“Oh, you’re beautiful.  You’re beautiful.”

Mrs. Fielding stopped her progress.

“So are you, you little darling.”

She stooped quickly and kissed her, holding her tight to her breast, crushed down into the bed of the flower scent.  Anne gave herself up, caught by the sweetness and the beauty.

“You rogue,” said Adeline.  “At last I’ve got you.”

She couldn’t bear to be repulsed, to have anything about her, even a cat or a dog, that had not surrendered.

vi

Every evening, soon after Colin’s Nanna had tucked Anne up in her bed and left her, the door of the night nursery would open, letting a light in.  When Anne saw the light coming she shut her eyes and burrowed under the blankets, she knew it was Auntie Adeline trying to be a mother to her. (You called them Auntie Adeline and Uncle Robert to please them, though they weren’t relations.)

Every night she would hear Aunt Adeline’s feet on the floor and her candle clattering on the chest of drawers, she would feel her hands drawing back the blankets and her face bending down over her.  The mouth would brush her forehead.  And she would lie stiff and still, keeping her eyes tight shut.

To-night she heard voices at the door and somebody else’s feet going tip-toe behind Aunt Adeline’s.  Somebody else whispered “She’s asleep.”  That was Jerrold.  Jerrold.  She felt him standing beside his mother, looking at her, and her eyelids fluttered; but she lay still.

“She isn’t asleep at all,” said Aunt Adeline.  “She’s shamming, the little monkey.”

Jerrold thought he knew why.  He turned into the old nursery that was the schoolroom now, and found Eliot there, examining a fly’s leg under his microscope.  It was Eliot that he wanted..

“I say, you know, Mum’s making a jolly mistake about that kid.  Trying to go on as if she was Anne’s mother.  You can see it makes her sick.  It would me, if my mother was dead.”

Eliot looked as if he wasn’t listening, absorbed in his fly’s leg.

“Somebody’s got to tell her.”

“Are you going to,” said Eliot, “or shall I?”

“Neither.  I shall get Dad to.  He’ll do it best.”

vii

Robert Fielding didn’t do it all at once.  He put it off till Adeline gave him his chance.  He found her alone in the library and she had begun it.

“Robert, I don’t know what to do about that child.”

“Which child?”

“Anne.  She’s been here five weeks, and I’ve done everything I know, and she hasn’t shown me a scrap of affection.  It’s pretty hard if I’m to house and feed the little thing and look after her like a mother and get nothing.  Nothing but half a cold little face to kiss night and morning.  It isn’t good enough.”

“For Anne?”

“For me, my dear.  Trying to be a mother to somebody else’s child who doesn’t love you, and isn’t going to love you.”