Quartet (9781509859498) by Crompton Richmal

Author:Crompton, Richmal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Pub Ltd
Published: 2017-04-10T10:44:34+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Laurence and Jenifer free-wheeled down the hill on their bicycles, laughing from sheer high spirits and joy of life. They wore rucksacks on their shoulders, and Jenifer’s carrier and the basket on her handlebars were piled with various oddments that their rucksacks would not hold, as well as their picnic lunch.

A friend of Frank’s had offered Laurence a post in his firm, and, as it was a bigger and much more prosperous business than Frank’s, Frank had advised Laurence to take it and had resigned himself to having neither of his sons in his own business.

Marcia had suggested that he should have a short holiday before settling down to work, and it was taken as a matter of course that Jenifer should be his companion. Marcia was glad for Jenifer to have a holiday. She had seemed overstrained and nervous lately, and once or twice had looked as if she had been crying. Adolescence, of course, was a trying time . . .

To Jenifer the plan was like a sudden release from prison. There had been a nightmare quality about life since the day of the Hall dance. She had tried to forget what had happened, but, even when she managed to forget it, she was aware all the time of the memory waiting to pounce on her thoughts the moment they were unoccupied. And when she couldn’t hold it off any longer, when the memory of it surged over her with wave upon wave of shame and horror, a sort of desperation would seize her, and she would feel that she could not face any longer a life in which everything that had been lovely was spoilt and besmirched. She shrank from going out in case she might meet him, she shrank even from looking out of her bedroom window because the sight of the Hall chimneys over the trees gave her a sudden sick sinking of the heart.

But once she had started on the holiday with Laurence, everything was changed. The nightmare feeling vanished. The holiday was an adventure (it was the first time that she and Laurence had been away without the rest of the family) and her youth rose exultantly to meet it. Her friendship with Laurence was a quiet friendship, independent of words, independent, indeed, of any sort of intercourse. It was not so much that Laurence always understood, as that he did not even need to understand.

Laurence, freed from the trammels of school life, his feet already on the road of manhood, was in higher spirits than she had ever known him. Even the inevitable little contretemps of the journey added to their enjoyment, the fact that the brakes of Laurence’s bicycle did not work properly, and that he had to use his foot as an emergency brake when necessary, taking it from the pedal to the tyre with a quick rotatory movement, being one of their staple jokes.

The holiday, of course, had to be as economical as possible, and they stayed in rooms, buying their own food.

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