The Mission House by Carys Davies

Author:Carys Davies [Carys Davies]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

36

He couldn’t explain it. He hardly knew her.

Every day now, before he went into town, he stood at his window, looking out across the garden, waiting for her to appear. When she didn’t come, he wished she would.

There were times when he walked out along the driveway and thought he could hear the rapid, uneven music of her distinctive walk just behind him, but when he turned there was nothing, and he was aware that the sound of her had been conjured, not by the shuffle of the leafy pom-poms of the eucalyptus trees in the wind, but by his own hope.

They’d never really had a proper conversation. The only times he’d been alone with her was the day she’d told him it was going to rain, and the day she helped him break into his bungalow. There were the hours he spent listening to her read, and helping her with her spelling; there was the sewing they did together, and the baking, but the Padre, on all these occasions, was always present, including the time she’d asked him if his face hurt. It was rare, too, for them to talk about anything other than the task in hand. In the three and a half weeks since he’d started teaching her, they’d swapped only the most meagre details of their different lives, and always within earshot of the Padre. Once, Byrd had asked her where she’d lived before she came to the presbytery, and she told him she’d lived with twenty-seven other children with someone she called Aunty. She’d told him about Aunty’s ambitions for their education. About the foreign volunteers from Europe and Scandinavia and North America who came and stayed for three months and then vanished and you never heard from them again. He, in turn, told her that he had worked for most of his life in a library but didn’t any more. He told her that before he arrived here in the hills, he’d been to Chennai and Trichy and Thanjavur. To Tranquebar to visit the old Danish fort; to Pondicherry to see the houses the French had left behind. He told her he’d wanted to go to Delhi, and to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. He’d always wanted to see the Taj Mahal, he said. It looked so beautiful in all the pictures. The glittering white, the long stretch of water in front like a pea-green carpet. But the heat had defeated him, he told her, and he’d come here instead.

The only moment they’d shared which had felt in any way intimate or private was yesterday when, out of the blue, she’d passed him a tiny folded piece of paper.

The Padre had just stepped out of the room to answer the phone.

‘Uncle,’ she whispered. ‘Please. Read this.’

Byrd’s heart had begun to beat crazily. He’d looked at her and then at the paper. What was he hoping for? He couldn’t say. The paper was folded into four. He opened it.

Arkansas, he read.

Just that, in Priscilla’s large, round handwriting.

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.