Free Trustee From the Toolroom by Nevil Shute Page B

finished and painted, hanging up in what had once been the coal cellar of the house and now was used as a boxroom. He had made it with pleasure for her, but now that the moment had come to use it as an anodyne it did not seem to be quite the right thing after all. He walked down to Holborn and then eastwards looking in the shop windows till he came to Gamage's. He went into the big store, mingling with the crowd of Christmas shoppers till he found the toy department and browsed around there, a pale-faced, rather fat little man in a greasy raincoat. He was already conscious of the need for economy, and finally he bought a yellow and blue plastic duck that would float in the bath. He knew as he bought it that it was much too young a present for a child of ten, but he bought it feeling that somehow it might be the right thing in the circumstances.
    He got back to the flat in Baling early in the afternoon, carrying the duck in a paper bag. He had thought of stopping at the store in Baling Broadway and discussing the position across the counter with Katie in the household linen, but he had abandoned that idea. Katie would want to come home early in order to be at home when Janice got back from school, and it did not seem quite fair to him to throw all the dirty work on Katie. He felt that he would rather tell Janice himself and get the back of the job broken before Katie got home; enough would fall upon her later, anyway.
    He was sitting in his chair before the fire in the parlour when Janice came back from school, a slim, dark-haired child in a thick blue overcoat and a blue hat with the school ribbon on it. He called, 'That you, Jan? Take off your coat and come in here. I've got something I want to tell you.'
    She came in, and he sat up in his chair. 'What do you want to tell me?' she asked.
    'Come over here,' he said. She came close, and he put his arm around the slender little waist in the gym tunic. He could only take this straight. 'Look, Jan,' he said. 'I've got something serious I've got to tell you. You know about boats and yachts, and how they get wrecked sometimes, running on shore, on rocks ?' She nodded.
    'Sometimes,' he said, 'the people in the boats get drowned when that happens.'
    She stared at him, and he knew that the realization was already with her. She asked, 'Drowned dead?'
    'That does happen sometimes, in a shipwreck,' he said gently.
    ' Has that happened to my mummy and daddy ?'
    'I'm afraid it has, Jan,' he said steadily. 'They got into a terrible storm, a long, long way from here. And they were wrecked.'
    'Are they drowned dead, Uncle Keith ?'
    'I'm afraid they are, both drowned,' he replied. 'Come and sit up on my knee.'
    He had thought that she would burst into tears, but that did not happen. She came Jap on his knee and he held her close, and so they sat in silence for ten minutes. At last she asked, 'Do you think my mummy and daddy were very frightened when the ship got wrecked ?'
    The adult quality of the question amazed him; children were so much older than you thought they were. 'No,' he said. 'No, I don't think that they'd ever have been frightened. They weren't that sort of people. And you won't be frightened of things either, I don't think.'
    She shook her head. He reached down beside his chair and brought up the paper bag. ' I bought you a duck,' he said. ' I'm not sure if it's a very good present, but I wanted to bring you something and this was all that I could think of.'
    She pulled it out of the paper bag upon his knee. ' It's a lovely duck,' she said. 'Can I have it in the bath?'
    'Of course,' he said.
    She wriggled round upon his knee and kissed him. 'It's a lovely present,' she said. 'Thank you ever so much for it.'
    He held her for a moment, and then said, 'What about a cup of tea?'
    She got down from his knee. There were still no tears. ' Can I come and watch you make a bit in the workshop ?'
    'Why, yes,' he said. 'I'll make a bit specially for you. What sort of a bit shall we make