Free Dorothy Eden by Sinister Weddings

going to cope with the requirements of a fifteen-month-old baby, but her distress was disproportionate. Hadn’t she liked her son Harry’s wife?
    “Paul,” Julia said, “why did you tell me Nita was Harry’s wife?”
    He moved back.
    “Because she is.”
    “No, darling. His widow.”
    “My God, don’t split hairs! You know that was what I meant.”
    “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. It’s just that—”
    “Just what?”
    Julia thought of Nita’s thin face that had a hungry yet excited look. She said slowly,
    “She doesn’t look like a widow.”
    “Nita isn’t the kind to look sad,” Paul said shortly. “She’s too tense, too edgy. She’ll take it out of herself in other ways, but she won’t let you see she’s sad.”
    “We must be kind to her,” Julia murmured.
    When he didn’t answer she finally reached the box of matches and succeeded in striking a match. She held the frail flame up to Paul’s face, laughing at him behind it, her tousled hair tumbling into her eyes.
    “You’re lovely!” he said involuntarily. Then he. blew out the match and holding her again in that hard painful embrace muttered, “Let’s be married soon. Soon!”
    Julia lay stiffly, suddenly deeply glad of the bed coverings between them. For Paul wasn’t being kind about Nita. She had seen that in his face as she had held up the match. The laughter had been flattened out of his mouth. It had had an implacable look. For a little while she was not sure that she loved him at all.
    After that she couldn’t go to sleep. She lay awake listening to the wind that lashed overhanging branches against the house until it seemed that the whole house was rocking and floating in a green sea. Much later, above the sound of the wind, she heard Nita’s baby Timmy begin to cry. He had been put to sleep in the little room across the passage from Julia’s room, and apparently wherever his mother was she could not hear his cries.
    Finally they became so pathetic that Julia got up and went in to him. He was tucked up in an old cradle that no doubt had done service for Georgina’s baby sixty years earlier. Timmy was a well-grown little boy, and the cradle was obviously a little too short for him. He had become cramped and uncomfortable, and was protesting emphatically. But when he saw the wavering flame of the candle that Julia held he began to laugh with delight, his flushed chubby face crinkling charmingly. On an impulse Julia put the candle down and gathered him into her arms. He continued to express his appreciation with murmurs of pleasure. “Where’s your mother?” asked Julia. She didn’t know where Nita was sleeping, and she shrank from rousing the house. If she was upstairs it was odd that she had not heard Timmy. The window of Timmy’s room looked over the back garden and the orchard and the path that led to Davey’s cottage. Julia could see a light shining in one of the windows. She looked at her wrist watch and saw that the time was one o’clock. Why was Davey up so late? Suddenly, for no reason at all, the thought came to her that Nita may have been down there. That was why she had not heard Timmy crying. If she had been in the house she must have heard him.
    Her suspicions had no foundation. As far as she knew Nita had never seen Davey in her life before. Yet something made her carry Timmy back into her own room and take him into bed with her. He murmured contentedly, his fingers exploring her face. Then he fell asleep, and she put her arm round him protectively and was filled with comfort. The wind had not abated, but now it no longer disturbed her, she no longer imagined she could see it flinging the snow off the high mountains in a white spray. She began to drift into sleep. Even the sound of a girl’s laugh, low and satisfied, not very far away, perhaps outside beneath her window, or perhaps on the stairway, didn’t deeply penetrate her consciousness.
    But in the morning she remembered it. For it was then that she