Free Absolute Hush by Sara Banerji Page A

drearily.
    Mrs Lovage would give the rooms a good clean then come down with cobwebs in her hair and dust streaks on her apron to say, ‘Those kiddies are such pigs, dearie. You’ve no idea.’ Once she said, ‘What a waste, ducky. If they was mine I’d have PGs up there. Imagine having six young airmen each paying a pound a week. You wouldn’t have to give money another thought. And it’d be a bit of company for you.’
    If Elizabeth wanted the children, she would call shrilly from the foot of the stairs up which, at this moment, Sissy and George were carrying a quilt that smelled a little cheesy because it was stuffed with the wool of sheep that had been sheared nearly two hundred years ago.
    The embroidery on the Nymph Quilt depicted three hairy, virile satyrs doing unspeakably rude things to a group of delighted nymphs. It had been made for a rich merchant in the late seventeenth century whose sexual appetite had become jaded, and this erotic bedcovering not only restored his original virility but made him so sexy that, even in his eighties, healthy young women became worn out with his energetic love-making. The quilt had, by the time George and Sissy borrowed it, lost much of its original brilliance. Its figures were barelydecipherable, the colours had darkened, the edges frayed, the grosser aspects faded.
    George and Sissy had known the Nymph Quilt all their lives and had never given the scenes depicted on it very much thought, until the episode with the Italian prisoner, when Sissy had suddenly understood what it was about.
    The quilt had been in Tim’s family for generations and perhaps it was one of Tim’s ancestors who had suffered from the loss of libido. Elizabeth had been going through a stage of telling Tim she was tired. Or had a headache. ‘Not tonight, darling. I couldn’t face it.’ It happened so often that Tim, realising he did not arouse her, started to lose confidence, and found that, even when Elizabeth was willing, he could not get an erection.
    Then one particularly disappointing night he rushed off and returned with the Nymph Quilt. Elizabeth was pretending to be asleep but Tim, ignoring that, threw the quilt down saying, ‘You’ve got to look.’
    â€˜Not now, in the morning, I’m tired,’ Elizabeth mumbled.
    â€˜Now!’ snapped Tim so sharply that it made her sit up.
    Tim traced the ancient figures out with his finger, telling Elizabeth in the smallest detail what was going on. She tried not to listen, to muffle her ears, to plead exhaustion, but he would not let her.
    It had been marvellous for both of them that night, and the next day Tim had been chucklingly triumphant, saying, ‘Neither I nor the dear old quilt have lost our potency, after all.’
    Elizabeth, who felt ashamed to have been sexually aroused by a seventeenth-century bedspread, said she thought the quilt was disgusting.
    Tim said, ‘An antique bit of sewing can’t be rude, can it?’
    â€˜It can,’ said Elizabeth.
    They had nearly had a quarrel, Tim clutching the spread and saying, ‘You are neurotic’
    Elizabeth was no fighter and, seeing Tim would never relinquish the quilt, tried to blot it from her mind.
    She did not like people to see it in her house and after Mrs Lovage had, by mistake, put it on Mr Parson’s bed, and it was too late to do anything about it, Elizabeth had lain awake all night worrying in case he saw the picture. At breakfast she was beginning to feel sure he had not when, after spreading marmalade on to Mrs L’s cold and disastrous toast, Mr Parson had snapped it in half in a noisy explosion, then looked up and winked at her. Before Elizabeth had time to react, he had raised his napkin to his eye, carefully wiped it, and said, ‘Got a crumb in!’
    After that, as the man drank his coffee, slowly, much too slowly for his burning hostess, Elizabeth veered from thinking it was a crumb and