The Wolf in the Attic Read Online Free PDF

you been?’ he asks simply, and he holds out his hands as though he is about to catch a ball.
    ‘Walking. Port Meadow. There – there’s a moon tonight, Pa.’
    He walks slowly towards me. Up the stairs; one step, two. Then his hand cocks back and he slaps me hard across the face, knocking me down.
    I climb back to my feet. ‘I’m sorry Pa,’ I say.
    He nods grimly. ‘Get upstairs. We will talk about this in the morning. I want you washed and in your nightgown in twenty minutes, Anna.’
    I rub my face. ‘Will you read to me tonight, Pa?’
    ‘Go’
    And so up the stairs I climb, and Pie slips through my hand I am so tired, and I drag her by the leg as I go up, her head bump, bump, bumping against every step.

4
     
    P EOPLE TALK ABOUT being in the doghouse after they have misbehaved. I have never understood why that should be such a bad thing. I love dogs, and would have no trouble at all cuddling up next to one in some little kennel. We could look out at the world side by side, and people would leave us alone. It would be a fine thing altogether.
    Far worse is to be in a normal house, with running water and coal fires and lamplight, where it is warm and comfortable, but where you know that everything you do is being watched and weighed up and you must behave in a certain way, and spend your days under the grey weight of disapproval, and wonder if the cloud will ever lift and you will see a smile again.
    I like things to be cut and dried and straightforward. If I have been bad, I want a belt on the ear, and then to be forgiven. Or a whack of some kind anyway – one that you can see coming, brace yourself for, and then know that when it is done, it is over. And afterwards it’s all jam and buns again. Pa hits me because he loves me – I know that. And afterwards he is always so nice to me, and it is almost like old times. That is the way it’s done and I am used to it. But things are different this time, it seems.
    I tell Pie this, sitting in my room alone. I am confined to the house now, for how long I do not know. Like Rapunzel, only with shorter hair.
    I am to stop calling Pa, Pa . I am to call him Father now. Which is horrible, and does not feel right in my mouth every time it comes out. But Pa is not genteel.
    I am an ungrateful ragamuffin and wholly without discipline, and utterly unaware of the behaviour expected of my sex and station, Pa – Father – told me the morning after Jack walked me home. He was very quiet, very pale, but I knew just by the set of his face that he was as angry as I have ever seen him. More than that. I think he was a little afraid, or desperate even.
    He has this way of raising up his open hands until they are at his shoulders, as though he were boasting about the size of a fish he caught. Then he lowers his head, and it looks as though he wants to cover his ears. He does that when he is not just angry, but sad as well. I have seen him do it in speeches in the hall down at Keble.
    He did it to me that morning, and that quiet cold tone of voice came out of him like it was a stranger he was speaking to.
    And perhaps I have not been attending lately, but as I stood all hangdog in his study I noticed as if for the first time that he is different, changed from what he used to be; and I do not believe that it is wholly my fault. It is to do with the Committee, and the Colonial Office – he has been down to London again – and I think, though he has not said it, that he has finally given up all hope of us ever going home.
    If anything can possibly be left of home.
     
     
    N O-ONE ELSE MADE it out with us, from all the friends and family we knew who were still beside us on that last day. Uncle Spiros, Aunt Eugenia; they just disappeared, and my cousins with them. Pa jumped into a launch as it was pushing off from the quay, with me in his arms – and it was sheer chance that it was a British boat and not one of the American or Italian ones. Otherwise we might be living across the