Another part of the wood Read Online Free PDF

in a vision
of being alone while they had tea, sitting with a book, a good book, and reading all the words, alone in the empty hut.
    Abruptly Joseph said, ‘Oh, stay if you want to,’ and strode out. Roland struggled to his feet and ran after him. Kidney heard
him call ‘Wait for me’. Then Joseph’s head appeared at the window. ‘Come on, Kidney,’ he said gently. ‘Come and have some
tea with us.’ Almost tenderly he added, ‘We want you to come.’
    Smiling, Kidney lumbered out of the hut.

2
    After a supper of sausages, followed by cups of coffee, Roland had been put to bed in the long barn at the back of the hut.
He had protested at being couched out there, alone in the field. Privately Dotty had agreed with him, thinking he was too
little and too spoiled to rest easy away from the main hut. She had kept her opinion to herself, fearing Joseph might remember
why it was the child couldn’t sleep with him, deciding at the recollection that it was unjust, and that she, not his lovely
boy, must sleep in the barn with only a strip of brown carpet edged with mud between her and the restless Kidney. Guiltily
she watched Roland carried from the hut in his father’s arms.
    ‘Look up there,’ Joseph entreated, standing in the damp grass under the black sky, wanting Roland to observe the stars. But
Roland wouldn’t raise his head. In the darkness a bird flew from a swaying tree. Roland made sounds of misery. Once in bed,
laid down in the puffy darkness, Joseph told him to be a good boy and go to sleep.
    ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, stroking the child’s head, ‘I’m going to take you up the mountain. Just you and me. We’ll be explorers.
We’ll go very early,’ he continued, soothing himself as much as the child, ‘and we’ll see the tower and we’ll look down and
see the countryside spread out just like a map.’
    ‘I don’t like being here alone,’ whispered Roland in despair.
    Joseph tucked the rough blankets more firmly round the boy. ‘You won’t be alone. Kidney is going to sleep in the other bed.
We’re all going to bed shortly.’ His voice receded towards the door. ‘Now go to sleep, Roland, and no more nonsense. I’m only
next door. You’re not alone … Good night, boy.’ To which Roland
wouldn’t reply, leaving his father no alternative but to shut the door and stumble back over the grass to the paraffin-lit
hut.
    Roland, in bed, wiped at his face with the sheet and thought how cross his mother would be when he told her how frightened
he had been at night. Soundlessly his lips shaped the words betraying his father, and he saw her face looming before him,
eyes widening at the terrible story, her teeth set like pegs between her lips. ‘All alone, my little boy, left all alone.’
He looked up at the square of window above his head, trying to see the stars, but the glass was too thick and he didn’t dare
kneel upright in the bed. He remembered something his teacher had told him about stars, how they weren’t really there, only
the light coming down every night for ever. Maybe his mother would buy him a train set to make up for him being so unhappy
out there in the wood.
    In the hut Joseph was trying to justify his treatment of his son. ‘You were an only child,’ he told the placid George. ‘Do
you feel you were deprived or lonely as a boy?’
    ‘No,’ said George.
    Balfour, dabbing his eyes with a square of handkerchief, saw that Joseph was regarding him attentively. ‘Hay fever,’ he apologized
and blew his nose violently.
    Dotty rose and went to the end of the hut. She pulled the wicker basket out from under the settee and rummaged inside. Crouched
sideways on her haunches, chin down, she looked like an athlete landing after a pole vault.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Joseph asked.
    ‘Getting the Chablis.’
    ‘What on earth for?’
    ‘Because I feel like a drink.’ She stood up and walked to the table, not putting down the wine, face sullen in the yellow
light. ‘I did buy it