Free Summer at the Haven by Katharine Moore

from a boy who could hum a Beethoven theme correctly after a first hearing, and there was something else as well as relief. The boy obviously really loved what he had heard. She was as convinced ofthat as Miss Blackett and Gisela had been of his admiration of them. There was no one at all at The Haven besides herself to whom music mattered. Mrs Perry enjoyed Gilbert & Sullivan and Strauss waltzes from early associations, Mrs Langley loved hymn tunes, and Gisela sometimes strummed “Ach du liebe Augustin” on the old piano in the sitting-room, but that was as far as it went, and now this boy, whose invasion on her attic floor she had so resented, was apparently a comrade in felicity. She felt profoundly grateful that, even in old age, life offered such surprises.

6
TOM AND THE LADIES
    TOM’S PECULIAR crow of laughter became a familiar sound at The Haven during the weeks that followed. To Gisela it brought a sense of fellow feeling and made her giggle. Mrs Thornton, too, liked to hear it. She became thoroughly interested in Tom and quite often of an evening she would invite him into her room to share a radio concert with him. She found that he was always affected by the music, but that she could not tell beforehand how he would react. Sometimes he could not remain still but jumped about in a queer clumsy dance, or clapped his hands and nodded his head to the rhythm; sometimes he sat motionless as if enchanted, sometimes he rocked to and fro with laughter and sometimes he put his fingers to his ears and rushed away out of the room. She made an attempt to teach him to play on the sitting-room piano, but, though he could pick up quite complicated tunes very quickly and hum them correctly, the mysteries of the keyboard were obviously beyond him, or else he simply wasn’t interested.
    Old Mrs Langley was always especially kind to Tom because she got it into her head that he was her Susan’s love-child. “He always was happy from a baby,” she told everyone.
    Mrs Perry said it was good to hear him laughing about the house, it reminded her of her grandchildren. Dorothy Brown only heard it faintly.
    “You grow deafer every day,” said Leila, aggrieved. Leila hated Tom. “I never could bear defectives,” she said, “and that noise he makes gives me the creeps. I’m a very sensitive person, I’m afraid, but I don’t think it’s fair to employ a boy like that here. I shall complain.”
    As for Miss Blackett, she found the laughter disquieting, she did not know why, but it was part of her uncomfortable inability to place Tom in her scheme of things. She could not make him out and this annoyed her. At the end of the first week she had decided to keep him on for there was no doubt he was a good little worker, thorough and willing and much quicker and neater than she had expected from his looks. But he had odd habits. For one thing, as the summer advanced, he seemed to wake earlier and earlier and would come down and set about his work before anyone else was astir. At first she determined to put a stop to this, not that anyone complained, for he was a surprisingly quiet worker and the offices in the annexe were shut off from the rest of the house. But it was not what she was used to.
    “You must not come downstairs so early, Tom,” she told him, “there is no need – there is plenty of time for you to do your work later.”
    But the day after she had spoken and all the mornings that followed, it was just the same. She expostulated but she might as well have not spoken. It was most irritating, yet there was no denying that after all it was pleasant to find everything swept and tidy when she herself got downstairs, and the boiler fire giving no trouble, and the breakfast trays set out for Gisela, who on the other hand was apt to be late, and Miss Blackett often had had to see to these herself. And there were little extra jobs done without the asking, such as Lord Jim’s breakfast Whiskas tin opened and his evening snack