Nightingale Wood Read Online Free Page B

was because Viola had not been able to let the flat that she had not been able to come to The Eagles until more than three months after Teddy’s death. She had kept on writing to her in-laws, putting off her arrival because of the flat, until Madge, in her blunt outspoken way, had said that it was as plain as a pikestaff that the girl did not want to come at all.
    Then there had been more delay over the cats.
    Teddy had been exceedingly fond of the cats, Sentimental Tommy and Valentine Brown (named after characters drawn by his favourite author, Sir J. M. Barrie) and that was why Viola had felt it her duty to find a first-class home for them. This took time, because both were enormous, full of crotchets, set in their ways, and hearty eaters. They also refused to be separated, immediately falling into a rapid decline if anybody tried it on. Viola, with Shirley’s help, had at last landed them in a roadhouse near St Albans which believed in the personal touch.
    But it had all taken time: and Mrs Wither, catching the note of embarrassment in Viola’s voice as well, wondered for the hundredth time if she really did not want to live at The Eagles.
    If she did not, it was very wrong and ungrateful of her.
    ‘Shirley Davis? I think I have heard you mention her before, have I not?’
    ‘Oh, hundreds of times, I sh’d think. She’s my best friend, you know. She was at my wedding.’
    ‘I remember her perfectly. A very striking-looking girl.’
    With dyed hair, thought Mrs Wither, for that shade of red could never be real.
    Some uninteresting conversation about the flat followed while the car got slowly through the narrow crowded streets of Chesterbourne. Viola answered Mrs Wither’s remarks politely and sensibly, but it was plain that she was thinking about something else; and when at last the car passed a small draper s shop on the corner of the High Street she leaned right out of the window, exclaiming, ‘Oh, there’s the shop! How lovely to see it again,’ and craning still further as the car drew away from Burgess and Thompson, Ladies’ Outfitters, ‘Oh! there’s Catty! At the door, matching something!’
    Mrs Wither said nothing, the usual method in the Wither ménage of showing someone that they had dropped a brick; and Viola slowly drew herself into the car, leaned back, and rolled the fussily cuffed gloves into a ball. She said nothing, either.
    After the little pause, Mrs Wither thought this a good moment to make the speech she had prepared about being glad that Viola was coming to live with them, and how she must try to feel that The Eagles was her real home.
    It did not occur to Mrs Wither to apologize for the lack of nightlife, or of any life, at The Eagles, because it did not occur to her that a young widow needs life. Mr Wither had said that Viola must come to live with them because, if she did not, she would get into a muddle with Teddy’s money. Also, the Wither cousins would Say Things. That was why Viola was coming. Mrs Wither felt that she was doing her duty in making the little speech, but she did not much like Viola (so young, so pleasure-loving, rather common) and was secretly dismayed that she was going to live at The Eagles.
    She was trying not to mind Viola’s having been a shopgirl. It was not Christian to mind; Tina did not mind. But poor Madgie minded; she demanded what the devil would everyone say up at the Club? and it was for Madgie’s sake that Mrs Wither had gently repressed Viola when she stared at the shop out of the car window.
    In reply to Mrs Wither’s speech, Viola gave her a quick nervous glance and a little smile, and Mrs Wither leaned back more comfortably now that duty was done, and the embarrassing incident over.
    Mr Wither was working out figures in his den when they got home, but Tina was on the doorstep, smiling and waving, and she hurried down to kiss Viola as Saxon opened the car’s door.
    ‘It is nice to have you, Vi,’ putting her arm about her sister-inlaw’s