Air and Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

go out with Mama to take tea at the club. She must submit to having her hair pulled back and plaited (for she is not yet sixteen and too young, Lady Moorehead feels, to be allowed to wear it up, or loose).
    But for the moment,she stands at the window and watches the play of sunlight on the fountains, and suddenly, feels energy, her own youth and confused desires, life , well up inside her, and does not know what she might possibly do with it, and in a great flurry, rushes out of the room and through the passages and the cool hall onto the porch.
    So that her father, just returned home, calls out, ‘Kitty, Kitty – whereare you going at such a rate?’, laughing. But she waves and runs on into the garden, and perhaps does not hear him.
    Only, stopping somewhere, down one of the gravel paths, beside the lawns where the grass is the vivid green of the new season, Kitty runs out of steam and stands stock-still again, irresolute, and a little foolish.
    ‘Kitty might still be six years old.’ Lewis has come into the room,laughing indulgently.
    ‘She is almost sixteen !’ And she says it with such passion that he swings round in surprise to stare at her.
    ‘Don’t worry about her.’
    ‘No. But then, of course, I do , I fret over her the entire time.’
    But then she smiles brightly and rejects his outstretched hand, not wanting to have this conversation now, when she is not completely prepared for, or relaxed about it.
    ‘Are you coming to the club?’
    ‘Later.’
    ‘Yes. Well then …’
    Lewis waits, lets her call the tune, as always, thinking again, she is too rare for this place, for me, still unable, even after nineteen years, to believe his own luck.
    At the door, she hesitates.
    ‘Lewis …’
    But it is all jumbled in her head – Kitty – her restlessness, which was plain for all to see – her being still a child and almosta woman – her cleverness – what ought to happen – what she herself wants – what Miss Hartshorn … and that was another thing – Miss Hartshorn.
    ‘And now we shall be late for tea.’
    She turns away and it is the same, abrupt impatience of movement that he had recognised in Kitty, dashing down the steps. He shivers, taken for a second by an appalling dread of losing either of them, and it cannot bea cloud crossing the sun, for clouds do not stray in that occasional manner here.

5
    IT WAS quite a dark room, not large, and the conservatory led directly out of it.
    On two walls, his books – ornithology, with some geology and botany lower down, and, here and there, a little literature. But the theology and classics, tools of his daily trade, had no place.
    His maps were raked below a specially built table, on which he could spread them in a frame, and beside them, the cabinetsof birds’ eggs, arranged beautifully in their drawers. Above, and taking up every other available space, the drawings and water-colours and identification charts of all the pale, delicate sea-birds, graceful of wing and leg, the colour of pebbles and waves, of sky and cloud, shore and shell.
    Thomas stepped inside and closed the door and for a moment stood quite still, and felt the familiar satisfactionand pleasure, and the absolute sense of his own identity.
    The fire burned sweetly, the lamp was lit, the room waited.
    But first, he must see to the birds.
    In summer, the whole outer wall of the conservatory slid back, and then the aviary was open to the sunshine and the outside air, and belonged more to the garden than the house. But now, the heat was on and the moisture that rose from thesmall pool in the centre, with its trickling fountain, made the air steamy to breathe.
    He switched on the lights, and at once the cages came alive as the tiny birds began to flit and flutter from side to side, flashing emerald and orange, black and saffron and scarlet wings, and the humming birds hovered, whirring softly in mid-air, and the cheeping rose from the cage like a cloud.
    He went tothe far end and carefully