Opposite the Cross Keys Read Online Free PDF Page A

conclude that my confident apprehension of her essential unattractiveness arose from her own deep conviction of it.
    I don’t know, either, how it was that I knew she was on my side, since she practically never praised anything I did, and her usual tone to me was shot through with a mockery only carelessly disguised: simply that I knew it and that, safe in her love, I was unconquerable. She dressed me, fed me, attended to my most intimate needs with a lack of tenderness which was a wonderful antidote to the anxious adoration lavished on me by my besotted family.
    One of the few books she had read was The Pilgrim’s Progress , given her as a prize for Good Conduct and kept wrapped up in a brown paper cover on which she had printed, each letter in a different colour crayon, MAUD MARY ANN FENNER, A PRIZE. She was fond of telling me that I was the burden Christ had seen fit to put upon her, one of which, like Christian’s in the story, she could not hope to divest herself until the Celestial City was in sight, if then.
    â€˜Knowing you,’ she said, with that familiar mixture of mockery and complaint, though this time it wasn’t clear to whom exactly the complaint was addressed, ‘once I get through the pearly gates what’s the odds the first thing I’ll hear ’ll be a certain little voice piping up, “Maud, can I try out your wings? Maud, can I have a go on your harp? Pleeease. Maud –” a passable imitation of myself in the wheedling mode – “can I?”‘
    â€˜At least,’ I pointed out, ‘it’ll mean I must have been good enough to get to heaven myself.’
    â€˜You good! Artful, you mean. Slipped in when Peter had to go and do a Number Two.’
    Apart from the family, who, in her book, were put on earth to serve my needs, Maud hated everyone who was so much as civil to her charge. Even the milkman, whose dashing good looks always set Maud’s face aflame when he strode up to the kitchen door looking like Tom Mix except that the wide leather belt swaggering about his hips was hung with the pint and the half-pint measuring mugs instead of pearl-handled shooters, was punished with the withdrawal of his weekly sweetener of Woodbines after the day he took me for a ride in his milk chariot, among the clanking churns. Her chief enemy was May Bowden, our neighbour, a spinster who would have been dumbfounded had she been able to plumb the depths of Maud’s hatred for her.
    May Bowden, who, being rich, was said to be a little eccentric – as distinct from being soft in the head, a condition which only afflicted the lower orders – often proclaimed her intention of leaving me her fortune when she died.
    â€˜That’ll be the day!’ Maud would mutter, not very inaudibly.
    The only other person allowed unrestricted access to my favours was Mrs Fenner, who, as Maud’s mother, was, one might say, a mere extension of Maud herself; the only other Fenner I knew until I went to Salham St Awdry.
    Mere!
    Mrs Fenner was the blooming miracle who, once a week, erupted into our pleasant, but bland, existence. She was a large, handsome woman with polished apple cheeks, whose abundant flesh, electric vitality, and sheer animal high spirits appeared all three indifferently restrained by the Edwardian corset and costume of antique mode which, summer or winter, were her best for a day in town. There was scarcely a Saturday, out on the Market Place, when one or other of the pearl buttons which marched in formation down the front of the close-fitting, three-quarter length coat did not pop off, a small explosion, to be scrabbled for by me under people’s feet, or among the trash accumulated beneath the stalls; sometimes to be found, more often not, which was why none of the buttons quite matched, the spaces being filled in, upon our return for tea, from the nearest my mother’s sewing box could provide. How Mrs Fenner laughed whenever a button