Down the Garden Path Read Online Free PDF Page B

was needed was to put some distance between Harry’s concept of me as a pal and my emergence as a woman. So one year I didn’t come home for the Christmas holidays. Instead I spent them with a friend at her family’s home in Bournemouth. The Jeffersons were wonderful people and made a great fuss over my birthday (celebrated as four days prior to my arrival at the vicarage), but guilt at leaving Fergy to fill Dad’s stocking and her own, and missing out on stirring the Christmas puddings for luck, almost made the sacrifice unbearable. The days until Easter seemed unending, and when I did at last get back to Kings Ransome it was to discover Harry was away on business for the agricultural firm he represented.
    Hadn’t Fergy always warned that not stirring the puddings would fetch forth seven years of bad luck? She was so often right in her ominous predictions. Indeed, the new month began with nine straight days of rain, a sure sign that evil forces were in ascendance. Still, I repeatedly told myself as the summer term dragged on that people made their own good or bad fortune. If I wanted to find my mother one day soon, I would have to go and look for her. If I wanted Harry now, I would have to go and get him.
    I took a good look in the mirror (something I was inclined to avoid because my reflection reminded me that, unlike most people I knew, I looked like no one but myself), and assessed my looks. Yes, I supposed I was pretty in an Old Masters kind of way. I would have preferred lush black hair and slumberous dark eyes, but my figure was coming along nicely, especially the upper portion, as a result of applying a herbal cream purchased at an exorbitant price via my friend Rosie Jefferson’s brother. And Harry had not seen me for almost a year.
    On a trip up to London to view the Houses of Parliament, I feigned illness and asked to be allowed to sit in the ladies’ cloakroom until I recovered. Knowing Miss Whale’s delicate sensibilities I was confident that visions of my being disgustingly sick would keep her at bay long enough for me to whip outside and down one of the side streets to the boutiques. Success. In one I found exactly what I wanted, a splashy black dress with a gravitating neckline and only inches of skirt. How smug I was as I sat on the train going back to school in my blue-and-gold-striped blazer and my demure straw hat, the dress concealed in my satchel. And how foolishly I forgot another of Fergy’s warnings: “God doesn’t sleep. He only pretends.”
    I was to be punished for my deviousness. My great plan to get Harry in a compromising situation from which the only decent outlet would be immediate marriage ended in catastrophe. I should have scented trouble ahead when things went too well—at first. Dad was glad I wanted to visit Vera and Harry. He liked them, and although he wouldn’t have liked the black dress, it was concealed under my raincoat. As I had known she would be, Vera was out at bingo that night, but Harry’s pleasure at seeing me eroded the instant the raincoat came off and he inhaled the first wave of the perfume I had sloshed over my body from the toes up. Could this be the man I had idolized for years, callously propelling me out the door, calling me a child—of all disgusting names? And, to add insult to injury, he said he was too fond— fond —of me to do anything that would hurt me.
    I would never forgive him. I didn’t plan to live long enough to forgive him! Back in our damp, chilly, black-and-white-tiled bathroom I tried to drown myself, but being the immature child I was, I couldn’t even do that right. The pungent scent of my Floral Passion bubble bath kept bringing me back.
    Something had to be made of the rest of my miserable existence, but for weeks I could not think of anything worthwhile, except making the lives of those around me as rotten as my own. The trouble with Dad was that he was so disgustingly understanding. After telling me that he was ready to