Absolute Hush Read Online Free PDF Page B

anything to catch fire, do we, darling?’ and, horror filling George’s mouth with saliva as he watched, she snapped off the heads of George’s carefully chosen matches.
    He managed to blurt, ‘They’ll be too short.’
    But Elizabeth only laughed and said, ‘You’ll have to find smaller conkers, then.’ After that, she kept asking him, ‘Where is the little conker car? Show it to Mummy, darling.’
    â€˜How do you make a car from conkers, Sissy?’ George asked his sister hoarsely.
    â€˜Well, you don’t, do you, silly,’ she snapped. ‘About the only thing you can make from them is chairs.’
    All afternoon the pair sat spluttering with exasperation as they tried to create with the spoiled matches, but though strong, their squat plump hands were neither flexible nor clever.
    Mrs Lovage always had matches with her because she was a heavy smoker. Cigarettes had shaped Mrs Lovage. Her mouth had become lopsided from the fag that was almost always hanging from its corner. Her eyes had become permanently narrowed from avoiding the smoke, and smoke had been rising up the front of her face for so many years that the front of her white hair had become stained a brownish yellow. Even her body had become a little twisted because of smoking, for, when both her hands were occupied, she would bring her bony shoulder forwards and ease on to it the ash from the cigarette her lips presently clutched. The small grey column would balance there until she got a chance to lean forwards and shake it, with a wriggle of a shoulderblade, into a wastepaper basket.
    Mrs Lovage had always had her suspicions about George. ‘Where were you when the village hall Christmas tree went up, that’s what I’d like to know?’ she had said last December.
    Mr Lovage, who was on the committee, had had to rush out and cut another tree on Christmas Eve, and people had brought decorations from their own trees because every single bit of tinsel from the hall had been burnt.
    â€˜And what about Farmer Potter’s hay barn,’ Mrs Lovage had hissed in June. ‘I bet you knew something about that, young man.’
    â€˜I don’t, Mrs Lovage. I really don’t,’ wailed George.
    The lopsided conker chair was not, Elizabeth pointed out, a car. She held the cracked, wool-festooned object to the light and considered it gloomily. She herself was good at manipulating materials. The manufacture of small delicate objects was her delight. She stitched miniature embroideries using the finest needles and the most glowing colours. Her brilliant silk landscapes, framed and hung, looked, from only a smalldistance, as though they were painted in oils with a sable paintbrush.
    â€˜It’s rather crude, considering your age,’ she said at last. ‘I wonder why you could not make anything better than this.’
    But the very awfulness of this conker thing suddenly filled her with a desire to hug them. A blast of love rushed through her because of their incompetence. She took a step towards them, her arms reaching. But then she stopped. Sissy had one hand on her hip and stared into her mother’s face. Her eyes had that diamond brightness that always alarmed Elizabeth.
    â€˜We could not make anything better because you did not have us educated,’ said Sissy coldly. ‘I don’t think it’s fair that you should laugh at us because we are bad at doing things when it’s your fault.’
    Elizabeth stared at her daughter with a sinking heart and thought, ‘I feel as if Tim has come back from death to scold me.’ She let out a moan, but for some reason refrained from saying, ‘You make me so unhappy I wish I were dead.’
    After Sissy’s remark, Elizabeth retired to her small sitting-room where, unable even to find the heart to go on with her embroidery, she flipped through the survivors of her collection of pre-war magazines and answered her