Astray Read Online Free PDF Page A

her breath, examining her nails.
    “It’s my money.”
    They stare at each other in the dim kitchen. After a second she reaches for Pet—unresisting now—and carries her upstairs.
    Caroline takes longer than usual to go through the routine; she sings Pet half a dozen nursery rhymes and stays for a while after the lamp is turned down. They say it spoils a child to let them have a light at night, but Caroline doesn’t care. If you break the cardinal rule when you’re still a girl, what does it matter if you break a few more? When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, she sings under her breath. Down will come baby, cradle and all.
    Bone-weary: she’s tempted to go to bed. But she can’t leave Fred alone downstairs. Entering the parlor, she sits straight down and picks up her hand of cards.
    Her brother’s hand closes over hers. “Caro.”
    The old name saps her, melts her.
    “What I said—”
    “Of course your wages are your own,” she tells him.
    “Of course they’re not. All for one, and all that. Besides, you earn twice what I do.”
    The word hits her hard. They’ve always spoken as if the figures Caroline adds to the household budget every week come from dividends, or a legacy. Earn: as if it were a job like any other. She feels mortification, and a strange sort of relief.
    “Last week I applied for the position of ticket-collector at the Olympic,” he goes on.
    “Fred, you can’t work in the evenings, too!”
    He shrugs like a small boy. “Today I heard the position has been filled; there were more than thirty applicants.”
    She doesn’t know what to say: what a shame, or just as well.
    “We can’t go on like this,” he says, pursing his lips.
    She stares at him.
    “A new beginning, that’s what we need, where nobody knows us. New surnames, even.”
    Caroline’s eyes hurt as they rest on her brother. So young still, so wonderfully stupid. Not that her borrowed surname means anything to her; she’d change it in the morning if it would do any good. “Fred,” she says softly, “that wouldn’t work for long. In another part of London, or another town, even, the neighbors—they’d start to notice as soon as there were—” Her throat locks on the word visitors. “People coming and going,” she finishes weakly.
    Fred’s jaw is set. “If I could get a better position, you could drop all that.”
    All that: only now, in the tightness of his words, can she hear how much he hates the men who have been swanning into his house since he was a child. She bites her lip. But what better position? Thirty men ahead of him for a job collecting theater tickets!
    “I wouldn’t mind getting into some other line altogether,” he mentions. “Some business you could help me with, even; you’ve got a great head for figures.”
    She breathes out her exasperation before she speaks. “In such times as these, Fred—”
    “I don’t mean in England,” he says, very low.
    “Not in England?” She repeats it without understanding.
    And then, unexpectedly, he grins. “If we made up our minds to a really fresh start … well, it could be anywhere. The Cape. Australia. Canada.”
    Caroline blinks. “You’re proposing that—”
    “Don’t ask me for any details yet,” he says, “but there are opportunities. Everyone says so. More space,” he adds urgently, “and fewer people. Less fuss about one’s origins, too.”
    She nods at that.
    “Things are just getting started in those sorts of places,” says Fred with a kind of wonder, “whereas here …”
    “Things have been going on as they are for such a long time.”
    “Yes.” He grips his sister’s fingers hard enough to hurt. “Where should we go?”
    “I—” She stops herself before she can say she doesn’t care, or that it makes no difference, because it’s not going to happen; it’s a child’s fantasy. “You choose.”
    “Could you bear it, really, Caro? Leaving England behind?”
    What’s the harm in humoring him?
    “I