Mr Nicholas by Thomas Hinde

Author:Thomas Hinde
Format: epub

Chapter Eight

Dorothy left next day and on Friday Mr Nicholas went to London. The windows were open, and the house silent and hot. David was upstairs in his room cleaning his shoes. Recently he had spent many hours a day cleaning his shoes till they shone like patent leather. Owen was on the hillside building a castle. He damped the sand, shaped it into rectangular walls, and let it bake hard in the sun. In the kitchen Mrs Nicholas was cooking but there was no one to talk to and the sound of her knife cutting on the deal table came between intervals of silence. The excitement of the past days seemed to have passed. As he stepped into the taxi which took him to the train Mr Nicholas had said, “There’s no doubt we’ve cured our Hump trouble.”

Mrs Nicholas bent over a salad, decorating it with hard-boiled egg, and Peter coughed so that he should not startle her by being there suddenly.

“Hallo darling.”

“Hallo.”

“One piece too many, now where shall I put it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you busy with?”

“Nothing, really.” There was a pause.

He said, “Why has father gone to London?”

“With Mrs Pawthorn, I suppose.”

“Did he tell you?”

“Owen heard them arranging it last night on the telephone.” She cut slices of cucumber. “I really can’t understand what he sees in her.” She said it looking at what she was doing, as if she thought she was wrong to talk about it.

“No,” said Peter. He went back on the remark, considering it apart from his mother. “No, I really can’t.”

“Owen can’t stand her,” she said. She was trying to excuse her dislike. “He says she flatters him.”

“What does Mr Pawthorn say?”

“I don’t think he worries. Will you arrange these for me?” She passed him the slices of cucumber, and he began to lay them one at a time symmetrically on the salad.

“When will father be back?”

“By the eleven-two tonight.”

He went on helping her with the lunch because he was suddenly aware of her loneliness, and didn’t like to leave her in the kitchen, cooking all day to make nice things to eat for people who had ceased to care about her. He could remember Mr Nicholas caring for her very much. He could remember standing beside the double bed in the early morning, asking his father to come shooting, and his father saying, “Coming, old boy, let Mummy and I have a last five-minute cuddle.”

They had been defiantly in love. His father had often compared the successful way in which he loved his wife and his wife loved him with other people’s failures.

After an argument, when he had got his way, he used to say, “Give me a kiss,” and take her round the waist, leaning forward as she leant back smiling and let herself be kissed. “No, a proper one.”

“I want a kiss,” he would say, grasping her wrist and leaning towards her between courses at lunch.

When the servants laid them at opposite ends of the table he used to be angry.

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