The Scent of Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

original range had been replaced by a modern Rayburn that was alight and filling the kitchen with warmth. A kettle was singing on the hob and a white cloth covered one half of the table. On it was set out an exquisite Staffordshire tea service, deep mulberry color with a pattern of vine leaves. One plate was filled with doorstep slices of bread and butter and another supported a grocer’s cake of a strange shade of yellow. There were milk and sugar and a painted tin tea caddy. Mrs. Baker’s tea? Or hers? She had left the door into the hall ajar and the smell of lilies of the valley was drifting in to her. Yet there had been none in the hall. She told herself she must be getting tired and confused. There was a window opening onto a small walled kitchen garden, beside the half-open back door, and she went to the door and looked out. There was a bed of lilies of the valley growing under the window, nearly strangled by weeds but smelling like heaven. She was tired and confused indeed, for the next thing she knew she was outside on her knees grubbing up the weeds to give the lilies light and air. And then she was picking a bunch of them.
    “There now,” said a voice behind her. “I’d just gone down behind the apple trees to bring in the tea towels, what I washed this morning, and just that minute you come. Would you believe it? And I’ve been to the front door ten times if once this last hour, to welcome you like. Had a good journey, dear?”
    Mary got to her feet and found herself confronting a little woman whose head scarcely reached her shoulder. Sparse gray hair was done up in an old-fashioned bun and very bright hazel eyes twinkled in a brown wrinkled face. She wore a white apron over an electric-blue cardigan and a purple skirt, and her hands were full of clean tea towels. Her smile was wise and loving and there breathed from her whole person that sense of comfort and security, spiced with severity, that in the days of Mary’s childhood had characterized the best nannies. She knew in one glance at Mrs. Baker that she had met her best friend, the best she had ever had or would have.
    “Yes, I had a good journey,” she said, “but it seemed a long way and I’m dying for a cup of tea.”
    “Come along in then, miss,” said Mrs. Baker. “It’s all ready.”
    Mary paused for a moment to look at the kitchen garden. Gooseberry bushes, a few apple trees, an old fig tree growing against the wall and the rest a tempest of weeds. But it appeared that someone had tried to do something, for in one place there was a cleared patch. “Taties,” said Mrs. Baker, following her glance. “Baker put ’em in on Good Friday. Thought you’d like ’em. He’s done what he could in the garden, mowing the grass and such, for love like, but he couldn’t do much, not with his tubes affecting his heart. And he’s a bodger by rights, not a gardener. But he’ll carry up your luggage later. I’ve told him to come along.”
    They were in the kitchen now and Mrs. Baker was making the tea. What is a bodger? Mary wondered. And what did Mrs. Baker mean by saying that Mr. Baker had mowed the grass for love? “You’ll have tea with me, Mrs. Baker?” she asked.
    Mrs. Baker’s sallow face flushed a little and she answered with quiet dignity, “If you wish it, miss. Or would you prefer me to say madam?”
    “I’d rather you called me dear, as you did at first,” said Mary. “It made me feel at home.”
    “It slipped out,” said Mrs. Baker. “You had a look of poor old Miss Lindsay, standing there.” She regarded the elegant woman pouring out the tea. “She had your figure and kept it to the end. Lonely she was, poor old soul. People were scared of her but in her good times she was as sane as I am.”
    “And the bad times?” asked Mary.
    Mrs. Baker hesitated. “She suffered,” she said. “But afterward, she never spoke of it. There are those who tell you the sick in mind don’t suffer like you think they do. Well, dear,