Free Hunger by Susan Hill Page B

past the row of cottages.
    ‘I mean, it’s a paradise, isn’t it? Running loose, perfectly safe.’
    ‘How do you know they’re perfectly safe?’
    He swung her hand up and kissed it. Smack. His lips were damp.
    ‘You’re not worried about the mad axeman?’
    ‘No. I just wonder how you know it’s perfectly safe. I mean, why the country would be safer than the town. The city.’
    Adrian gave his hyena laugh.
    ‘Traffic. Road rage. Paedophiles. Knife crime. Oh yes, indeed, urban life is very safe.’
    ‘I didn’t – ’
    ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’
    The Nurofen had begun to wear off. Someone was dragging her insides down at the front and boring the hot poker into her back. The headache was gone, though.
    ‘What do you think they were doing? Cooking something?’
    Stone Soup , she remembered.
    ‘Making witches’ potions.’ Adrian put on a spooky voice. ‘Stirring the cauldron. Eye of newt and all that. I think it’s great. Really great. All that space. No one telling you what to do. No Nintendo.’
    ‘I don’t think children play Nintendo now, do they? Isn’t it something else?’
    Adrian slammed the gate.
    ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Why do always have to correct me? Why do you have to be right?’
    ‘I wasn’t . . . ’
    But he had gone thundering up the uncarpeted stairs and crashing into the bathroom.
    He had two more days off, during which they sorted out the furniture, the curtains, the kitchen, the linen, the lamps, the books, and Paula forgot what it was like not to ache, not to feel so tired she longed to lie on the floor and sleep without undressing. It rained. Adrian sang and whistled. The electricity failed. The oil delivery came. And every morning and afternoon he made her go out for a walk, to explore, even in the rain, because, he went on saying, that was why they had come here.
    ‘Fresh air. The natural world. Space. Exercise.’
    And she had agreed. When they had still been living in Salisbury Road she had agreed, had longed for all of this, the greenness, the space, the silence. She did not blame him at all.
    When he went back to work, she would start organising her workroom, an old lean-to conservatory at the back, with a couple of broken panes and rotting wood in the door. But hers. It had a floor of old, uneven bricks and a tortoise stove. She could see the shadows of the blue hills and the sky was soft with cloud, right above her head.
    On the second morning she went for a walk alone, ambling along the track and across the field without any sense of direction or purpose. Adrian always had a purpose – to the east, to the west, to the woods, to the fields, to see a view, to reach the end of somewhere. Not having one made her feel peaceful.
    On the far side of the field, beside a high hedge, she could see them again: a little cluster of children close together, arms stretched up, then backs bent, arms up and bent. Paula zigzagged quietly towards them.
    They were picking unripe berries, green and small, and dropping them into a plastic tub.
    ‘You do know you can’t eat those?’
    Two of the children turned and stared at her, but did not smile or speak.
    ‘Leave them till autumn. They’re OK when they’re ripe.’
    One of the boys stripped a handful of the green berries and ate them, looking her straight in the eye.
    ‘You’ll get tummy ache.’
    But after a moment, during which they merely stared at her in silence and unsmiling, she turned away.
    ‘Wonderful,’ Adrian would have said, ‘foraging for their own treats, not buying all that sugary junk from a shop. That’s how it should be.’
    Paula wondered again why they were not in school.
    She began to notice the birds that came into the garden. While she was at her drawing board or painting at her table she kept looking up and spotting a blackbird under the bushes, a thrush on the fence, a long-tailed tit, a great tit, chaffinches. Once or twice a woodpecker swooped in, flashing scarlet and white. They did not fly up in panic.