A Winter's Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

over-indulgent mother; knowing more about Toby, she supposed, his weakness, his incompetence, his easy, lovable, exploitable temperament than she knew herself. Things he would never tell her and which she would never believe in any case but which lay between them, heavy, bitter, without compassion. He would blame her, reprimand her, advise her, but he would not understand. She could not lean on him, could not turn to him for reassurance as badly – badly – she longed to do. Such a thing would have been unthinkable. She could never have survived the rebuff. Almost – and choking on her own injustice – she found herself hating her brother Benedict again.
    Miriam, who had nothing to ask and therefore nothing to fear, smiled not fondly but perhaps appreciatively across the room at him. Naturally she had not been present at his birth but she knew that it had taken place in the middle of a frozen December, a black bitter night with snow drifting so high that the doctor’s gig had foundered on the road to High Meadows, leaving Aaron Swanfield to deliver his own firstborn and not greatly welcome son, no doubt with clumsy hands and then to leave him unwrapped, almost forgotten in the cold room while he gave what comfort he could – and it would not have been much – to his dying wife.
    Miriam – herself the child of a bright May morning – could perfectly understand that the world to Benedict must have seemed in those first moments to be a bleak and hostile place; the act of birth itself a conflict in which only he, not his adversary, had survived. Had life always appeared so to him? She shivered and then, with a quick return to her Maytime humour, gave him another quite playful smile.
    â€˜We were discussing the problem of our young widow, my dear.’
    â€˜Is she really such a problem?’
    â€˜Ah well.’ And Miriam became arch in her manner, ‘pretty Mimi’ at her sweetest and most caressing. ‘That depends on you, dear boy. You are the head of the family, after all, are you not?’
    â€˜I believe I am.’
    â€˜Well then – I should not care to invite her to make her home with us, as seems only proper, and then find that I had acted against your wishes. Benedict dear – what would you like me to do?’
    â€˜Miriam,’ he said, his mouth faintly amused as it sometimes was with her, ‘I think you must do as you please.’
    Good. It had been, it must always be, her intention. But just the same, even Mimi with all her skill and charm and daring and the security of the promise Benedict had made his father, had so far never challenged her husband’s eldest son directly without making sure, beforehand, that it was an issue about which he did not greatly care.

Chapter Two
    Sitting in the empty, suburban train, Claire Swanfield tried hard to remember the face of her young husband and failed utterly. He had been twenty-one when she had last seen him, a slender young man with a teasing smile, blue eyes, light brown hair, almost six feet in height with not enough weight to balance it, the loosely-knit frame of youth all hollows and angles, waiting for maturity and good living to fill him put.
    He had been twenty-one and highly pleased with himself. She had been nineteen and on her honeymoon, shy and adoring and still not entirely certain how it had been allowed to happen. He was not only a young warrior, a mischievous Sir Galahad indulging himself in a little honest enjoyment before setting off to find the Holy Grail, but he was also a Swanfield. She was Claire Lyall, no one in particular, who had caught his roving eye at a tennis party at High Meadows and held it because that high-charged atmosphere of patriotism and sacrifice and young heroic death had been so apt to generate romance.
    Looking back down the far, thin distance separating her from that other dimension, that other reality of ‘just before the war’, a hundred times four