The Looking Glass House Read Online Free PDF Page B

hotly, was to ignore it. ‘Good afternoon to you then!’ she said, though she thought she felt his eyes on her all the way back across the lawn.

Chapter 3
    Mary’s childhood had been spent in a large town house on Beaumont Street belonging to her grandmother, but when her grandmother died the family had been forced to sell up and move to a smaller one on Folly Bridge. Mary had not been back to it since she moved to the Deanery, and now that she was here again, the rooms seemed to have shrunk even further. The whole house was filled with steam. Her mother’s servant was boiling a pig’s trotter on the stove, and Mary could hear the sound of the bone clacking against the sides of the saucepan as if it had been brought back to life and was trying to get out.
    Mary, her mother and her mother’s friend Mrs Chitterworth sat in the parlour, between them a pile of hats like awkwardly landed birds.
    ‘You know what they say, of course: “I am the Dean, this Mrs Liddell. / She plays first, I, second fiddle. / She is the Broad, I am the High/Together we are the University! ”’
    When Mary’s mother, Mrs Prickett, hinged open her jaw to make University rhyme with High , Mary could see the sticky pink powder gathered in the crevices of her face.
    ‘I have heard that,’ said Mary. ‘Though of course if you said University the right way, it would not work so well.’ Her head throbbed just above her eyes; she took up a straw hat and began to attack it with her scissors.
    Her mother could not sew; it hurt her fingers, she said. But she did not want to waste money on a new hat every year when the old ones could just as well be updated. So Mary was called in, to change a feather for ribbons, wilting silk roses for bows.
    ‘And I suppose her position is unassailable now. Your father said that the whole of Oxford was there hoping to catch a glimpse of the royal carriage,’ said Mrs Prickett.
    ‘And I was there waiting just at the gates,’ said Mrs Chitterworth. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it. Though I did get cold and have a very sore throat this morning. I have already been to the pharmacy.’
    ‘You spend your life at that pharmacy, dear,’ said Mary’s mother.
    ‘You are clever, Mary, with your needle. My fingers could never manage it!’ Mrs Chitterworth leaned towards Mary. ‘But what of the party? I am desperate to hear.’
    ‘The party was very grand,’ said Mary. ‘I saw the Queen up close and Ina presented her with a posy—’
    Her mother interrupted. ‘Yes, yes, but you, did you hold up?’
    A nub of silk, where the flower had been sewn on, remained clinging to the felt. Mary stabbed at it with the tip of her scissors. She was damaging the material round it; a small hole was starting to blossom.
    ‘Oh, let her finish, do!’ said Mrs Chitterworth. ‘I must hear about it all; I cannot wait.’
    Her mother blew air out of her nostrils – not a snort, nothing that Mary could argue with. But air rushing through a mother’s nasal cavities can be open to many filial interpretations, which Mary now ran through:
    Her mother did not trust her. She did not think she had ‘held up’, as she put it.
    Her mother thought her a figure of fun.
    Her mother was conveying her amused derision that Mary had not yet managed to find a husband and had to go out to work for a living.
    Or her mother’s nose had become inflamed.
    She could settle on that.
    ‘Who was there? And what about the royal family, and was the Queen magnificent?’ asked Mrs Chitterworth. (Mrs Chitter ­worth was a woman who had reacted to the difficulties in her own upbringing by refusing to look inwards. Thus she spent her whole life in gossip, although her body hatched all sorts of ailments in protest.)
    So Mary had to give out every name of every person she could remember from the party, and who talked to whom, until her mouth was dry. As she spoke, she remembered the wine stain. It would be discovered by now, even if she hadn’t heard