With No Crying Read Online Free PDF

had been one of those straight-laced, censorious parents she so despised, actually trying to make her daughter feel guilty and awful, she couldn’t have made a better job of it. Miranda pulled the eiderdown over her head and buried her face deeper in the pillow; and when, a few minutes later, she ventured warily to peep out, her mother was gone.
    Presently, a delicious smell of oxtail, cooked with thyme and bayleaves, began to float upstairs.
    Her favourite meal! Had Mummy done it on purpose, to make her feel even more churlish and ungrateful? Or (let’s be fair) had she done it lovingly, to cheer her up, and make her feel cherished?
    Either way, there was the same decision to be made: sulks or supper? No one can reasonably expect both, and so after a brief struggle between the flesh and the spirit, Miranda rolled off the bed, combed her hair, slid her feet into her slip-slop sandals, and went downstairs to the dining-room.
    Daddy had already been told, obviously. He was wearing his see-no-evil, hear-no-evil look which he never ceased to hope would somehow make things not have happened. And indeed, it worked well enough at Ward Labour Party meetings quite often, but less well at home.
    On this occasion, the better not to see what was going on, he had taken his glasses off as well (he was short-sighted) and laid them by his plate, so that the bluish fuzz now materialising in the doorway bore but a minimal resemblance to anyone’s daughter, let alone his own, in blue-and-white checked shirt andfaded jeans, carrying Trouble towards his dinner table like a loaded tray…
    “Hello, Daddy,” Miranda greeted him, brightly and deliberately —the transparency of his evasion tactics always irritated her, wasn’t he supposed to have an I.Q. of 140, or something?—“I’m having a baby, did Mummy tell you?” she continued chattily, pulling out her chair and sitting down at the table, “around the beginning of March—”
    “Hush, dear! Not just now!” her mother admonished in an urgent undertone, while her father made a brave effort to choke on a forkful of mashed potato, and then to hear the telephone ringing out in the silent hall. Twice he rushed headlong to answer this phantom summons; and by the time he’d returned the second time, the conversation had sure enough moved into safer channels, and he was able to finish his meal in peace.
    The ostrich, burying his head in the sand, has long been a laughing stock; but all the same, it really can work. After all, if it couldn’t, ostriches would have been out of the evolutionary stream long ago, and so, presumably, would people like Edwin Field. The Survival of the Fittest manifests itself in diverse and sometimes surprising ways—look at the Toucan, for example, or the Duck-Billed Platypus.
    Sooner or later, of course, Mrs Field would pin him down and force him to face the facts, but by that time the worst would be over, and she would be in a position to tell him what he should think and, if there was anything he ought to do, to make him do it. Such had been her benign practice over all these years, and there seemed no good reason why any drastically different system should suddenly be put into operation now.
    By the time the meal was over, and she’d gone back upstairs, Miranda’s room was bathed in pinkish light, and the bright cotton curtains that Mummy had made her for her thirteenth birthday were stirring gently in the cool of the evening. In the far corner of the room, dusty, unloved and neglected these five or six years, Miranda’s old dolls’ house was flashing with sparks of rosy light from its tiny lattice windows, long unopened.
    How she had loved that dolls’ house once! And what a nuisanceit had been ever since, remorselessly continuing to exist, gathering dust, blocking up that useful alcove, and yet somehow quietly and inexplicably resisting every decision to give it away to this or that deserving child, or on behalf of this, that or the other worthy