Paying Guests by Claire Rayner

Author:Claire Rayner [Claire Rayner]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780708988824
Google: ND_geS4VFgYC
Amazon: B00359FF3K
Publisher: Charnwood
Published: 1995-10-07T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

BUT GEORGIE STUBBORNLY refused to die. Despite all the gloomy prognostications from all around him – Mr Cumming, Eliza and, because of them, Tilly, too – he clung to life like a barnacle, silent, stubborn, but there. Polly sat with him for day after day beside the kitchen fire, tucked into the big rocker and, patiently and laboriously, dripped food into his half-open mouth from a china pap boat. At first the food dribbled out of his mouth to drip down his chin, but she would mop away the mess and try again and again, and after a while less of the pap was rejected. He did not precisely swallow but seemed almost to absorb the food through his mouth; and then one day he actually did swallow, and opened his eyes a little and then closed them fully. Polly lifted her face to Eliza who was, happily, watching them at the time and said simply, ‘You see? I told you he’d get better.’

After that first hopeful reaction, which came five days after the pair had moved into Quentin’s, he seemed to speed up his progress. He swallowed as much as a dessertspoonful of pap at a time, though it took him close on an hour to do it, and Eliza decided that no matter what the hospital had said – they had given instructions that the baby was to be fed only on bread pap, which was white bread soaked in water and squeezed out to leave a thin, cloudy liquid – that he needed ‘somethin’ a bit stronger than that’. She showed Polly how to make a richer bread and milk mixture with sugar in it and a little butter, and squeezed it through a muslin sieve to make a thicker, richer feed. And Georgie seemed to like that, for certainly he swallowed more and more of it.

It was a week later that Tilly came down on her way to breakfast to find Polly crouching by the baize door, just inside the hall, her skirts pulled close to her knees, and her chin tucked in so that she could peer out over her hands which were clasped round them, looking as though she was all eyes. Tilly stopped at the foot of the stairs when she saw her and her belly lurched. Had something happened to Georgie in the night?

‘What are you doing there?’ she cried, sounding brusque in her anxiety and for a moment Polly’s face crumpled.

‘I was waitin’ for you,’ she muttered and got awkwardly to her feet. ‘Didn’t know I weren’t supposed to be ‘ere. It’s the way wot you brought me into the ‘ouse, and I ‘as to come down the stairs an’ all and through ‘ere to get to the kitchen so I didn’t think it mattered.’

‘Of course it doesn’t!’ Tilly said, still a little sharply. ‘I was not complaining because you are in the hallway, silly girl! I was just surprised to see you there. Is there – have you trouble

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.