The Court of the Stone Children by Eleanor Cameron
Author:Eleanor Cameron
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2013-07-10T03:00:00+00:00
Chapter Eleven
He had months and months of notes on his project in this binder, he said, coming in and sitting down, and Mrs. Patrick went out to make toast for him. It was all a mixture of things he’d copied and things he’d written down whenever he had even half an idea, no matter how crazy it was, and when there got to be too much, he’d file away those pages and put in fresh. If he’d lost what he had here, he could never have gotten any of it back, never remembered. But how could those kids have known that?
Mrs. Patrick came in and put down his plate and a cup of coffee and he spread the toast thickly with jam and began eating. “It’s just that they’ve always got to have some little thing going,” he said presently, almost musingly, “some stupid little kick, no matter how senseless. They give me a pain in the rump.” Mrs. Patrick chuckled and Nina, slipping him a sideways glance, noticed how clearly his freckles stood out, stains spattered across his thin face, a face that in its thinness made him seem older than he must surely be. For a fraction of a second, she knew exactly how he must appear to those others, with his secret intensity, his fierce way of looking at a person, obliviously, so that the other, some stranger to his kind, could only be made to feel uncomfortable, unnecessary, insulted. Yes, he was odd! But not insufferable, the way they must see him. To her, quite the opposite.
She looked up and Mrs. Patrick’s eyes were on her, calm, faintly smiling, as though there were all the time in the world or as if time, inside this room, inside this particular moment, were held in abeyance and no one need say a wrord. Gil was watching the fire, his anger seemingly past, for all at once he leaned back and had a good long stretch, then let out a contented sigh. Nina heard the fire flapping and how it would creak when the wood shifted. She was aware of the quiet, of her own happiness as usually she was not, in the midst of it, but only later when she looked back and it was gone.
Gil sat up, finished his coffee, then reached out and touched Nina’s knee with the point of his finger. “Would you care to see a sort of messy room?”
It had two large windows giving a view of the bay, a thoroughly used room, every corner of it: very personal and expressive of Gil, Nina thought. There was a goodsized desk, well littered, and half a wall of bookshelves, completely filled. A large, sloping pillow, the kind used for reading in bed, had been tossed on the floor. The bedside table was an unusually large one whose surface around the lamp base was entirely covered with reading matter piled at random with innumerable slips of paper sticking out at the edges. A shelf underneath was in the same condition.
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