Master of the Moor Read Online Free PDF

and blue check carpet slippers.
    Once she had been pretty and lively with a twenty-three-inch waist. She had been second housemaid at Chesney Hall and Arthur Naulls had been under-gardener. They had had several children, of all of whom but the eldest Arthur was the father. Mrs Naulls was in Sunningdale because her son Stanley was a Hilderbridge councillor and had pulled strings. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a chance for someone with such a large family, almost any of whom could have taken her in. The only one, in fact, who had offered had been Lyn. Stephen had vetoed that, though, before she had made her offer to anyone but him, and now he tended to tell people they couldn’t have his grandmother because it wouldn’t be fair on his wife. He had been brought up to call Mrs Naulls ‘Nanna’ but had had more luck with her than with Dadda when he wanted to change this mode of address.
    ‘How are you, Grandmother?’ he said. He had brought her a box of fruit jellies, the only passion she still had. She took them in unsteady hands stained with grave marks, and peered with suspicion at the manufacturer’s name. ‘How have you been getting on?’
    ‘Just the same.’
    ‘Anybody been to see you?’
    Mrs Naulls shook her head. ‘Nobody ever comes to see me.’ She took the cellophane wrapping off the box. ‘Not a soul.’
    ‘Oh, Mrs Naulls, what an untruth!’ said the old woman in the next chair. She was the one who had been knitting. ‘Your son Leslie was here only yesterday.’
    ‘Haven’t got a son called Leslie, have I, Stanley?’ said Mrs Naulls, dropping cellophane on the floor.
    ‘Leonard. And I’m Stephen.’
    ‘Nurse’ll be after you,’ said the knitter. ‘You’re what they call a litter bug.’
    Mrs Naulls ate a crimson jelly and then a green one. She didn’t offer the box. A bovine contentment came into her face as she chewed. Stephen had never been able to talk to her about her relationship with the great novelist. He had been over twenty before he had even found out about it but he hadn’t been old enough to dare ask his grandmother how it had been and how she had felt and what they had talked about. Now when he might dare it was too late. But still he searched for ways to bring the conversation round to Tace.
    ‘I expect you’ve been watching those “Bleakland” programmes, haven’t you, Grandmother?’
    ‘Pardon?’ she said, her mouth full.
    ‘On the television, Saturday nights.’
    A woman who had been looking at the screen turned to him and said, ‘I saw one, round at my daughter’s. It was lovely. Lovely dresses.’
    ‘Why can’t you see it here?’
    ‘They get us to bed,’ said the knitter. ‘Eight they start getting us to bed.’
    ‘That’s a pity,’ Stephen persisted. ‘You’d have liked to watch that, Grandmother.’
    ‘How’s Rosemary, Keith?’ said Mrs Naulls.
    ‘If you mean Lyn, she’s fine. And I’m Stephen.’
    He looked at her hopelessly. She had come to this, to a limp white heap who had forgotten the names of her nearest and dearest. Once he had tried to extract so much from her, and not just details of the Tace affair. She was the key to a past he needed to understand. Dadda’s temper, that he had inherited along with Dadda’s darkness and Dadda’s height, had got the better ofhim and he had attacked her, physically attacked her. But that was more than half his lifetime ago. He got up.
    ‘Time I was on my way.’
    Mrs Naulls said lucidly, as if veils had suddenly, when it was too late, fallen from her mind and her speech, ‘It was good of you to come, dear. Thank you for the jellies.’
    The knitter waved. Stephen was sure his grandmother had fallen asleep before he was even out of the room. It had begun to rain. Soon it was raining hard enough, Stephen noted dismally, to keep him off the moor for the evening. He felt as he had done when a small boy and rain or some other calamity of nature had kept him from a picnic, resentful and somewhat