With No Crying Read Online Free PDF Page B

cause.
    Miranda hadn’t looked at the thing except with mild and helpless irritation for years, but suddenly this evening she found herself noticing all over again how pretty it was—how enchanting, really, all aglow in the last rays of the sunset, and the little windows shining just as they used to shine when she polished them with that inch-square of wash-leather that Mummy had snipped off for her that rainy afternoon six—seven?—years ago. There’d been a tiny bucket, too, and a ladder made from match sticks glued to cardboard struts, for Grandfather to climb up on his stiff, unyielding plastic legs.
    What fun it had been! Crouching down in front of her old treasure, Miranda manoeuvred open the absurd little front door (it had always been inclined to stick, and now it was worse than ever from disuse), and peered into the dark little hallway, still carpeted with those scraps of maroon corduroy left over from the pinafore dress Mummy had made her one winter holidays, when she was about eight. The little stairs were carpeted likewise, boasting even stair rods made from wooden tooth picks, laboriously halved with blunt (and subsequently quite useless) scissors.
    On to the ornate, ridiculous dining room, crammed with match-box furniture, and lumpy, impossible sets of dining-chairs (even a doll couldn’t balance on them) made from conkers stuck with pins. How well she recalled Mummy showing her how to make them … and the wonderful, golden October afternoon when they’d collected the conkers, gleaming like polished mahogany through the cracks in the green, spikey rind…
    And in the midst of it all, decrepit and unloved, there lay in a dusty little heap the whole Mactaggerty family—Grandfather Mactaggerty, with his white beard come unglued and dangling round his left ear and his stick all out sideways … Grandmother Mactaggerty eternally smiling down—even now, with her legs in the air—at the knitting stitched permanently to her lap, MummyMactaggerty, Daddy Mactaggerty and the three naughty little Mactaggerty children, Rosalinda, Rosamunda and (for some reason she could not recall) French, his perky, bell-bottomed trousers tattered and dusty now beyond all recognition.
    How the baby was going to love them! Little though they knew it, their days of loveless retirement were coming to an end, and life would begin for them again. Soon, there would be new little fingers to set Grandfather’s beard straight for him again, and to send him— hobb ledy-hop, hobb ledy-hop—out shopping. Or to the office. Or up in an aeroplane. In a year—well, no, two years—the Mactaggerty’s would be on their feet again, having fun again, adventures again, and raisins, and crumbs of chocolate biscuit on the tiny plates….
    That her baby would be a girl, Miranda had never doubted. Already she had decided to call her Caroline. Like “Caroline and her Seaside Friends”—and after Granny, too, of course. Granny would have been awfully pleased…
    Would she, in view of all the circumstances? The wishes of the dead are, of course, difficult to ascertain, but it is surprising, in practice, how often their opinions turn out to be just what is maximally convenient for their survivors; and why should Miranda’s Granny be an exception to this rule?
    Dusk was falling, the inside of the dolls’ house was thick with shadows. Reaching with her giant, overgrown fist into the dining room, Miranda gathered up the Mactaggertys in a single handful and carried them over to the desk to look at them properly under the reading lamp. To look at them, that is, through Caroline’s fresh, wondering eyes, already in the process of coming into being.
    They were awful! Well, not them, not the Mactaggertys themselves , for they were indestructible—but their clothes !
    Dirty, tattered, cobbled together with huge, uneven stitches, and not even hemmed, half of them—had she really been such a rotten needlewoman at the ripe age of nine? Or even ten, was it?