Free The Flowering Thorn by Margery Sharp

weary body instead of the exacting mind! … And then as once before, from some deep and unexpected reserve, she found either courage or obstinacy to set her teeth and hold on. On the table with the telephone lay her heavy gloves. Lesley picked them up and went out to the well.
    2
    The first week was a pure nightmare of laying fires, drawing water, driving out pigs, making beds, washing-up and wrestling with the Primus: a squalid domestic turmoil, during which Lesley gathered only the vaguest notions of her general surroundings. At the bottom of Pig Lane, she was aware, lay the main thoroughfare of High Westover: half street, half square, with the Three Pigeons on one side and the Post Office on the other. The Post Office was simply a cottage with a notice-board, the Three Pigeons a late Victorian edifice of bright yellow brick; and neither of them lent the least picturesqueness to an essentially uninteresting view. From the other end of the square a road ran slanting to the church and Vicarage, which could also be approached across country from Pig Lane: but this Lesley did not expect to do. There was always, of course, the possibility of a Parochial visit, those impertinent descents which loomed so large in the conversation of Aunt Alice; but Lesley felt confident that by a little judicious atheism, or at any rate by a little judicious incivility, she would be perfectly able to nip them in the bud. In the meantime, however, the days went by and the only callers were a remarkably saturnine postman, and Arnold Hasty the constable, who appeared very early one morning to ask if she had lost a small white-and-tan terrier.
    â€œNo, I haven’t,” snapped Lesley, with her wrists in the washing-up water. “I don’t keep a dog.”
    â€œAh,” said Arnold reflectively, “then it wouldn’t be yours, then. I just thought it might.” He smiled at her bashfully; he was as young as a duckling. Lesley pulled out a meat-dish and began to swab it vigorously.
    â€œWell, if you should be wanting eggs,” said Arnold suddenly, “my mother’d be very pleased to let you have them.”
    â€œThank you,” said Lesley, “but I’m getting everything from Town … good morning.” And that was the end of Arnold.
    Apart from that one visit she spoke to no one at all except Patrick and Florrie Walpole, a handsome red-haired slattern, who supplied the cottage milk. Patrick, she believed, talked occasionally to the pigs. For bread Lesley telephoned to Aylesbury, where a baker named Twitchen offered to deliver twice a week, and punctually on the Wednesday morning a van arrived from Fortnum and Mason and decanted her first order: an attractive selection of ready-cooked foods, rusks for Patrick, and a small piece of bacon for angels on horseback. That same afternoon, the state of the kitchen becoming at least noticeable, she realised with a shock of dismay that in addition to the duties already enumerated it would also be necessary to scrub, sweep, dust and polish. For three days she did so; and at the end of the first week, with roughened hands and aching shoulders, came to the reluctant conclusion that she would have to get help.
    â€˜Some local woman’ she thought, ‘who can come in in the mornings, do the heavy stuff, and then clear out again. She can draw water, lay the copper, keep the Primus clean, wash up—all that sort of thing.’ The picture grew attractive. ‘And really if she can cook,’ thought Lesley, ‘it’s going to be quite possible.’
    From this hopeful conclusion, however, the next step was not so simple as might have been imagined. The village of High Westover supported no registry office, and Lesley had a shrewd idea that most business of that kind was probably transacted through either the Post Office or the Vicarage. The dilemma thus presented—between Church, so to speak, and Home Office—was sharp indeed: to apply to