A Judgement in Stone Read Online Free PDF

were visited by the same hopes and fears that affected them. At that stage Eunice was little more than a machine to them, and the satisfactory working of that machine depended on its being suitably oiled and its having no objection to stairs.
    But Eunice was a person. Eunice, as Melinda might have put it, was for real.
    She was the strangest person they were ever likely to meet. And had they known what her past contained, they would have fled from her or barred their doors against her as against the plague. Not to mention her future, now inextricably bound up with theirs.
    Her past lay in the house she was now preparing to leave. An old terraced house, one of a long row in Rainbow Street, Tooting, with its front door opening directly onto the pavement. She had been born in that house forty-seven years before, the only child of a Southern Railway guard and his wife.
    From the first her existence was a narrow one. She seemed one of those people who are destined to spend their lives in the restricted encompassment of a few streets. Her school was almost next door, Rainbow Street Infants, and those members of her family she visited lived within a stone’s throw. Destiny was temporarily disturbed by the coming of the Second World War. Along with thousands of other London schoolchildren, she was sent away to the country before she had learned to read. But her parents, though dull, unaware, molelike people, were upset by reports that her foster mother neglected her, and fetched her back to them, to the bombs and the war-torn city.
    After that Eunice attended school only sporadically. To this school or that school she went for weeks or sometimes months at a time, but in each new class she entered the other pupils were all far ahead of her. They had passed her by, and no teacher ever took the trouble to discover the fundamental gap in her acquirements, still less to remedy it. Bewildered, bored, apathetic, she sat at the back of the classroom, staring at the incomprehensible on page or blackboard. Or she stayed away, a stratagem always connived at by her mother. Therefore, by the time she came to leave school, a month before her fourteenth birthday, she could sign her name, read “The cat sat on the mat” and “Jim likes ham but Jack likes jam,” and that was about all. School had taught her one thing—to conceal, by many subterfuges and contrivances, that she could not read or write.
    She went to work in a sweetshop, also in Rainbow Street, where she learned to tell a Mars bar from a Crunchie by the colour of its wrapping. When she was seventeen, the illness which had threatened her mother for years began to cripple her. It was multiple sclerosis, though it was some time before the Parchmans’ doctor understood this. Mrs. Parchman, at fifty, was confined to a wheel chair, and Eunice gave up her job to look after her and run the house. Her days now began to be spent in a narrow twilight world, for illiteracy is a kind of blindness. The Coverdales, had they been told of it, would not have believed such a world could exist. Why didn’t she educate herself? they would have asked. Why didn’t she go to evening classes, get ajob, employ someone to look after her mother, join a club, meet people? Why, indeed? Between the Coverdales and the Parchmans a great gulf is fixed. George himself often said so, without fully considering what it implied. A young girl to him was always some version of Paula or Melinda, cherished, admired, educated, loved, brought up to see herself as one of the top ten per cent Not so Eunice Parchman. A big rawboned plain girl with truculent sullen eyes, she had never heard a piece of music except for the hymns and the extracts from Gilbert and Sullivan her father whistled while he shaved. She had never seen any picture of note but
The Laughing Cavalier
and the
Mona Lisa
in the school hall, and she was so steeped in ignorance that, had you asked her who Napoleon was and where was Denmark, she would have stared