Buffet for Unwelcome Guests by Christianna Brand

Author:Christianna Brand [Brand, Christianna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9049-1
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-01-15T22:38:00+00:00

No More A-Maying…

THE ROLLING SUMMIT OF the bare Welsh mountain was patched with gorse, standing like sparse tufts of hair on a bald man’s head. ‘Come in by the bushes, Gwennie,’ said Boyo. He had been nerving himself for this for a long time. When they were safe from observation, he blurted it out at last. ‘Gwennie! Show me?’

‘Show you what?’ said Gwennie. There’s dense, for a girl of nearly six.

He went very red, having to say it outright but he summoned up all his temerity. ‘Show me your chest.’

Gwennie seemed not unduly offended. But…‘How can I show you up by here?’ She peered out from the frail shelter of the prickly patch. ‘Someone might see us.’ And indeed from where they crouched they could see across the valley to her farm, Penbryn. Mam and Da had gone over to Llangwyn for the mart. Ianto would be out in the woods with Llewellyn the Post and Blodwen off somewhere with Nancy James; but their big brother Idris had been left to work in the yard, cleaning out the silo pit, shifting the hay, ready for the new crop. ‘Not up here, Boyo. Come down to the cave.’

‘If we go to the cave—will you show me?’

In the yard outside the hay-barn, her swing hung idle. ‘If I show you, Boyo, will you push me on the swing?’

‘Yes, all right,’ said Boyo.

‘A hundred times?’

‘All right, all right,’ said Boyo. But a hundred times!

They tumbled down the hillside to the trees that edged the little river; crept across the rough path to the green glade that lay at the opening of the cave. It was not a cave, really, but a sort of rock tunnel that opened out again where the low bank dropped, grass over crumbling earth, to the water’s edge. But when, hidden within the cave’s mouth, she had, with much struggling, hauled up her thin cotton dress—nothing! Just a plain old flat chest like his own, two tiny pale pink seed pearls on a flat white front. ‘That’s not a girl’s chest,’ said Boyo, disgusted. ‘You’re not a girl. You’re a boy.’

‘I’m not,’ said Gwennie, indignant.

‘Oh well! Let’s go in by the river, then,’ suggested Boyo craftily, ‘and make boats out of leaves and launch them down the running water.’ Better than a hundred times pushing her on her old swing. And all for nothing.

But someone was there already. A girl was lying drinking out of the river as they themselves often stooped to drink, lying with her shoulders hunched and her head right down to the water, one arm still on the bank, lying at an uncomfortable angle, turned at the elbow, palm upward. Huge eyed, they clapped their hands to their mouths and backed silently away. ‘Boyo—it was your Megan!’

‘If she’d seen us!’

‘If she knew I’d shown you my chest!’

‘She wouldn’t tell,’ said Boyo, gaining confidence with distance from danger.

‘Well, perhaps not. She’s funny, that old Megan of yours.’

‘Lost her ’ealth,’ said Boyo, laconically, in the language of the grown-ups.

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