To the Hilt Read Online Free PDF

for you to bring me all the way from Scotland while she was there to look after things?”
    “Oh dear... you know how positive she is ...”
    “A tidal wave.”
    Civility was a curse, I often thought. Patsy needed someone to be brusquely rude about the way she bullied everyone with saccharine; but if ever openly crossed she could produce so intense an expression of “poor little me”—dom that potential critics found themselves comforting her instead. Patsy at thirty-four had a husband, three children, two dogs and a nanny all anxiously twitching to please her.
    “And of course,” my mother said, “there’s some sort of serious trouble at the brewery, and also I think he’s worried about the Cup.”
    “What cup?”
    “The King Alfred Cup, what else?”
    I frowned. “Do you mean the race?” The King Alfred Gold Cup, sponsored by Ivan’s brewery as a great advertisement for King Alfred Gold beer, was a splendid two-mile steeplechase run every October, a regular part now of the racing year.
    “The race, or the Cup itself,” my mother said. “I’m not sure.”
    At that inconclusive point the kitchen was abruptly invaded by two large middle-aged ladies who heavily plodded down the outside iron steps from road level to basement and let themselves in with familiarity.
    “Morning, Lady Westering,” they said. A double act. Sisters, perhaps. They looked from my mother to me expectantly, awaiting an explanation, I thought, as much as an introduction. My gentle mother could be far too easily intimidated.
    I stood and said mildly, “I am Lady Westering’s son. And you are?”
    My mother told me, “Edna and Lois. Edna cooks for us. Lois cleans.”
    Edna and Lois gave me stares in which disapproval sheltered sketchily behind a need to keep their jobs. Disapproval ? I wondered if Patsy had been at work.
    Edna looked with a critical eye at the evidence of my cooking, an infringement of her domain. Too bad. She would have to get used to it. My father and I had historically always done the family meals because we’d liked it that way. It had started with my mother breaking a wrist: by the time it was mended, feeding the three of us had forever changed hands; and as I’d understood very early the chemistry of cooking, good food had always seemed easy.
    My mother and Ivan had from the beginning employed a cook, though Edna—and also Lois—were new since my last visit.
    I said to my mother, “Wilfred notwithstanding, I’ll go up now and see Ivan. I expect I’ll find you upstairs in your living room.”
    Edna and Lois hovered visibly between allegiances. I gave them my most cheerful noncombative smile, and found my mother following me gratefully up the stairs to the main floor, quiet now but grandly formal with dining room and drawing room for entertaining.
    “Don’t tell me,” I teased her, once we were out of earshot of the kitchen. “Patsy employed them.”
    She didn’t deny it. “They’re very efficient.”
    “How long have they worked here?”
    “A week.”
    She came with me up to the next floor, where she and Ivan each had a bedroom, bathroom and personal day-room, in his case a study-cum-office, in hers the refuge they used most, a comfortable pink and green matter of fat armchairs and television.
    “Lois cleans very well,” my mother sighed as we went in there. “But she will move things. It’s almost as if she moves them deliberately, just to prove to me that she’s dusted.”
    She shifted two vases back to their old familiar position of one at each end of the mantelshelf. Silver candlesticks were returned to flank the clock.
    “Just tell her not to,” I said, but I knew she wouldn’t. She didn’t like to upset people: the opposite of Patsy.
    I went along to see Ivan, who was sitting palely in his study while noises from his bedroom next door suggested bed making and the tidying of bottles.
    Ivan wore a crimson woollen robe and brown leather slippers and showed no surprise at my