it to be a lie. “You’re making it up, just to scare me.”
“You know quite well I’m doing nothing of the kind. And there’s no occasion at all for being scared. You’re theirs now, and you know they love you, even if you don’t always deserve it. And you know that everything will go on just the same as always. This doesn’t alter anything. Except, I hope, the way
Doesn’t alter anything! Only the whole of his world, and worse still, the heart in his body and the mind in his head, and the memory of a lordly childhood he had always supposed to be simple, unassailable, and his by right.
In the flat, practical voice of shock, which she had no way of recognising, he said: “Why did they never tell me? I wouldn’t have minded so much if I’d known all along, I could have got used to it.”
“That was their mistake. I know it, I always told them so. They thought you need never know, because it happened just about the time they were thinking of moving here to Pentarno. By the time they realised how foolish they’d been, they’d left it so late they didn’t know how to go about it. So they kept quiet and hoped for the best. But
“I didn’t know I wasn’t. I mean—I didn’t know I had to be more grateful than other boys—”
“Now, there’s no need to feel like that about it. You just think it over quietly, while you pick the apricots for your mother, and see if you can’t make up your mind to behave a bit better to her in future.”
He looked at his hands, which were gripping the edge of the stone seat so hard that the knuckles were white. He wasn’t sure whether he could detach them without having them start shaking again, but he tried it with one, cautiously, and it was quite steady. He picked up the basket. Everything seemed to work much the same as before, and yet he felt a long, long way from his own body, as though he were looking on at a play.
“All right. Which tree shall I start on?”
She told him, piloted him to it, not without certain careful sidelong glances at the chilled quietness of his face, and left him to his labours, firmly determined not to fuss over him now and undo the good she had done. He’d needed a sharp lesson. All boys get above themselves at times, even the nicest. It would be disastrous to hang over him anxiously at this stage, and betray the fact that he had only to manufacture a look of distress to twist her round his finger again. So she tapped away stubbornly out of the kitchen-garden, without once looking back. It was going to take her the whole of the next hour to convince herself that she had done the right, the necessary, the only possible thing, and there was not now, and never would be in the future, any cause to regret it. But she would manage it eventually, and then forget that she had ever been in doubt. What she did must be right, as it always had been.
Paddy set the basket on the edge of the gravel path, and began methodically to strip the apricot tree. Somewhere infinitely distant and dark, his mind groped feverishly after the full awful implications of what he had heard. Fifteen is a vulnerable age. Once the possibility was presented to him, he found it only too easy to believe that nobody could love him, and to imagine that nobody ever had. When he came to consider himself in this new light, stripped of privilege, he didn’t find himself a particularly lovable specimen. The people you rely on, the people you’re sure of, even though you don’t deserve them—what happens when you suddenly lose them? Like having the world jerked out from under your feet as neatly as a mat.
Now he wasn’t sure of them or of anything. Oh, he knew, just as positively as ever, that they were wonderful, that he adored them, that they would never let him down. They’d always been marvellous to him, and always would be; that wasn’t what dismayed him. But now he found himself horribly afraid that it was only out of pity for his forlorn estate, unwanted by his father, a rejected nuisance, badly in need of someone to take pity on him. The shock of feeling himself uprooted, of not even knowing who or what he was, was bad enough. But the shock of turning to look again at the parents he had hitherto taken for granted as his undisputed, cherished and misused property, of seeing them suddenly strange, forbearing and kind, and not his at all, only suffering him out of the goodness of their hearts, of feeling his inside liquefy with fearful doubts as to whether they could ever truly have loved him or felt him to be theirs—this was too much for him to grasp or face. He shrank from it into protective numbness, clinging desolately to the job he had been given to do, and dreading the time when the shell of habit would crack and fall away, and leave him naked to the chill of what he knew. Furiously he plucked apricots he was not aware of seeing and loaded them into the basket he hardly knew he was filling.
“You might,” said Miss Rachel, making an unexpected appearance in the library at about half past eleven, “take out some ginger-beer and cake for Paddy. I daresay he’d like something by now.”
“I daresay he would,” agreed Tamsin, “if he hasn’t eaten himself sick on apricots. I know which I’d rather have.”
“Paddy isn’t afraid of spoiling his figure,” said Miss Rachel nastily.
Tamsin rose from her work with a sigh, and took the peace-offering the old lady had prepared with her own hands. And very nice, too, she thought. Chocolate layer cake, and the almond biscuits he likes best. What did he do to be in such high favour to-day? Or what’s she trying to smooth over? Come to think of it, why doesn’t she take it out to him herself?
She was back very quickly, and still carrying the tray.
“He’s not there.”
“Nonsense, he must be there.” Miss Rachel’s resolutely confident face grew indignant at the suggestion that things could slip out of the comfortable course she had laid down for them. “You haven’t looked properly.”
“Under every leaf. He isn’t there, and his bike isn’t there, and his basket isn’t there. And the apricots from that first tree aren’t there, either. He must have worked like a demon. Probably to get away and down to the dunes before the matinee’s over.”
“Ah!” said Miss Rachel, seizing gratefully on a solution which permitted her to keep her self-righteousness, her indignation against him, and her cheering conviction that children were as tough as badgers. “That’s probably what it is. The little wretch! I just hope Tim will send him home with a flea in his ear.”
They rode down to the church promptly at ten, in Tim’s Land-Rover and Simon’s grey Porsche, dropping from the coastal road through the dunes by a pebble-laid track among the tamarisk hedges, silted over here and there by fine drifts of sand. The tang of salt and the straw-tinted pallor of salt-bleached grasses surrounded them, the fine lace of the tamarisks patterned the cloudless but windy aquamarine sky on either side. The small car led, with Simon driving it and George beside him. The Land-Rover, used to being taken anywhere and everywhere by Tim,, ambled after like a good-natured St. Bernard making believe to chase a greyhound pup. Tim and Sam Shubrough up in front, the Vicar behind for ballast, with the additional tackle they had brought along in case of need.
