Whatever Happened to Margo? by Margaret Durrell

Author:Margaret Durrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241983225
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Sunday started with a disaster, and as so often my first moments of the day were heralded with involuntary action, so it was today. Persistent filterings of ominous sound, probing, roused me from a heavy sleep. Somebody was crying. Nelson was dead, poor Nelson. I felt a moment of great personal loss. We would spend pounds on a large wreath worthy of him: the coffin would have to be extra wide, a foot perhaps.

Something touched my face: I shot up to find Gerry standing by the bed crying. Nelson, like a nightmare of over-indulgence, was by his side.

‘Come and see, the mice are dying,’ Gerry sobbed.

‘I thought you were dead,’ I told Nelson bluntly as I focused, feeling that I had wasted my sympathies now that he wasn’t and remembering last night and poor Mrs Williams’ dilemma. Sheer tiredness had forced me to bed in the end, leaving her dozing fitfully on the drawing-room sofa, her anger turned to anxiety and forgiveness, as she hoped and prayed for her offspring’s safe return.

‘Not on your Nellie,’ he remarked casually. ‘It’s these ’ere mice breeding like flies, causing overwork, and women’s nagging that is driving me to near suicide – and now this financial disaster.’ He held two fat hands up in a gesture of despair.

Nicholas appeared around the door: he looked small and anxious and moaned of death and destruction.

‘Wot a burial we are going to have,’ Nelson surmised, plunged into further gloom – hypocritically, I knew, for I could see by his eyes that he was suddenly cheered at the prospect of a funeral session, which might possibly be turned to financial gain. He was quick to seize any advantage to better his own financial position at the expense of a good cause, in what might be loosely called ‘press gang sweeps’, guaranteed to force the last coin from his victim.

Throwing a dressing-gown on, I staggered out still heavy with sleep, food and wine. ‘Where the hell have you been, anyway?’ I demanded sourly over my shoulder of Nelson, who was following me meekly, a robust convict in striped pyjamas. ‘The last time I saw you, you were counting coffins with all the diligence of the local cops.’

‘I was around,’ he murmured, evading my question with the face of an overweight angel, and he endeavoured to change the line of thought by a completely irrelevant remark, one of his favourite manoeuvres.

The scene of upheaval, at the place that caused Mrs Briggs so much heartbreak, was the obvious hand of a stealthy marauder. ‘Who did this? Mrs Briggs?’ I suggested unfairly, with the irritation that too much rich living and little sleep produces.

‘It’s that perishing cat,’ Nelson stated. ‘I ’eard the crashings and raised the alarm, but I’ll get ’im with me catapult, see if I don’t – the stinking ol’ bleeder.’

I was so used to Nelson’s constant and varied reflections on the word blood that I scarcely ever rebuked him now. It was like his grammatical errors; they were as much a part of him as the chaotic roundness of flesh and bone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.