The Crimson Rooms Read Online Free PDF Page B

suppose.”
    “She left the boy with us for hours while she went out. She said we needed to be better acquainted with him though I can hardly bear to look at him. He’s so like . . .” She dabbed her eyes and added: “We couldn’t think what to give him for lunch. Prudence said the girls couldn’t be expected to provide different meals for a child. If we had a house full of servants like before the war, but we’re so overstretched . . .”
    “Didn’t you ask Edmund what he’d like?” I asked, eager to prevent a well-rehearsed complaint about the servants.
    “He was very vague, just said, ‘No tomatoes,’ and you know it’s mean of me but I thought, she’s told him to say that because James—oh my darling boy—never liked tomatoes and she wants us to believe in him. In the end Rose boiled an egg. I couldn’t go to bridge and leave him with Mother and Prudence, it wouldn’t have been fair.”
    “Well, I should think not.”
    Prudence suddenly turned around, pen suspended midair. She had a habit of staring very hard when she spoke, and her light gray eyes were full of disapproval beneath drooping lids so that she resembled, at times, a basset hound. Her voice was too loud for the dimensions of the room. “I said he ought to eat tomatoes. Boys should eat plenty of fruit and vegetables.”
    “It was the way his mother just left him without even saying where she was going or asking if we minded. I can’t stand her,” said Mother. “And as for the letter she’s supposed to have sent telling us she was coming, I’ve seen no sign of that.”
    “Where is Meredith now?”
    “Upstairs somewhere with the boy.”
    “I’ll go to her.”
    “Be very careful what you say. She makes no bones about it, she’s short of money. She wants the boy to have an education and she wants to live here, in this house, presumably rent-free. Oh, good God, I wish your father were alive.”
    But it was Father who landed us in this situation, I thought. Mother’s habit of idolizing the dead (as she had the living) was infuriating, especially as the full extent of Father’s failure to insure his family against unpleasant shocks had come to light. “Since there is no question that Edmund is James’s son,” I said, “we must take some responsibility for him, as I’m sure Father would have wished.”
    Mother would not meet my eye. “She might want a lot of money—which we don’t have. It’s one thing to believe we’re related to the boy, but can we be sure she’s really the mother?”
    “You’ve presumably had plenty of opportunity to question her.”
    “She tells me that she was a nurse in the hospital to which he was sent when he was wounded but what does that prove? He can’t have been there long. A couple of weeks later he was . . .”
    “What else did she say about James?”
    Mother flinched. Over the years, his name, like Jesus , had become a word almost too sacred to form. A shiver trembled across the muffled surfaces of the drawing room, the layers of wool and lace and linen among which we women moved with slippered feet, the arrangements of dead birds and foliage under glass domes, the china figures, the photograph frames; James in his rugby shirt, James as a fat baby in a perambulator.
    “Some questions one cannot simply ask,” said Prudence.
    “Did Father never speak about it to either of you? He obviously knew of Edmund’s existence.”
    Silence. I had placed Prudence in a dilemma that she managed by pressing her shapely lips together and folding her hands. If she admitted Father had confided in her, she would be guilty of having withheld vital information from me. If she hadn’t known about Edmund, her position as Father’s chief adviser, adopted since her arrival in the house in 1919, would be diminished. She therefore wished me to believe that of course Father had confided in her but had bound her to secrecy. In fact, I suspected she hadn’t been told.
    Mother put her hand to her forehead in a