The Undrowned Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

or clinging to the branches of trees.
    The firemen and the officers of the water magistrate rushed around, taking the wooden flood pontoons to places where they had never been needed before. But when the tide surged up, it arrived with such remarkable force that the pontoons just sprang up and floated off, sometimes with terrified people on board.
    And the water that carried them away was always warm and dark as blood.
    Maria was supposed to be Teo’s best friend; for this trip, anyway. But the truth was that Teo was as fond of Maria as she was of cod-liver oil.
    Naturally Maria, with her perfect glossy hair and her chronically bored expression, had always been one of the “fashionable crowd” at school, the ones who cunningly adapted their hats and school pinafores to the latest style. The kind of girls who, even at eleven, could cause a carriage accident just by gazing at the coachman with their heads on one side.
    The fashionable crowd took pride in being far too modern to show much interest in schoolwork. They affected drawls and babylike lisps.
    Like Teo’s teacher, but for different reasons, Maria’s form-mistress had been quite content to let her pupil out of school to go to Venice.
    “Perhaps it will put an idea in her head,” Maria’s teacher had sighed. “Perhaps a museum … a spot of art, some culture, you never know.”
    Someone at the back of the room had called out, “Perhaps a spot of shopping!”
    And everyone in the fashionable crowd had giggled or clapped then, betraying Maria for a cheap laugh. That, of course, is what the fashionable crowd is like in any classroom anywhere in the world.
    Teo was most definitely not in the fashionable crowd. Well, a girl generally isn’t when she spends all her time in the library. (Teo even had a special library trick of being able to read books upside-down, which rather disconcerted the librarians.) To Teo’s lot had always fallen the schoolgirls’ full repertoire of nasty little tricks: the tea-party invitations ostentatiously handed out to everyone else but her, the mocking compliments on her clothes and the sudden silences or sniggering when she entered a room.
    The parents, of course, did not have much idea of the undercurrents of schoolgirl life. The adults innocently assumed that their daughters would amuse themselves together in Venice while the scientific gathering was in progress. No suitable replacement had yet been found for Teo’s poor Nanny Giulia. Maria’s always gave in their notice soon after arrival: Maria’s tantrums were legendary among the nannies of Naples.
    In a whispered conference in the corridor, as their train approached Venice, Teo had convinced Maria that it would be far better if they were to secretly spend the days ahead separately: “You can do what you want. I can do what I want. We only need to meet up in the evenings when our parents come home from their meetings.”
    “You’d really, really like that, then, Dora?” drawled Maria.
    Teo nodded fervently.
    “Then it’s goin’ to cost you something, ain’t it?”
    “But you want it too.…”
    “Or I could stick to you like glue, Te-Odore.”
    And so Teo was forced to bribe Maria with a great deal of her allowance. Maria seemed to spend all their joint pocket-money on scarves, belts, beads and Venetian slippers. It was the height of fashion that summer to wear crests: on scarves, printed all over skirts and even leather shoes. By the end of the second day in Venice, Maria was already covered head to toe in crests.
    “How exceedingly subtle,” Teo had observed sarcastically.
    Maria, with characteristic brilliance, riposted: “Go and boil your head, Dora.”
    Astonishingly, Maria’s parents didn’t notice the profusion of crests at all. It crossed Teo’s mind that Maria might be trying to attract their attention. That, as usual, failed miserably. Maria’s parents prided themselves on being far more interested in the next professorship than in what their foolish