Free Rose in Darkness by Christianna Brand Page A

Grenwidge.’
    ‘In Greenwich?’
    ‘Well, breakfast time this morning, Ena Mee suddenly comes out with, “Where’ll we go for our picnic, Daddy?” “Picnic?” he says. “You promised to take me for a picnic today,” she says—never a word to me, of course, never a word to Nanny who’s got to get the samwidges and that. Well, he looks a bit sick, you could see he had something else up his sleeve, he’d forgotten about the picnic, but she starts creating, “You always break your promises!”—and “Mummy would take me if she said she was going to,” ’  said Nanny, contributing a touch of flattering embroidery which both of them must recognise to be totally false. ‘So he says, “I can’t,” he says, “I’ve got a case to see,”—always the same old excuse. So Ena Mee, she sets up a hullabaloo, so he sits there thinking and at last he says, “Well, look, all right, I was supposed to be going to Grenwidge to see this patient, so what we’ll do, we’ll take our picnic to Grenwidge Park, and I’ll drop in and see the patient and you and Nanny can wait just a few minutes.” Ena Mee says no, she wanted to go to the zoo’, but, “It’s lovely in Grenwidge Park,” he says, “you can sit on the hill and look all the way down to the river.” “What, after all that rain last night?” I says. “Why not a nice restrong?” but no, we can take the tarpauling and a picnic it has to be. And I have to say,’ admitted Nanny, ‘it turned out a nice day after the storm, and not all that cold.’
    ‘Yes, well obviously it was all an excuse to go to Greenwich. So, Nanny, what about Her? He parked you there and just went off and left you?’
    ‘Well, he had to tell her he couldn’t manage it after all, I suppose. But pretending it was a patient—But it wasn’t a patient,’ said Nanny, shrewdly, ‘I know him ! Just come back and says after all that trouble, the patient had gone out, so he just left a message. And I bet she had too, he looked that upset!’
    Goodness: thought Ena, listening with only half an ear. Greenwich? She had an idea, though only a very vague one, as to the identity of the lady concerned. That there’d been any lady before she’d left him, was certainly not the case, though she had made considerable parade of jealousy at his seeing all those females and under such intimate conditions, in his consulting rooms. But afterwards... Well, Phin was a bit of a one for it; and doctors, especially gynaecologists, had to be very, very careful about dalliance with their patients; and, especially again, with young married patients. If she could discover that Phin had been up to something of the sort, then the law would be willing to hand Ena Mee back to her Mum. Not that Ena had the smallest intention, whatever Nanny might imagine, of lumbering herself again with a six-year-old child, and Ronald would certainly never stand for it—but by pretending to want her, she could blackmail lots and lots of lovely lolly out of Phin. Ronald was loaded, but had proved not all that generous, after all, in doling it out to the little woman. ‘Well, so what did you have for the picnic then, Nan?’ (Greenwich Park. She must be one of his Harley Streeters, sent to him by a general practitioner. The hospital where Phin was consultant was in North London, which was why he chose to live out in Hertfordshire; and Greenwich, after all, just about slap opposite, a good twelve miles away, the other side of London. The lady would not come to him via a North London hospital. A small contribution to Mr Charlesworth’s collage floated through Ena’s cunning mind; she was unconscious that it was this that had prompted her to ask what they’d had for the picnic.)
    ‘Oh, well, the picnic,’ said Nanny, flattered. One of Mummy’s charms had been that she always said that Nanny’s fixing-uppings for all special occasions were so marvellous that she would leave everything to her—by which Ena in fact meant all the