Free Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing Page B

the Lanes’ to find a heavily pregnant woman taking the child by the hand to lead her away from Mary.
    â€˜No, it does me good to walk,’ she said, though she was scarlet and perspiring and full of discomfort, Emily could see.
    A dark woman, but it was not possible to see what she would look like when not pregnant.
    â€˜I’m glad it’s not long to go for her,’ said Mary. ‘Being in the family way isn’t poor Phyllis’s line at all.’
    And now, until suppertime, Mary told Emily about how ‘everyone’ was concerned that any troubles Phyllis might have would start Bert off drinking again. ‘That is the problem, you see.’
    What interested Emily was the ‘everyone’. And when Harold came back from the bank he too joined in, with how Alfred’s wife was wonderful with Bert, no one knew what could have happened if Betsy hadn’t been so good with Bert, because there was a time when everyone thought he was going straight towards the DTs.
    Again Harold went off to the room he called his lair, and Mary said she was at her wit’s end, there were mice again in the storeroom and really she thought that Mrs. Mew – the cat – wasn’t earning her keep.
    This house had been a farmhouse once, before it was absorbed by others, which collectively now wanted to be called a village. At the back there was a pantry, with marble shelves, where stood bowls of cream and milk, cheeses, ranks of eggs, slabs of yellow butter. Off that was the storeroom, with sacks of oats, flour, sugar, and on the floor piles of potatoes and onions, covered from the light.
    Here, Mary mourned, a family of mice left their droppings on the floor and even in the pantry.
    The provisions of the storeroom, the pantry, were attractive to Emily, contrasting them with the tight, orderly shelves in her house in London where food arrived, delivered every day.
    Mary said, ‘Oh, Emily, I’m sorry. I’m off to bed. I know you must be feeling neglected.’
    â€˜It’s enough to be here,’ said Emily, thinking that with Mary just there, a yard or so away, it was indeed enough. But she would have liked very much to go with Mary to the kitchen for a good old-fashioned unhurried chat.
    â€˜You’re not one to be knocked off course so easily,’ said Mary, after a close look at Emily’s forlorn face. ‘You’re all right.’ And she went off to bed.
    With that Emily had to be satisfied, but she lingered a while in the storeroom. Mrs. Mew wandered in, like a visitor, just as if she did not know more was expected of her, and sat staring indifferently at a little hole in the corner, which Emily supposed must be a mousehole.
    She drank cocoa. Now, when had she last done that? Yes, it was at Daisy’s: they had been drinking cocoa last thing at night all through their training, and when Emily went to visit her.
    Emily went to bed and thought that she had been here not two full days and was already feeling promptings of remorse about her listless state. She was not one to be knocked off course, had said Mary. Well, she had been, knocked down, knocked to pieces. And what was her course?
    The next day the little girl came again to be with Mary, and Emily went off in the afternoon to watch the children with two men, one the energetic, always-on-the-move Alfred, and a tall, lazy, shambling fellow she supposed was the famous Bert. She sat away a little distance, hiding from the chilly spring airs in Mary’s fur coat, which she suspected was rabbit, nothing like the sleek black moleskin of her own town coat.
    There would be a big sports day tomorrow for the children of the area, and Emily planned to be there, but next day Phyllis called for Mary, saying she felt some pains but did not know if these were real birth pains but please would kind Mary…
    Emily was left with Josie in the little conservatory, or semi-outdoors room. Josie showed she was well used to