The Little Red Chairs Read Online Free PDF

visiting the sick, bringing Holy Communion in her wooden pix to those who were crippled and housebound. Sister Austin did the grounds and the gardens and Rosario took classes in Science and Geography, which meant that she was the most earnest. Poor Pius, who was the eldest, did the altars and the sacristy, helped the parish priest and the curate, laid out their vestments and lit the candles for Mass and benediction. Bonaventure loved her charity work, tireless at raising money for causes. She collected stamps. Always badgering people for stamps, especially from faraway places, which she then sold to a bureau in Dublin, using the money for a water scheme in East Africa, from where she received letters of profuse thanks and photographs of children with infectious smiles. She also made jams, which she sold at a car boot sale on Sundays. At first she was a bit of an oddity, with her nun’s veiling, standing behind a fit-up counter, but once people tasted the jams, which she put for them to sample, on tiny squares of water biscuit, business flourished. The ‘apogee’, as it was described in the local paper, was her marrow jam with chunks of crystallised ginger.
Her appointment was for eleven o’clock and all that morning she prayed that she was doing the right thing and not sullyingher body. She took extra care when she showered and with the big powder puff, dusted herself with lily of the valley talc, a gift from Mona at Christmas.
He answered the door himself and bowed as he welcomed her in. He was wearing a loose-fitting blue overall, which gave him the likeness of a monk. A fire blazed in the small upstairs grate of the waiting room and they paused to have a brief conversation, she saying there was nothing that seemed quite so vacant as an empty grate and he regretting that the chimney smoked, but that the builder assured him with a good coat of soot on the back breast, the smoke would travel upwards.
She halted before a glass cabinet, staring at all the medicines – drops in glass-stoppered bottles, blue jars, their insides silvered from the powders they were filled with, see-through bags with herbs and grasses, bits of bark and forked roots that reminded her of a picture in Rosario’s science book of the mandrake that shrieks when dug up. All of a sudden she felt uneasy. This was more incriminating than she had imagined.
The treatment room itself was a temple, lights so very dim and intriguing, and sacred music issued from the four corners. Out of the open mouths and empty eye sockets of wooden figures, gods and goddesses, plumes of light poured, gold one minute, then blue, then rose pink, at the touch of a tiny switch, which he held in his hand, the Magus, as the ex-Schoolmaster had called him.
He left her alone to undress, saying she could leave her panties on, if she wished, or he could give her a paper pair. She opted to leave her woollen on and then cautiously undressed, having to sit on a stool to roll down and remove her tights. She nearly fell off that stool twice, because of the way it swivelled. On a side benchwere two big saucepans, one fitted with an electric element to heat water and one with stones, a great mass of stones, smoothed to various sizes and shapes, smooth as pumice and tiny chinks of white marble.
She lay on her back, peeping through the slits of her almost closed eyes, for fear of any hanky panky. He looked like a devil, or maybe a Red Indian, because of a bandana that kept the hair out of his eyes. Yet warmth flowed from his hands when he touched her and sought out the various knots and nodules and cricks. When he leant on her chest and caused it to ease under his weight, she feared she might dissolve altogether. His hands were so capable and so far-reaching and it was as if he had more than two hands, so that gradually she felt herself giving in to it, with him persuading her to let go. He placed stones on the flab of her stomach, which he had not touched, and ran the sides of other stones