Part of the Furniture by Mary Wesley

Author:Mary Wesley [Wesley, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-5063-9
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-10-02T23:57:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

RIDING DOWN THE HILL to the village on errands for Ann, Juno considered the letter so long overdue which she must write to her mother. It would not be enough to say that she had a job on a farm, that she was living in a house called Copplestone, working for a man of the same name who owned the farm and the land roundabout. Her mother would want to know how this situation had come about and why she had not boarded the ship as her parent had planned. It belatedly struck Juno that her mother, meeting the ship and discovering her missing, would be alarmed, to say the least. She groaned. ‘Oh my God, why have I not thought of this before?’ She kicked the pony into a trot as she racked her brain for some cogent reason for the change of plan and, too, for not having had the courage to make it clear that she had never wanted to go to Canada and a new life with Mr Sonntag. That she needed to stay in England, desperately needed to stay where her heart lay.

‘I should have been a more rebellious child,’ Juno said to the pony. ‘Get on with it, Millicent.’ She kicked the animal, who had halted to snuffle over a gate at a carthorse, ‘That’s no suitable friend for you.’ She shook the reins and Millicent broke into a reluctant trot, while the carthorse kicked up its heels and galloped clumsily, keeping parallel on its side of the fence. ‘You should set your sights higher,’ she told the pony. ‘An Arabian barb would suit you,’ she said and her mind reverted to her mother’s aspirations for herself, clean-cut Canadians with prospects and private means magically produced by Mr Sonntag. She began to laugh out loud, for she was enjoying the ride and it was a beautiful day.

Trotting into the village, she was met by a procession of army lorries loaded with soldiers in commando uniform who, seeing Juno, whistled and waved, in high spirits returning to camp after an arduous day. Reining Millicent to the side of the road, Juno waved back. Her eyes searched the faces driving by and her heart beat in spite of common sense which told her that what she hoped to see was not there, that she was a fool to pin hopes on such slight resemblances as the set of an ear, the colour of an eye, that she did not know whether Jonty and Francis were in the commandos, for they had never told her what element of the amorphous mass engaged in the war was theirs. Had she not, a few nights earlier, imagined them in the plane which had shot down the bomber?

Dismounting at the Post Office and tying the pony to a rail, she found that the woman she had seen driving her car down the hill from Copplestone with a large dog running behind was standing beside her, holding out a hand, saying, ‘I am Priscilla Villiers, a friend of Robert’s, and you are Juno Marlowe.

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