The Greengage Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

workbox packed up with Miss Dawn and Dolores, while Vicky had Nebuchadnezzar in a basket. Nebuchadnezzar was a pig made out of a potato, with matchstick eyes and legs;
she had made him at school and carried him about ever since, though he was beginning to shrivel a little. “When he is quite shrivelled I shall eat him,” said Vicky. Mother sitting on a
chair had her hat on one side and the coat of her good suit wrongly buttoned: she leaned her head against the chair back and shut her eyes, and her face seemed as mottled now as her leg. As for us,
we were crumpled, untidy, and dirty, Hester’s and Vicky’s faces were streaked with dirt and tears, their socks had come down, and all our shoes were dusty. I could see that we were not
at all the kind of family that would be an ornament to any hotel.
    “I expect a doctor will come and take our mother to hospital,” Joss said in English.
    “L’hôtel n’accepte pas les enfants seuls.”
    “She won’t take children by themselves.”
    “But if we are by ourselves?” said Hester.
    Madame Corbet sat behind the grille with the hotel books spread out round her. On this hot evening she was wearing a black high-necked blouse; a black crochet shawl with bobbles was crossed on
her shoulders. She wore a finger-guard of stained celluloid and her face looked stained too with sallow marks; her hair was in two black snakes coiled in a knot on the top of her head and she had a
moustache of heavy black down on which Willmouse, straining to look over the counter, had instantly fixed his eyes. All the time we were talking I saw him examining it.
    Joss was desperate. I knew that by her white face and the bigness of her eyes. She had taken over Mother’s capacious old handbag, which looked oddly big on her. “S’il vous
plaît, aidez-nous,” she said. I knew how difficult it was for her to humble herself, but Madame Corbet only shrugged so that the topknot and the bobbles of her shawl danced. “Et
qu’est-ce que je peux y faire, moi? Je ne suis pas la patronne. Je suis Madame Corbet, c’est tout.” She said that as if to be Madame Corbet was something derogatory.
    “If it is not your hotel, where is . . .” Joss consulted the paper Mr Stillbotham had given us. “Where is Mademoiselle de Presle?”
    “Mademoiselle Zizi? Elle va dîner au château de Méry.”
    Joss and I looked at one another. Did she say going out to dinner. In Southstone we had supper at seven o’clock; now it was nearly ten.
    “Au château de Méry,” repeated Madame Corbet impressively.
    The maid who had helped with our luggage and who was now waiting on the stairs rolled up her eyes and crossed herself; she was pert and Madame Corbet spoke sharply.
    “Y sont des amis . . .” “Amis means friends,” I told Hester. “Mademoiselle de Presle is going to a big house, a château, that might mean a castle, to
friends.”
    “Des amis à Monsieur Eliot . . .” said the maid. Why did she say “Mr Eliot’s friends” so meaningly?
    Madame Corbet ignored her. To us she said, “They say the President of the Board of Trade is to be there,” and I thought, So, she can speak English.
    “Then we can’t see Mademoiselle de Presle?” asked Joss.
    “Naturally not.”
    “But what can we do?”
    Madame Corbet shrugged. “Vous feriez bien d’aller au commissariat. Oui, allez au commissariat.”
    “Commissariat?” What was that? We looked at one another mystified. “Police,” said the hotel boy Paul from his place on the landing. “Go police.”
    Joss’s face flamed as though Madame Corbet had slapped it. “Come,” she said to us.
    We left the counter and followed Joss across the hall, walking round the two big Alsatian dogs who lifted their dark-furred faces. One wagged its tail; it was the first sign of friendliness Les
Oeillets had given us. Perhaps it was that that made Madame Corbet feel ashamed.
    “Vous pouvez laisser les bagages,” she said.
    “No thank you,” said Joss.
    This was