Free Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) by Jane Gardam

yard especially in the dark. All those other children! Shouting and dancing about with the flaming wires. They were all so much older. Why ever had Terry been invited?
    He wouldn’t be crying though. Terry never cried.
    But, well, he might just be. He might be crying now. Would they notice him? Would they, any of them have the gump to think he might never before have been out in the dark? Would they look after him around the bonfire? Would he scream when he saw the man burning? Would they care?
    That daft Bessie. No help there. Fourpence in the shilling. And she’d seen other people. All their proud horse-faced nannies in that hall. Eyebrows raised. She’d known Anton was wrong about the kids all being in uniform. Maybe in his country. Not here. Except if it was a sailor-suit and where would she get a sailor-suit? He’s not Princess Margaret Rose in London.
    They might be being unkind and laughing at him. At this moment he might be screaming with fear. She’d seen his face as they grabbed him and carried him away. They all said he was advanced. Very, very, very clever—. But she’d seen his solemn face—.
    He thinks I have left him and he won’t see me again. Fear blazed to inferno and she scrambled from the step through a laurel border and round to the back of the house to its rows of lighted windows and doors and the waiting bonfire. She stepped into a flower-bed and looked into a long room full of children sitting round a banquet.
    It was a Christmas card of pink and gold and scattered with glitter. There were cart-wheels of cakes, pyramids of sweets and fruit. Nannies in dark blue dresses stood behind almost every child’s chair talking to each other out of the sides of their mouths but never taking their eyes off their charges. Iron-masters’ children. The other side of the tracks. She couldn’t see Terry.
    One Nannie was pressing a rather torpid child into a high chair facing Florence. All the children were being firmly controlled. They’ll not forget the rules, these ones, she thought. There’ll be no fight left in them. She knew that this stuff wasn’t for Terry. Where was he?
    She sensed an event. A few children were being restrained from banging spoons on the table-cloth and a tall iced cake was being carried in by a heavy smiling man who gripped a pipe between his teeth. Mr. HAROLD FONDLE, OXON! A maid came and began to cut the cake. Where, where was Terry?
    Then she saw him. He was so close to her that she could have stretched to touch him but for the glass in the long window. He had his back to her. With his newly cut hair he looked like a tiny man. In both hands he held a glass of orange juice.
    He was drinking from it. He was lifting it up in the air. He was bending backwards. Then he slid off his chair and turned towards the window and she stepped back. And, oh, he was beginning to cry!
    And there was blood on his face and there was a jagged arc in the glass and on his hand and he was spitting out blood. He had swallowed glass!
    She began to beat her fists against the window as first one person and then another noticed that there was a crisis. Shouting and consternation surged among the nannies. One gave Terry a savage shake and glass shot across the room. Terry stopped crying and grinned and Mrs. Veronica Fondle came swanning up like a barge at sunset.
    Through the window Florrie heard her pea-hen cry that the child was probably only used to mugs, All well. All well.
    But Florrie was by now at the front door again hanging on the bell chain, dragging it up and down and when Bessie answered she was across the hall and into the dining room to see Terry composedly eating porridge which some plumed assistant was spooning in to him. Mrs. Fondle in her furs stood nearby, en route to the garden where the bonfire was being lit. Smoke and one crackling flame. ‘Oh! Aha! Oh—Mrs.
Verminsky
!’ (She was laughing) ‘He took a
bite
from a
glass
! But
please
don’t worry. Nannie has counted all the bits