THE KEEP by JILLIAN BECKER

Author:JILLIAN BECKER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: eBookPartnership.com
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mrs Leyton too came to the rescue. ‘Now run along and send Simon here,’ she said. ‘It is his turn to talk to Dr Weiss now.’

Josephine found him helping Alpheus, the new fat gardener, to rake leaves into a pile for a bonfire.

‘You must let me light it, hey?’ said Simon.

‘Yes, Baas,’ said the new boy, smiling.

Simon kept his head bent and gave abrupt orders. He would not look Alpheus in the eye. But he spent as much time with him, almost, as he had with Willy, undeterred by Nanny.

‘Look,’ he said when he saw Josephine. He showed her a very small frog, hardly bigger than a tadpole.

‘Put it away,’ said Josephine. ‘I don’t want to touch it.’

He put it down his shirt front.

‘Mother wants you on the veranda. She wants you to talk to a woman. The woman will ask you to tell her something.’

‘No,’ said Simon.

‘She looks,’ said Josephine, bending light round tree trunks and hedges, ‘like a kangaroo. And she has a moustache.’

‘All right,’ said Simon, and flung his rake on the pile. ‘Don’t light it till I’m back,’ he called.

‘Hello Simon. My name is Dr Weiss. Can you say that?’ She had not expected anyone so big. She had expected a boy. This was hardly a boy. And his hair was unexpected too. Was it actually crackling? No, that was the chair.

He did not answer and Mrs Leyton said nothing to prompt him. Emma Weiss knew this was a test. She called, ‘Simon - ’

‘Do you want me to tell you something?’ he shouted, louder than she.

‘Why yes, please do,’ she said, turning to Mrs Leyton and this time parting her lips on a smile that showed her teeth, where triumph was written in letters of gold.

Flatly, and in a lower tone he said, ‘Your knickers are showing.’

‘Oh. Oh I see. Do you think that is rude?’

Mrs Leyton frowned. She had hoped that not too much of that would be necessary. After all the mind was - well, right at the top. With the mind there was no need to - touch. This woman especially. There had been something about her which had made it impossible to entertain her indoors. Even when she’d talked about art, she’d made it sound - impure.

Simon looked at Dr Weiss’s knickers which she did not try to hide, and took the frog out of his shirt.

‘What is it you have there?’

The tiny creature leapt to the ground.

Dr Weiss uttered a guttural noise of disgust.

‘Take it away at once,’ Mrs Leyton ordered, tucking her legs back under her chair. ‘I loathe them,’ she said, and squirmed.

Dr Weiss, out of revulsion and fear, rather than to oblige, stamped galvanically, hammering the frog with her thick cork heel. The mess remained there, except what stuck to her heel.

Mrs Leyton got up.

‘Will you come and visit me in my little home?’ Dr Weiss asked Simon, who was looking down at the squashed frog. ‘You will bring him soon to visit me, won’t you Mummy?’ she called to Mrs Leyton.

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