The Outcast Read Online Free PDF

thump.
    Kit didn’t sit up. Her forest and the snow and the wolves had

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    all disappeared. She heard her parents’ voices and then a sharp sound. She didn’t move, except to slide a bit more under the tree; her father was hitting her mother and she didn’t want to go and look.
    Dicky often hit Claire, it was his habit, and part of the pattern of the family, and it wasn’t questioned between them at all. None of them had ever, ever referred to it, but Kit got so angry it made her cry with rage.The crying was because of being six and not able to change anything. She used to imagine Dicky meeting God, and God saying,‘I know what you do to Mummy, you’re a very, very bad man and I’m going to send you to Hell!’, and Dicky would be so terrified he would beg, but it would be too late, and he would burn for ever. Kit imagined tying him up when he was asleep and then kicking him and hitting him with the poker until he cried, but she wouldn’t stop until he realised how unfair he was and apologised to her mother.
    Kit knew it was silly of her really, because her mother didn’t like her at all and would never have thanked her even if she did manage to save her, and Kit cried about that, but always in her room away from everybody. She had learned to guard herself and it was very important to her never to cry in front of anyone. When Tamsin cried, which was often, she was soft, with a dipped head and big tears, and it was natural for arms to go around her and for her to be soothed. Kit’s crying was hard and tight and lonely; she didn’t want or imagine arms around her when she cried.
    She lay under the Christmas tree and listened some more for noises from the library, but couldn’t hear anything else. She was aware of her heart thumping and the hot feeling of it in her chest. She stared up into the tree again and worked hard at imagining the snowflakes falling on her, but they had gone away. Then she heard the library door open and the footsteps of her

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    mother. Kit held her breath. Claire stopped by the bottom of the stairs and looked at Kit’s feet sticking out.
    ‘Why don’t you get up?You’ll spoil your frock.’
    Kit slithered out and Claire turned away and went upstairs before Kit could see her face, just the back of her straight wool skirt and cardigan, and her heels tapping up the polished stairs. ‘I’m sick and tired of you, Kit, you do nothing but make a mess and spoil things. If that dress is ruined you’ll just have to
    change. Do you hear?’

    The people started to arrive promptly at one. Kit’s dress had been spoiled, so she’d changed into another one her body was too narrow for, and the sash made creases in the skirt where it was pulled tight to disguise the wrong shape of her. She stood in the shadow of the stairs and watched the people arriving and taking off their coats and hats.The long hall table piled up with overcoats and minks, fox furs and white scarves and men’s hats, and Kit wanted to jump onto it and climb underneath and wriggle about, and had to hold her hands behind her back to stop herself.
    Outside the house Preston helped to direct all the cars that arrived. A couple of the cars had drivers who went into the kitchen to wait. Elizabeth would have liked to save the petrol and walk through the woods to the party, but Gilbert wouldn’t hear of it – ‘Walk there in mud and home in the dark? Are you mad?’ – so they drove, with Lewis bouncing on the back seat and shoving the door with his shoulder and being told off.
    ‘This is our third Christmas since Daddy came home,’ he said. He counted lots of things like that; he thought that was to be the main event of his childhood, and he underscored the memory of life with and without his father in his mind.

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    Gilbert stopped the car by the steps and they got out, and he gave the keys to Preston, and thanked him. It wasn’t a cold winter, there hadn’t even been a hard frost yet, but it was dark and wet, and inside