Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns

Author:Barbara Comyns [Comyns, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fairy Tales, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9781907429194
Publisher: Capuchin Classics
Published: 2011-10-29T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

By the time Johnny Forbes was seven months old he had had four different nurses. The last and best was a Spanish girl called Catalina, who had settled into the household far better than we had expected although her English was poor and Charlotte and Bernard did not know a word of Spanish. The main thing in her favour was that both the children loved her from the day she arrived with her scarlet imitation leather suitcases. She was a good-looking girl, with beautiful dark eyes glowing in her slightly heavy face. Her hands were soft and dimpled, very feminine. In some ways she resembled me in appearance. She had the same thick, dark hair that fell into good shapes and the fine white skin – but, of course, without my scar. Our figures were similar too, a little on the heavy side. My legs were longer than hers, but she made up for this by usually wearing very high-heeled shoes on her small, pretty feet. The thing that appealed to us all, including Johnny, was her warmth and cheerfulness: she was like a dear little fire warming our rather sad hearts.

Now Johnny was all smiles and already trying to crawl. He had been like a little zombie under nanny’s care, and a clockwork zombie at that. Now time meant little in his life. If he awoke early in the morning, Catalina took him into her own bed and played with him. He had no fixed time for rests during the day, he just fell asleep when he felt tired, and in the evenings his bedtime varied from around seven to ten o’clock. Charlotte did insist on him having his meals at regular times that fitted in with ours and Catalina soon saw the wisdom of this. She liked to dress the children up before taking them out and sometimes they were drenched with ‘colonia’, and Marline had her hair drawn up into a little topknot decorated with beads, looking odd but very sweet.

Monday was Catalina’s day off and Charlotte said she spent hours over her toilet before she left the house. She would meet her Spanish friends in London and they would go from shop to shop until they closed. Then they’d go in a group to some friend’s bedsitting-room and have a picnic meal and play records, the group growing larger and larger. Sometimes she gave her friends a miss and I took her to places of interest like the London Museum, Hampton Court or Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. Unfortunately she wasn’t interested in art galleries or most museums and we often ended up looking in shop windows or spending an hour or more in Harrods, her favourite shop. At least twice a week Charlotte gave her an English lesson which they both enjoyed, particularly Charlotte, who loved to teach. Bernard, not to be outdone, tried to interest her in paintings and she said they were all ‘Muy bonito’ and gave her a pretty smile.

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