Long Live the King Read Online Free PDF Page B

such a very vain and frivolous person. The stove is the best place for it. And what are those silly little creatures? What on earth are they meant to be? Like no creature I have ever seen. Is it a very dark morning, or has the time come when I need spectacles? Oh dear, I hope not.’
    ‘It may be both,’ said Ivy. ‘One day you don’t need them, the next you do, my mum says.’ This morning Elise was talkative. When her husband left the house and went for a walk, which was seldom, she could become quite friendly.
    ‘I think the little creatures are meant to be Christmas reindeers, walking across the page,’ said Ivy, helpfully.
    ‘What have reindeers to do with Christmas?’ Elise was puzzled.
    ‘Father Christmas from the North Pole,’ said Ivy. ‘He brings presents on his sledge.’
    ‘Fairy tales and poppycock!’ Elise was indignant. ‘At home in Innsbruck when I was a child, St Nicholas came on Christmas Eve and gave you an orange if you were a good child and a lump of coal if you were naughty. Once I was given a piece of coal. I cried a great deal, but they would not tell me what I had done that was bad. I never found out. My husband is not a great believer in presents at Christmas time, and neither am I. Better that Adela does not receive them. Christmas is a happy time, but that is to do with the birth of our Lord, not self-indulgence, overeating and presents brought by reindeer, which harks back to the old pagan ways, and must be rooted out from Christendom.’ But Ivy thought that perhaps Elise was trying a little too hard to persuade herself. She was poking the paper with a finger.
    ‘I wonder if it’s velvet,’ she said. ’My sister-in-law is famous for her gowns.’
    ‘It seems a wicked waste to burn it,’ said Ivy, ‘whatever it is. Perhaps I should take it down to the Almshouses and give it to the lady superintendent there? On Christmas Eve they distribute gifts for the poor of the parish. Then we’ll know it’s gone to someone deserving. The Reverend doesn’t have to know.’
    ‘Very well,’ said Elise and gave Ivy the glimmer of a smile.
    Ivy decided she would never marry, not if you ended up married to some man who so crowded your mind you could smile only when he was out of the house.
    Later that morning Ivy cut through the churchyard on her apparent way to the Almshouses. She would drop the parcel off at her mother’s cottage, reindeers and all. The fog had burned off and the day was suddenly bright and cheerful. The yew trees which stood in rows along the path from the lych-gate to the church door were bright with berries – except as ever the one with broad sinewy trunk and gnarled branches, said to date from William the Conqueror, which managed only a few pitiful orange-red berries every year. The weathercock on the steeple glittered in the sun, and was beginning to flash as the wind got up.
    As it happened she encountered Adela, and pushed the parcel further into her basket. Better if it was not seen. Adela was in tears, as she so often was. The workmen had been busy the day before, and the remnants of the musicians’ gallery, its pale wood splintered and powdery, lay in pieces on the ground, piled ready for the bonfire. Adela was in a state of lamentation, wringing her hands over the wreckage. Was she more like Helen, Ivy wondered, Helen watching the burning towers of Troy, or Dido weeping for Aeneas, or Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott ? Ivy’s mother Doreen loved to pin up prints of sad, beautiful ladies on her cottage wall, rescued from her novelties stall, fly-blown and damp-stained though they might be, and Ivy knew and loved them all.
    Adela stood and watched, and Ivy too, as a couple of brawny men carried out the old gated pews, almost black with age, to add to the pile for burning. The new open pews, in a lightweight, orangey-coloured wood which Ivy did not recognize, had already been delivered and were stacked against the stone walls. She could hear the uneven sound of