Free The Haunting of Harriet by Jennifer Button

with an inclination to do nothing in which he began to indulge. His depressions deepened. He would sink into pits of self-loathing and despair that terrified Alice, who had little empathy with her husband’s affliction and saw him as a liability.
    His “little nightingale” was his salvation. Her patience was infinite, her devotion total. They would start each day walking together around the garden, her right hand gripped tightly in his left, his black cane in service in the other. With his stick he would point to items at random - a bud, a leaf, an insect - and Harriet would run to them, kneeling to examine them more closely; then placing them in her canvas bag she would run back to the comfort of that large hand while chattering non-stop about the latest amazing treasure, which they would examine later under a magnifying glass. The bond being cemented daily between father and child was to be for the child a powerful force in a strange, lonely life.
    So far Harriet’s life had been fine. She had a few troubles but adopted the philosophy that there was no point worrying about something if you could not do anything about it. Her relationship with her mother fell into this category. Although Alice was an abysmal parent, Harriet taught herself to accept her or ignore her. Her love for her brother came naturally and was mutually rewarding. Her love for her father was absolute. Watching him slip away cut her to the quick. His dependence on her, however, turned her into a fiercely independent creature, old for her age and proud of her role as a carer. She had been born stubborn and now she was growing up, her individualism was surfacing with a vengeance. So when her father suffered his first stroke Harriet was ready to become his “nightingale” in more ways than one. Given the choice, she would have been constantly at his side, nursing him in her own earnest way.
    George’s concentration diminished daily. But Harriet never moaned. When she was not wiping the stream of dribble from the corner of his lop-sided mouth or packing his pipe and puffing on it to get it started before handing it over for him to take a few feeble sucks, she was content simply to sit and sing to him, knowing that the days when he could walk with her or carry her aloft on his shoulders were over. She had to accept that their precious days together were numbered. When his face contorted with pain or he became insensible to her presence, she wondered where he went but she never gave up on him. Sitting in silence was hard for Harriet and she tried to read quietly beside him. She even attempted sewing and produced a pathetic sampler that he hung beside his chair in the Tudor room. There was little she could do other than love him. For the child, that was enough but for the man it caused a deep ache, a yearning to gather her into his arms and fly away with her beyond all the pain and cruelty this world afforded. There were times when Harriet’s presence served as a hideous reminder of his inadequacy as a father. His depression crippled him. He would be lost without her and afraid of leaving her. Locked inside his unresponsive frame was a loving father desperate to escape by any means. The telepathy between them was so strong that the child began to sense the pain her presence caused him. Reluctantly she limited the time she spent with him to such times when she could see it was helping him. The prison that trapped him became a two-way barrier blocking her on the outside, unable to reach through to him while he could find no release from the pain.
    Alice remained oblivious to all this. She was starring in a drama of her own. She had discovered the joy of sex with almost anyone but George. The war delighted her. London became even more enticing with its constantly changing supply of handsome uniformed officers to admire her. The blacked-out streets, the knowledge that at any moment it could all end, that any kiss could be the last, was irresistible. War had