Maddie by Claire Rayner

Author:Claire Rayner [Claire Rayner]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781849820424
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 1988-04-20T14:00:00+00:00

20

January 1951

Working on Pa was ridiculously easy. She started by sitting beside him as he read his newspaper and asking him to explain things in it to her. At first he was irritated, and merely rattled the pages at her, but she sat there quietly and timed her questions carefully, so that he was not as aware of being interrupted as he might have been, and slowly he thawed and began to talk and once he had started, and discovered the pleasure of having a rapt audience who clearly respected and admired him and never questioned his opinions, went on talking.

She would sit beside him, carefully choosing the same low stool on which Rosalie had sat beside her, knowing how appealing it was to have someone sitting looking up at you, and would hug her knees and rest her chin on them so that she had to keep her eyes even more upturned, and he clearly found her very beguiling indeed. She would laugh often, too, as they talked and he became more expansive than ever, trying little jokes and sallies for the pleasure of hearing her laugh again, and slowly and easily she threaded him on her line and pulled him in.

Blossom became aware quite soon of what was happening, and took to coming into the sitting room, instead of remaining in her favourite place in the dining room, to talk to her husband, but he became gruff when she appeared and returned to his reading, and after a while she would go away again, clearly put out but unable to do anything about the situation. Maddie would sit there demurely, smiling at her and leafing through a magazine that she kept beside her in case she needed it and, baffled, Blossom would take herself and her missal and her rosary to the dining room, leaving the two of them alone again. And after a while the old man would look over the top of his paper at Maddie and glint at her and she’d grin back and they’d return to their discussion of the day’s news. And if Blossom came back they would lapse into silence again until she went away. It really became a most diverting game.

Maddie concentrated on politics after the first few days of the game, chattering artlessly about her inability to comprehend and he would set his paper on his knees and give her an account of how the American political system worked which, though she pretended to find it too complicated, she understood well enough to know that it should not be all that difficult to get Timothy Two out of the family business and involved in public life.

But it was not so easy to bring the subject of Timothy into their conversation. Any attempt to talk about family business made the old man shut his lips and she would have to be very adroit to get him talking again on the innocuous subject of American doings in the world. Until she hit on the idea of asking him questions about his own history.

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