In the Springtime of the Year Read Online Free PDF Page B

of them afraid or embarrassed. There was no need for much speaking.
    Jo went into the kitchen, she heard him open the range and begin to riddle out the cold ashes; he went outside for coal, filled the kettle.
    He called through, ‘I’ll do the hens, in a minute, when this is going.’
    ‘No.’
    For she wanted to do something herself, and she wanted to see the hens. She took the scoop and filled it with meal. Jo did not argue. He accepted, always, what people said, respected them.
    The hens were restless inside the coop, waiting like a gaggle of school-children for the gates to be unlocked, they came out and flapped around her legs, bumping up against one another, as she mixed the meal and water. It seemed a hundred years since yesterday morning, when she had come down to do this same job, after Ben had left for work.
    Then there were the eggs, several of them still warm. She put them into the empty scoop and, lying there in a clutch together, pale brown and creamy grey, they were like the beach stones Jo had collected, on a holiday the family had taken, when he was six. The Bryces had had some money then, put by over the years, and they had all of them gone forty miles on the train from Thefton, to the sea. Jo had told her about it, he remembered every detail, the five days’ holiday still shone out in magic splendour from the past. That was before Ruth had come here, and it was a time she liked to hear about, because anything that had happened in Ben’s life was important to her, she wanted to link herself with it in her imagination.
    It had only been a month afterwards that Arthur Bryce had been gored by the bull, and though he went back to work for Rydal eventually, it was only on odd jobs, the money wasn’t the same and so there had been no more holidays.
    ‘I could fry an egg for you,’ Jo said, when she brought them in, ‘The range is getting up all right.’
    ‘No.’
    He didn’t press her.
    ‘But you have one. You get some breakfast, Jo.’
    ‘I came straight out when I woke. The others weren’t up.’
    ‘Alice was here until late.’
    ‘Yes. And then they went on all night, crying and everything. I kept hearing them.’
    He selected an egg.
    ‘You didn’t cry, Ruth.’
    ‘No.’
    Jo – how could he be only fourteen and know so much, be so sure of what to do, how to talk to her? He was small for his age, and he had his father’s build, broad-shouldered and with wide-spread hands and feet. It was Ben and Alice who were tall and light-boned like their mother.
    He cooked two eggs with great care, basting them with fat, until the membrane over the yolks went milky and opaque. Was there nothing he could not do? And do well, because he was patient and thorough. He went to the cupboard for a plate, paused, glanced at her. Ruth shook her head. But it pleased her to watch Jo eating the eggs, with bread and butter, his face serious and yet calm – they were both of them at ease.
    She had met Jo only a few days after the first time she saw Ben, and an affection and understanding had at once been born between them. Jo had told her about the hoopoe he had seen in the woods, near Charnley, and how he had gone numb with the excitement of it, the bird was so rare and beautiful, with its exotic plumage and crest.
    ‘No one believed me,’ he had said, ‘I wished I’d not told them. They all went out, right through the woods looking for it. Well, I knew they wouldn’t see it, they made too much of a noise, you don’t get to see anything that way. They said I’d been day-dreaming, only they meant lying. But it was a hoopoe. I know it was, I saw it.’
    The next day, he had brought a bird book to show her, to Godmother Fry’s cottage, where she was staying.
    ‘It belonged to my great-grandfather.’ He turned over the pages with immense care. ‘There’s a lot of his things in our house. Nobody else bothers with them.’
    The book was heavy, bound in wine-red leather and with thin sheets of tissue paper