Back Read Online Free PDF Page A

years usefulness in us yet, what with the work I do unpaid on the H.R.O.N., and Amy who’s still fit enough to go down to the A.R.B.S., and put in a few hours each week. So I said, ‘Gerald,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to get a move on. It mayn’t be the best thing, not by a long chalk, for her to forget her own daughter.’ Mind you, Charley, she doesn’t even know her grandson now. And, as a woman begins to age, the toddlers play a great part, Charley boy, or they should do, that’s only human nature after all. So to cut a long story short, I made up my mind I’d call on Charley Summers. Not that we wouldn’t have been glad to see you, any day. After what you’ve been through. You mustn’t misunderstand me, please. But just to find whether she would …” and his voice trailed off as, turning his back, he began to move towards the house. Charley sullenly followed. “So don’tbe surprised if you notice a big change,” Mr Grant ended over his shoulder, in so loud a voice that Charley was afraid.
    But how dead selfish of the old boy, Charley felt as he stood in the porch of their villa while Mr Grant shouted for his wife. After all, here was a man who had no need for coupons, who couldn’t have to buy anything new. Because surely he had done enough, Charley thought, once more coming back to himself. When all was said and done he had risked his life, lost a leg, spent the best years of his prime in prison behind barbed wire, and, now that he was back, they had a use for him as a guinea pig on Rose’s mother.
    Mr Grant shouted again.
    “I’m coming dear,” she piped in a quiver, and there was Mrs Grant, too neat, scuttling down the stairs. She came straight on, never hesitated, flung her old arms round Charley’s neck, went up on her toes to do it, and sung out “John, John,” twice.
    “No it’s not John, dear, it’s Charley, back from the war,” Mr Grant announced at her towered white head of hair, which she was leaning on Charley’s neck as the young man lightly touched her elbows.
    “They are very cruel to me, John,” she said. From her round cheeks he found that she was crying.
    “Now dear, this is Charley Summers,” Mr Grant repeated.
    “Don’t you worry,” Charley mumbled.
    But she would not have it. She was most natural.
    “John, to think you’re back at last,” she said.
    “There you are,” the husband explained, “she thinks you’re her brother who was killed in seventeen.”
    Charley hardened his heart.
    “Why my little baby brother John,” Mrs Grant exclaimed in rather a happier voice and stood back, laying hands gently on his forearms. She looked yearning into his face. She was much too neat. But for two tear drops under the chin, and a wet run to each from out the corners of her eyes, which were intenselybright, everything was mouse tidy, except it seemed her wits.
    “Now Amy,” her husband begged.
    “But you mustn’t stand here. I don’t know where my mind is, I’m sure,” she went on, preceding him into their parlour. As he sat down he felt she did not seem so sure of him after all. In fact he did not like the way she shaped, complaining as she now was that it must be the war, that ever since the Russians gave up she had felt tired. “This terrible war,” she ended, and screened her eyes with a hand as if he were seated opposite nude.
    “Look dear,” the husband said, “you rest yourself while I go fetch our tea. I shan’t be a minute,” he explained to Charley, who did not want to be alone with her, who opened his mouth to ask him to stay but was too late, as happened so often.
    “So cruel,” Mrs Grant murmured, once they were alone. There was then a silence while she still held a hand on her eyes. Charley asked himself if it was safe for them to be left together, and then for no particular reason remembered that he had forgotten to buy the tie he’d meant to get in the morning.
    “You’re not John, are you?” she said, when he looked up.
    But he did not