The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann

Author:Leonie Swann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

13

WARM MILK

Once upon a time there was a little girl. She lived in a house near the woods. She liked ice cream and skipping. She liked plums and summer, marbles and hide-and-seek. She liked white handkerchiefs and red lollipops and even the taste of cough syrup. She liked books and the grasshoppers’ evening song, and she liked telling tales on other children in school.

The girl’s name was Clara.

Agnes paused. Was it really a good idea to tell Nathan the story about her school friend Clara? What for? The whole thing was an eternity ago, almost forgotten, and now of all times it came back to the surface. Agnes realised too late that a story that had children in it wasn’t necessarily a children’s story. Far from it.

But the ship had sailed. Nathan was sitting up in his bed, wide awake and wide-eyed.

“More!”

Agnes seized the forward momentum and aimed to present everything in as child-friendly a way as possible. If she was clever about it, maybe Nathan would fall asleep before she got to the unpleasant bits.

Obviously, Clara wasn’t particularly popular with the other children, and so she sat on her own during most of the playtimes, mostly under a tree, mostly with a book. Sometimes the children threw acorns or stones or rose hips at her, but she always acted like she didn’t notice, and so the other children soon got bored.

You might think she lived a lonely life, but she did have one friend. Maybe not a real friend—but a companion.

Me, thought Agnes. Me.

Their houses were a little way out of the village, near the edge of the woods, so they walked to school together every day.

It was a long way they had to go, because there was no school bus back then.

“No school bus?” Nathan cried in disbelief.

“No school bus,” Agnes confirmed with a sigh. If there had been a school bus, then maybe the course of her whole life would have been different!

You might think that two little girls on their way to school would have lots to talk about, but that wasn’t the case. Mostly they walked in silence, not really side by side, but just a few steps apart. If one of them tripped or had to tie their laces, the other waited, casually, almost as if by coincidence. If one of them ran, the other ran too. Sometimes they talked about the weather, homework, their toys or their plans for the weekend, but Clara was a show-off and a tattletale, and so as a rule there was no great pleasure in talking to her.

It went on like that for a while, and it would have carried on like that, if one day a new teacher hadn’t come to the school. He was different to all the other teachers the children knew. He wore fine wool jackets like a gentleman and small gold-rimmed glasses, and he always smelt good, not just of soap, but of leather and lemons.

His name was Titus Coldwell. His voice was smooth and melodic, but it was sometimes difficult to understand exactly what he wanted of them.

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