The Fifth Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

“A room each for such little tiddlers!”
    “It’s important,” said David, fierce; “everyone should have a room.”
    The family exchanged glances as families do when stubbing toes on some snag in one of them: and Molly, who felt herself both appreciated but in some devious way criticised, too, said, “Everyone in the world! Everybody!” She had intended to sound humorous.
    This scene was at breakfast—or, rather, mid-morning—in the family room, breakfast continuing indefinitely. All the adults were still around the table, fifteen of them. The children played among the sofas and chairs of the sitting-room area. Molly and Frederick sat side by side, as always, preserving their air of judging everything by the perspectives of Oxford, for which, here, they often got teased, but did not seem to mind, and were humorously on the defensive. David’s father, James, had been written to again by Molly, who had said he must “fork out” more money, the young couple simply were not coping withfeeding Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. He had sent a generous cheque and then had come himself. He sat opposite his former wife and her husband, and as usual both kinds of people were observed examining each other and marvelling that they could ever have come together. He looked fitted out for some sporting occasion: in fact, he was off skiing shortly, like Deborah, who was here with her little air of an exotic bird that had alighted in a strange place and was kept there by curiosity—she was not going to admit to admiration. Dorothy was there, dispensing tea and coffee. Angela sat with her husband; her three children played with the others. Angela, efficient, brisk (“a coper,” as Dorothy said, the “thank God” being unspoken), allowed it to be known that she felt the two other sisters took up all of Dorothy and left her nothing. She was like a clever, pretty little fox. Sarah, Sarah’s husband, cousins, friends—the big house had people tucked into every corner, even on the sofas down here. The attic had long ago become a dormitory stacked with mattresses and sleeping bags in which any number of children could be bedded. As they sat here in the great warm comfortable room, which had a fire burning of wood collected by everyone yesterday from the woodland they had been walking in, the rooms above resounded with voices, and with music. Some of the older children were practising a song. This was a house—and this defined it for everyone, admiring what they could not achieve themselves—where television was not often watched.
    Sarah’s husband, William, was not at the table, but lounging against the dividing wall; and the little distance expressed what he felt his relation to the family was. He had left Sarah twice, and come home again. It was evident to everyone this was a process that would continue. He had got himself a job, a poor one, in the building trade: the trouble was that he was distressed by physical disability, and his new daughter, the Down’s syndrome baby, appalled him. Yet he was very much married toSarah. They were a match: both tall, generously built, dark, like a pair of gypsies, always in colourful clothes. But the poor baby was in Sarah’s arms, covered up so as not to upset everyone, and William was looking everywhere but at his wife.
    He looked instead at Harriet, who sat nursing Paul, two months old, in the big chair that was hers because it was comfortable for this function. She looked exhausted. Jane had been awake in the night with her teeth, and had wanted Mummy, not Granny.
    She had not been much changed by presenting the world with four human beings. She sat there at the head of the table, the collar of her blue shirt pushed to one side to show part of a blue-veined white breast, and Paul’s energetically moving little head. Her lips were characteristically firmly set, and she was observing everything: a healthy, attractive young woman, full of life. But tired … the children came rushing