The Pumpkin Eater Read Online Free PDF

convenience and solidarity those who had post office savings books or sent up coupons for silver-plated teaspoons or entered competitions for winning ponies, changed their names; and those who were too small had theirs changed for them and grew up used to the idea that in any list, roll call or census they came very near the top.
    Only the three at boarding school remained apart, cut adrift, growing old under their old names. They were my first children, and although they had always been gloomy and hard to please I felt desolate without them. I burned with anger, but dully. Anger against whom, against what? It was all for the best, that boy and those girls set on the right path, flannelled and stockinged for Jesus and the General Certificate of Education, stripped for ball games in the bitter cold. It was right for Jake that they should go. Slowly, little by little, almost imperceptibly, I let them drift until only our fingertips were touching, then reaching, then finding nothing. Our hands dropped and we turned away. The younger children always felt kindly towards them, the three melancholy Conservatives who grew to hate Jake with such inflexible devotion. In time, they included me in this hate. They were my first enemies. My mother sent them each ten shillings at the beginning of every term, fastened to the letters with small gold safety pins.
    With Jake’s child I went to hospital for the first time. Jake was thirty and beginning to worry about his hair. He was deprived, nervous, over-excited. He was working on his first full-length script, and he told me that one day he would build a tower of brick and glass overlooking the valley where we met.

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    â€œI don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Philpot said. “Sometimes I shake all over and sometimes I have a temperature of ninety-three. Sometimes I cry for hours on end.”
    â€œWhy don’t you see a doctor?”
    â€œThey’d just say it was the worry. I mean, there’s nothing you can do about worry, is there?”
    â€œWell,” I said, “I don’t know …” I was cleaning out the kitchen cupboards, a sign of unease. The girl — she was in fact a woman of twenty-four whose surname was Philpot — had said she was sure there was something she could do. I had set her to cleaning saucepan lids with steel wool. She did it slowly, sitting on the edge of the sink and stroking the dented lids round and round as though they were faces.
    I took the new Coronation mugs off the shelf, a clutch in each hand, and put them on the floor. Then I asked Philpot to move so that I could get some more hot water. She heaved herself up on to the fridge and spread her skirt over it.
    â€œGoodness,” she said, “what a lot of mugs. Poppy was given one too. Aren’t they rather divine …”
    â€œI think they’re hideous,” I said. “But we’ve got dozens of spoons.”
    â€œYes,” she said, “Poppy got a spoon too.” She looked out of the window to the garden, where some of the younger children and Poppy were sitting each in an individual cardboard box doing, as far as I could see, absolutely nothing. She sighed gustily. “I wonder if there’ll ever be another Coronation. I mean, while we’re alive.”
    â€œOh, sure to be.” I felt she needed reassuring. “Why? Did you like this one?”
    â€œI did indeed. Such wonderful parties. Poppy went to stay with my aunt.” I scraped bits of butter off six saucers on to a plate, and moved her off the fridge. She settled like a great duck on the cooker. “And I had a simply wonderful time, although I slept all through the actual thing on TV. Shall I hand you the mugs, or something?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “It’s all right.”
    â€œWell, of course, it all ended in disaster. It always does with me. People’s wives get so ratty somehow. And I mean, I
like
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