Free Absolute Hush by Sara Banerji Page B

feeling relieved, to thinking he had seen the lascivious scene on the Nymph Quilt and had winked at her, and feeling mortified.
    Mrs Lovage, sensing anguish arriving, was already pouring Elizabeth tea. Elizabeth threw herself into the chair, groaning, ‘They dragged the Nymph Quilt off, tumbling all the bedding, with no thought at all for me, who works hand and foot for them.’
    â€˜Oh, that one with fellows clutching logs of wood between their knees?’ asked Mrs Lovage, pulling out her packet of Woodbines. ‘I always thought it was a bit of a hoot.’ It was a moment before Elizabeth recognised the description and said ‘Yes.’
    â€˜I wonder what they want it for, on a lovely day like this,’ said Mrs Lovage.
    George and Sissy tiptoed upwards, breathing fast, sensing thrills, eager with curiosity, while tumescent satyrs pranced under their sweating palms.
    â€˜You have to take all your clothes off and so do I,’ whispered George as they hauled the quilt after them into the darkest bedroom. ‘Then you’ve got to show me what the Italian prisoner tried to do to you.’
    â€˜And we can see how to do it properly by looking at the picture on the Nymph Quilt,’ said Sissy.

Chapter 8
    â€˜They’re very quiet,’ Mrs Lovage said, lighting Elizabeth another cigarette. ‘We don’t usually get such peace. Normally it’s in and out with dirty boots all day long, asking for bread and marge.’
    Elizabeth, her eyes narrowed against the romantic swirls, looked out on the garden, thought of beauty, and didn’t answer.
    Mrs Lovage didn’t mind, interpreting Elizabeth’s silence as a sign of her delicate nature, which she much preferred to the humdrumness of her own family: Mr Lovage grunting brief speculations about his cucumbers, ‘They won’t beat last year’s if I can’t get dung’; or her daughter Myrtle’s shrill prayer of, ‘All I want’s a pair of silk camiknicks’.
    â€˜Which reminds me of that calf they brought back, do you remember, ducky? Perhaps they’re up to something like that now,’ Mrs Lovage was saying. ‘They’ve seemed pretty shifty ever since they came home. I can just imagine them with some filthy animal up there, and me having to go with a scrubbing brush and clean its messes.’
    Elizabeth announced suddenly, ‘I was not made for war.’ She spoke loudly and mournfully, the words coming straight from the heart. ‘I am a peace person through and through. I can’t bear violence or shortages.’
    â€˜Oh, I know, ducky,’ cried Mrs Lovage sympathetically, quickly moving from the subject of the dirty children and the animal in the attics. She felt grateful to Elizabeth for teaching her how to be a flexible thinker. Her own family, parents, children, husband, were all very heavy thinkers and, untilElizabeth, Mrs Lovage had been accustomed to staying strongly and at length with a single subject. Mrs Lovage’s mother was the worst, grabbing the discussion like a bulldog by the throat and, when it had been done to death, starting it all over again.
    â€˜I saw Myrtle with an American soldier. She was dressed like a slut.’
    Heated family argument would follow. Whether Myrtle, fifteen, was old enough. Whether the dress she had worn was rude or merely fashionable. Whether it was right for her to go out with an American at all. Whether her school work, her health, her character, her reputation, would suffer.
    â€˜Can you get me silk stockings from him?’
    â€˜He’s ever so kind to me, even if he is ugly.’
    â€˜I bet he’s got a wife and family back there in America.’
    And from Mrs Lovage’s mother, her tone rich with the satisfaction of gloom, ‘He’ll give her the claps, that’s for sure.’
    When no one could think of anything more to say, Mrs Lovage’s mother would announce brightly, as though