepburn.