Free Paper Faces by Rachel Anderson Page B

white clouds, so that it was like being both indoors and out at the same time.
    At teatime, there was honey, sour-milk scones, and plum jam where you had to mind out for the stones. The bread and butter was served not in huge chunks like at elevenses, but on a pretty dish with a golden edge, in thinly cut slices.
    Gloria was hungry.
    â€œI’m telling you,” she said, “when I heard that big clock in the hall striking the five, you could’ve knocked me down with a feather! Seems like I been dead to the world for weeks! I’m telling you, Mrs. Hollidaye, you’ll get plenty of work out of me tomorrow. Anything you need doing around the place. And that’s a promise. Come on, pet, put that where the flies won’t get it.” She urged Dot to drink a glassful of fresh milk. “Does you good, that does. Oh, well, please yourself, ducky. Me and Lil, at least we know how to trough up good and proper, don’t we, Lil?”
    Loopy Lil, with plum jam already streaked like blood round her mouth, grinned cheerfully and went on tucking in.
    By the end of that first day, Dot knew, despite her throbbing head, her painful neck and throat, that this was a good place. She didn’t mind how long they had to stay. She wouldn’t even mind if Gloria went away and left her.
    Loopy Lil began piling the tea things onto the tray to carry back to the kitchen, and Mrs. Hollidaye suggested Gloria should go and help bring in the vegetables from the shed for supper, when an insistent bell began ringing out somewhere within the house. It clanged urgently, like a fire engine dashing toward a disaster, like the ambulance thundering along behind to retrieve the bodies. It would not stop.
    â€œOh, bother!” said Mrs. Hollidaye, calmly putting another teacup on the tray, not at all upset by the persistent clamor. “Telephone. It’s Nurse River, I’ll be bound, someone needs to be driven somewhere. And I did so want to dig up a few artichokes this evening. Jerusalem artichokes, they make a lovely cream soup so long as you don’t mind the flatulence.”
    The telephone was in her hall.
    Mrs. Hollidaye got up and went to it. Then Gloria was called. After that, everything changed and everything that had seemed to Dot to be all right disappeared. Just when she thought they’d got away from it, change and disruption had caught up with them again.
    Dot sat rigid and shivering on the wicker armchair in the conservatory. Loopy Lil went on piling more and more things haphazardly onto the tray.

11
    In the Henhouse
    Dot could hear them just inside the house. Mrs. Hollidaye was doing most of the speaking.
    â€œYes, my dear, I do understand how it must seem hard to you.”
    Dot knew it was something to do with her father.
    â€œBut you’ve got to try. For yourself. For the child. For him, too.”
    And Dot knew that Gloria was crying.
    â€œMy dear, he’s going to need you more than ever before.”
    Dot could hear Gloria saying she wouldn’t and she couldn’t.
    Then Mrs. Hollidaye said, “My dear girl, you have to start making a home. And you know that you will always be welcome back here on another occasion. Now, while you go and dry those eyes, I’ll look up the trains.”
    Dot in the conservatory watched as Loopy Lil slowly tried to pick up the unsteady tray of china. Dot knew what was going to happen.
    The wobbling teacup on the top fell first, the rest followed. Cups, saucers, teapot, milk jug with its little muslin cloth, plates, and splattered jam. The crashing seemed to go on forever as tiny broken fragments bounced with a dainty tinkle across the brick floor.
    Loopy Lil stared round at the destruction with a look of hopelessness as though she did not understand how it had happened. Dot knew that Mrs. Hollidaye would come to comfort her, to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault. Poor Loopy Lil, she had a screw loose. She’d only been trying to