Wish Her Safe at Home Read Online Free PDF

Nothing new under the sun, as they’ll always tell you.”
    Yet this was a happy day. Not one for letting in the glooms. I picked up my bill, totted up the figures.
    And, after all, it was hardly as though I’d ever won a beauty contest, was it? Therefore no real reason to suppose that—if I hadn’t been stuck at home—I’d have been whisked off by some gentleman like Mr. Darcy or Rhett Butler or Jervis Pendleton. No real reason at all.
    Or was there? I pulled on my own gloves with gay decisiveness. Yes, it seemed so important to be gay. In London I was seldom gay; at work, practically never. I sat at my table and pondered and grew increasingly elated. It was as if I’d received a revelation. Here in a tearoom along with the fruit scones and the jam doughnuts. I wasn’t even sure what had led up to it. Previously, of course, I had often discovered the secret of happiness: courage on one occasion, acceptance on another, gratitude on a third. But this time there was a rightness to it—a certainty, simplicity—which in the past mightn’t have seemed
quite
so all-embracing. Gaiety, I told myself. Vivacity. Positive thinking. I could have cheered. Still sitting at my table in the empty café I knew that concerning the house I had made the right decision. Bristol, merely a name to me before, was going to treat me well, provide me with a new start. London in my imagination had now become grey; maybe always had been? Bristol was in flaming Technicolor.
    They were as different to each other as Kansas from the Land of Oz.

5

    My mother was such a silly person. I explained this to the woman from the teashop as we strolled around the park; not that I felt I needed to. My mother was always so concerned, I said, with what she considered correct behaviour.
    “And there’s something in particular which can
still
make my stomach clench.”
    “Oh, my!”
    “Yes! When I was a child she told me I should always decline a gift of money. And I don’t mean just from strangers but from relatives. And I can remember saying repeatedly, ‘No—no, thank you—I simply can’t accept it,’ but then, after a fair amount of coaxing, ‘Oh well, that’s extremely kind of you,’ and later to my mother, ‘Yes, I tried. I really did try.’”
    The woman with the hat made sympathetic noises.
    I went on.
    “On one occasion an elderly cousin of my father’s offered me something and got the customary response. So he simply gave a shrug and replaced the pound note in his wallet. ‘Very well, in that case, if you really don’t want it... ’ My disappointment must have showed. He pulled the wallet out again. ‘It isn’t that I don’t want it,’ I mumbled, with a burning face, ‘it’s just that... ’ ‘Just that what?’ he asked.
    “‘I was trying to be polite.’
    “‘Rachel, don’t try to be polite. Just try to be natural. Be a child.’
    “And another time (the two things are connected) my mother was in hospital one Easter and I was staying with the elderly couple who lived upstairs. Well, on the Sunday morning there wasn’t any egg beside my plate—of course, I hadn’t been expecting one—but what there was, was a packet of Ross’s Edinburgh Rock. When I took my seat I saw it and felt jubilant; you didn’t get so many sweets in those days. Yet I didn’t say anything because, again, I had been told never to assume that something was yours until you’d actually been given it. But after a while Mrs. Michaels, who was a funny little woman, spindly-legged, slightly hunchbacked, jumped up from the table with a small cry of distress and exclaimed to her husband as she went, ‘It was meant as a surprise. So why isn’t she pleased?’
    “Well, I sat there in shocked silence for a minute, gazing dully at the gift, and then I said quietly, ‘But I am. Very.’ Yet by then Mr. Michaels had gone after his wife and there was nobody left to hear.
    “There was nobody either—but this I was glad of—to see the silent tears