Free Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde Page A

almost lifted her hand to give her a good cuff but remembered the guest-bit.
    â€˜None of that, please! We’ll have good manners here.’
    â€˜It was last Christmas, and mine had red diamond eyes. Didn’t it Lally?
Red
ones. I remember.’
    â€˜Rubies,’ I said, and Flora twisted her face to begin whining again, but Lally gave me one of her looks and wrapped everything up in a clean tea-cloth.
    â€˜Red or green makes no difference, no difference at all. Both are lucky, and
we
better be lucky and start to move. The driver has just trodden on his cigarette butt, and that’s a sure sign. So anyone who wants to be “excused” had better go off and do it now. Be off this instant – it’s a long journey ahead.’
    Going back to the bus was quite difficult. It was icy, and our feet crunched over the tarmac and I held on to the Weekend very tightly for fear of them falling or something. It was quite worrying trying not to bang them against my knees, and Lally said she was worried aboutthe other end, when we got to the cottage, because the way up from the road was a narrow chalk path, and it would likely be iced over in the dark of the trees. You couldn’t even ride a bike up it in the summer, it was so steep, so how will we manage with all the luggage and that dratted cage, she’d like to know? I knew she was worried because she said ‘dratted’. In front of a guest.
    When we got into the bus and settled ourselves down, and she had counted the luggage on the rack, I said that perhaps Mrs Daukes, who lived in the cottage at the foot of the path, might give us a hand, or her husband, Mr Daukes.
    Lally snorted, and resettled her hat with the ivy leaves. ‘Mrs Daukes hasn’t been known to give anyone a helping hand, nor anything else for that matter. A sly woman, Mrs Daukes.
He’ll
be down at the Magpie getting ready for Christmas. We’ll be lucky if she’s even aired the house. Though I wrote most particular and advised her of our impending arrival. But I wonder?’
    Lally didn’t like Mrs Daukes because once last summer, when our parents came down to the cottage, without warning, they had discovered her sitting in her garden wearing a pair of our mother’s ankle-strap shoes from Paris. There was a terrible fuss, so now there was no knowing what we’d find. She could have set fire to the place. Or put the pink carbolic powder we used in the privy down the well. You couldn’t really trust her after that shoe business.
    At Lewes it was already almost dark. There were lights in some of the shops up the hill, the lamp-posts were on, and by the time we had clambered off, said our thanks tothe driver and the conductor and got on to the Seaford bus which would take us on over High-And-Over and down to Alfriston, it was really quite dark, and we only caught the bus because Lally waved her umbrella and shouted very loudly. And then we were safely on board.
    After we moved out of Seaford there were only four other people left on the bus except for us: Ivy Bottle, who lived down Sloop Lane and was pretty boring, my mother said; Mr and Mrs Wooler, who were quite old and friends of the vicar’s sisters, Misses Ethel and Maude who ran the little shop down by the Flats, the water-meadows which got flooded in winter at high tide; and another person we did not know. Everyone we did know called out and said how nice it was to see us all again and were we down for Christmas, and how was our mother and so on. It was very friendly and welcoming and I nearly told them about the Weekend, but a poke in the side from Lally made me change my mind.
    Then the headlights of the bus swept across the old flint walls and the bobbly windows of Baker’s the confectioner’s and the bulging panes of glass in the double windows of Wilde’s the grocer’s, and then, like a skinny finger wearing a thimble, right in the middle of the square, there was the