Spilt Milk Read Online Free PDF Page A

river. Green newts shimmied in under the cracks in the door. Vivian put themoutside but they came back, like messengers from the river, reminding them of its closeness. The cooking range rusted. Even the light through the thin glass windows seemed damp and watery. And still the sisters cried, adding their own salt tears to the wet little riverside cottage.
    May brought hot weather. Day after day, the glaring sun scorched the land. The cottage was a waterless ship then, beached and cracking in the drying afternoons. Bedding hung from open windows like windless sails; the door and window frames shrank ever more crooked. Finally the sisters had no more tears. They, too, were dried out.
    ‘If you’re willing to work,’ Mrs Langham said when she called to see the sisters, ‘we need women to take picnics to the labourers in the fields.’
    ‘We’ll do it,’ said Nellie, her lips stained red with cherry juice. ‘We’d be glad to.’
    They collected jugs of tea and parcels of bread and cheese from the kitchens, crossing the water meadows, following a group of other women with their arms full of picnics. All along the river where the men were working, yellow buttercups smothered the green banks. Church bells for a wedding pealed in the distant village, the sound drifting across the fields.
    The labourers coppicing the willows had put down billhooks and saws and settled themselves under oak trees where it was shady. Swallows – the first of the season – darted across the sky. They brought a new summer on their wingtips. Vivian marched on ahead, catching up with the other women handing out picnics. Nellie stopped to watch the birds. They swept towards the river where a man waded in the shallows, a bundle of canes on his shoulder. It was him.
Joe
.
    He heaved the canes onto the shoreline and climbed the bank, grabbing at bushes to pull himself up. It looked to Nellie as though the river was reluctant to let go of him. Finally he stoodon the bank. When he turned his head in her direction she stumbled forwards, horrified to be caught staring, treading on her skirts, nearly dropping the jug she was carrying.
    He waved and called loudly to her.
    ‘Do you have a drink there for me, Miss?’
    ‘Cold tea,’ Nellie called back, lifting the jug, liquid spilling down her arm. She cursed her clumsiness. Now she had no choice but to go to him. Perhaps it was the hot sun that made her feel slow or the way he stared so openly at her, but Nellie stumbled again as she walked. Sunlight dropped through gauzy clouds. She offered him the tea and his face lit in a slow smile. She could smell the river on him, a familiar odour of green weeds, mud and washed stones. Nellie found herself lifting her face to breathe in his watery scent.
    ‘Hello, Poacher,’ he said. ‘Stolen any more fish lately?’
    The day was murderously hot. A curl stuck to her face. She had forgotten to brush her hair that morning and her long plait was coming undone. She laughed, her cheeks reddening. ‘We didn’t steal it. Honestly, I told you, it came through the door.’
    He took the picnic she offered him and said he’d take her word for it. He settled himself on the ground, cross-legged, eating hungrily.
    ‘The name’s Joe Ferier. Sit down with me.’ His request sounded cheerful, ordinary. ‘Keep me company for a minute or two. That can’t do any harm, can it?’
    ‘I’ll just wait for the jug and be on my way, thank you.’
    She stood stiffly, watching the swallows dipping to drink in the river.
    ‘All the way from Africa,’ Joe said, pointing at them. ‘Imagine that. A whole winter spent on another continent and then they find their way home. We humans would need a map or a compass, but those birds don’t have either.’
    ‘Swallows don’t go to Africa,’ Nellie said. This she knew for a fact. Anna Moats had told her. ‘In winter they sleep in leafmould in forests. They wake up again for the summer, just like hedgehogs.’
    He laughed and pulled a