Hester's Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

a brief hug, and then he was gone in the same taxi that they had taken from the station. Henri had asked the driver to return for him.
    The place looked completely empty to Estelle. It was raining when they arrived, and the sky was so low and grey over the purplish hills that she felt she could reach up and touch it. There were a few sheep grazing on the moor and what her father called ‘a village’ was two streets, a church, a grim-looking grey stone school house, one shop and a tavern of some kind called a ‘pub’, her father said. Her mother’s cousin lived at the far end of the village. On the drive from the station, just before they reached their destination, they passed a big house. Estelle looked at it through the bars of its tall, wrought-iron gates and wondered who lived there. Paula, Estelle’s cousin, told her later that it was called the Witch’s House and that it had been empty for years, spiders and bats the only company for theghosts who lived there, and hooty owls nesting in the trees that grew behind it.
    Estelle first saw Paula looking down from the upstairs front room window as she and her father got out of the taxi. She had a narrow face, a long nose and thin lips, and her brown fringe fell on to a wide forehead. She looked cross, as though she wasn’t a bit pleased that her French cousin was coming to live with the family, and this, Estelle realised quite quickly, was entirely true. Paula thought of her as a nuisance and treated her from the very first with complete disdain and dislike.
    Mr and Mrs Wellick – Auntie Rhoda and Uncle Bob – weren’t unkind. Estelle only realised much later that they had little aptitude for conversation or laughter and exchanges with them from the very first day were formal and wooden. Whatever came out of their mouths sounded to her like sentences repeated from a reader, or textbook.
    This is your room, dear … we hope you’ll be very happy with us … we’re sure you’ll be a good girl … eat your nice tapioca pudding now . And on and on. Those puddings made every meal a torment. Wobbly or gelatinous or gritty white concoctions appeared regularly on her plate and she found them disgusting. As she swallowed each mouthful, she tried hard to think about Grand-mère’ s pastries and lemon mousse, her pots au chocolat , meringues and profiterôles – everything delicious she’d ever eaten.
    The house was colourless. Curtains of a dark non-colour hung at the windows; the paintwork was a lighter shade of nothing; the carpets were trying to be green but failing miserably. Auntie Rhoda and Uncle Bob dressed to blend into their surroundings in washed-out grey and a thousand variations on beige.
    The Wellicks did their best. Bob Wellick went intoKeighley every day to work as a clerk in an accountant’s office and returned at night. Auntie Rhoda stayed at home and looked after Paula and Estelle.
    Estelle felt a desperate longing for France that she didn’t have the words to express. On her first night in England she lay in chilly sheets, with Paula asleep in the next bed, and stared at the ceiling. She thought of the taxi, driving away down the road with her father, who never looked back to wave at her, even though she’d stood at the gate for a long time staring after the car. It had truly happened – he’d left her in this place all on her own. Until the moment when she saw the car disappear into the mist that seemed to have fallen while they were drinking tea with the Wellicks, part of Estelle believed that perhaps it wouldn’t happen, that Papa would say Right, my dear. Drink up your milk and come home to Paris with me .
    She felt she was nowhere; not in her home, not in some other home, just in a sort of limbo, a non-place that she would never get used to. Where was Grand-mère ? Was she thinking of her? Did she miss her? Estelle imagined her grandmother in the high bed at the Rue Lavaudan, with lace-trimmed pillows heaped behind her head, and the