Free Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing Page A

very quiet. Warm pressure on her legs absorbed her attention. It was the cat. Emily shifted her knees, and the cat woke and yawned.
    What Emily needed, she now knew, was to find Mary, and to hear from her words that would define her, her situation.
    She went to the kitchen in her wrap, and saw that any breakfast had been eaten long ago. It was already midmorning. Emily found water simmering in the kettle, made herself tea, and sat down. She decided she must be ill. She could not remember being ill. Her heart ached, but if that was a symptom, then…There were voices, one a child’s from outside. A window from the kitchen showed the two, Mary Lane and a little girl, engrossed in each other, in a small room like a conservatory that had windows on to a garden.
    The sight of Mary, bending forward to smile at the child, who was cutting out coloured paper with blunt scissors, made Emily’s heart go cold with misery. The child leaped on to Mary’s capacious knees, and Mary hugged and kissed Josie, Bert and Phyllis’s child. Still Emily did not realize that what she wanted was to be that child, rocked in Mary’s arms.
    Emily retreated to the table, and her tea, and stayed there, listening to the sounds of woman and child, from time to time going to the window to see how it all went on. What total absorption from Mary. If she, Emily, had had a child, was that how she would have been? In the ten or so years she had been a dedicated hostess, could she have spent her time as Mary was now?
    There would have been something to show for it, whereas now she kept thinking: But that wasn’t me, surely. Was it really me in that nice house that took up so much of my attention?
    At lunch-time Mary brought in the child, for some little mess or other, and Emily was offered plates of this and that. Mary hardly ate. ‘She will have a nap now,’ she said. ‘Well, a small child certainly does tell you your limitations.’
    The child went with Mary to her bedroom, and Emily, glancing in, saw that both were asleep.
    She went out into the lane, which had not changed, and she wandered along past clumps of daffodils and narcissi till she saw a big field, which she remembered. But it was full of noisy children running about, and then she saw a man she associated with cricket. Yes, that was Alfred Tayler and he was instructing what seemed like hundreds of children of various sizes, boys and girls, in the ways of cricket. Emily sat down, where she had before, under the oaks, to watch. It was all very noisy and energetic and when the cricket ball arrived near her feet, a much earlier Emily jumped up and threw the ball back towards the man, who caught it, with a laugh and little bow.Soon he came over, and said, ‘I am sure I know you. But I am confused. That skirt…’
    â€˜I am wearing Mary Lane’s clothes,’ said Emily. ‘I came down on an impulse and didn’t bring the right things.’
    â€˜Oh, yes,’ said Alfred. ‘I see. I heard from Mary that you’ve had bad luck.’
    Well, that was a way of putting it.
    â€˜Yes, my husband died.’
    â€˜That is very sad. I’m sorry.’
    â€˜I’ve seen you playing cricket before, long ago.’
    â€˜Not so long, surely,’ said Alfred, gallantly, as two boys came running up. ‘These are Tom and Michael,’ said Alfred. The two loud, excited boys were tugging their father away, back to the cricket pitch.
    Alfred ran, the boys chasing him.
    Could I have done that? wondered Emily. The boys were likeable lads, both dark and lean: like their father, she supposed.
    She sat on, watching until Alfred came running back to say that tomorrow, if she liked, he would be doing sports with the children over there. There, she could see, were two workmen pushing a heavy roller each.
    Alfred went running off, surrounded by the children.
    The cottages and houses of the Redway farm were full of children. Emily went back to