Everything Will Be All Right Read Online Free PDF Page B

from his bedsheet and jumped with it out of an upstairs window and somehow only sprained his ankle. His teachers warned that he wouldn’t get a place at a good school. Kay was the baby, who was just growing out of being everyone’s little pet into a silent, stubborn, and stolid child, tall like her mother, with Vera’s large long face, and with a head of startling white-blond hair, which Lil cut in a short bob.
    Dick and Vera were waiting for one of the new houses that were being built in Farmouth; in the meantime they were given the old gray house because the Port Authority had bought it up and wasn’t using it. It had long stone mullioned windows with leaded panes; inside the rooms were higgledy-piggledy and unexpected, with low doorways and crooked passages. A narrow spiral staircase behind the kitchen led up to a mysterious tiny room with stone shelves all round where they stored apples; in summer Joyce used to read there. There was a walled kitchen garden, and outside the back door of the house were a walnut tree and a huge William pear tree: fat pears smashed onto the path, and in the autumn mornings when they first opened the back door, Winnie, their brindled bulldog, would push past them and dash out to gobble them up. They found a bat in the living room, its ears as long as its body (Ann put on gloves and carried it outdoors); once a solemn-staring owl was on the sill by an open window in one of the bedrooms. The bathroom was on the ground floor, and the bath had to be filled with buckets of hot water from the stove; outside the window the weeds grew tall and green and were all they needed for a curtain, until Joyce began to imagine she could hear rustlings and made Lil pin up an old blanket when it was her turn.
    The house stood on reclaimed estuary land, and wide rhines—drainage ditches—covered with bright green algae crisscrossed the fields all round. Ducks and moorhens swam on them, as did the geese who were Ann’s special friends; she stroked their fat creamy necks and kissed them on their beaks. One particularly severe winter they were cut off by snow from Farmouth for a whole week (Uncle Dick eventually got through to them with food and paraffin). Then in the spring when the snow melted, the rhines flooded and the house stood in a shallow lake of water. The children made a boat out of an old tin tub, the one Lil used to wash Kay in front of the kitchen stove.
    When Kay wouldn’t go in the “boat,” all the others became bent upon coaxing her into it, as if she were missing something transforming and essential.
    â€”Cowardy custard! said Peter.
    â€”You’ll love it! Martin pleaded. It isn’t dangerous; see how shallow it is? It’s so easy: look! It’s jolly good fun. You can come in with me.
    And he executed some nifty turns and splashed up and down, paddling with the spade. Martin was good at all these sorts of things: paddling a boat, climbing trees, clambering (unbeknownst to his mother) along the rafters in the hayloft at their neighbor’s farm, or steering the old pram, which they used as a go-cart, on the causeway that ran down to the shore. Kay pressed her mouth shut and shook her head and clung to the little scrap of grubby blanket that was her “sucky” to get her to sleep, which she took everywhere with her. (“One of these mornings I’m going to drop that in the stove!” Lil said whenever she saw it, so Kay had learned to keep it out of sight, in her pocket or balled up in her hand.)
    Peter was—inevitably—the one who tipped out of the tub into the filthy water. He lost his nerve when he drifted slightly away from the house, which stood on a slight rise; they knew they must be careful not to paddle near the rhines, where the water was deep. He raised himself awkwardly to look behind him and then went in with a big splash and a funny truncated scream and had to wade ignominiously back to the others, pulling