Tomorrow's ghost

Frances glanced side-long at Jane: she knew with a terrible certainty that the child was about to stand her opinion of cricket on its head.

'I don't mean dull - ' There was a slight flush to the peach cheeks ' - it only seems ... I mean, it only seems difficult if you don't understand it. Like ... like additional maths. But once you've got the hang of it ... then it has an inner poetry all of its own, cricket does.'

Another of the obiter dicta of the redoubtable Miss Baggers (or whatever her real name might be, Baggott, Bagnall or Bagley for choice) was being hurriedly conscripted for service outside its original context.

'It does?' Frances melted in the heat of the desperation the child was striving to hide under false enthusiasm. 'Yes, I'm sure it does.'

She could well afford to be merciful now; she had what she wanted out of them, they had given it to her without any effort on her part, freely out of their own need. And she could get more, anything she liked, for the asking simply by giving them the tiniest bit of encouragement.

'Our mother was foreign, of course - she was French. You can't expect a French person to understand cricket,' said Sally suddenly, as though prompted by a stirring of older loyalty. Then she frowned. 'Not that it really is difficult - Jane's quite wrong there.'

She was recalling herself to her duty, to the more important business in hand, which had to be done, thought Frances bleakly.

The business of imparting information about the virtues and interests of Colonel Jack Butler;

The business of discovering, at the same time, information about the background and character of Mrs Frances Fitzgibbon;

And, on the basis of the latter, and also on Mrs Fitzgibbon's reactions to the former, the business of deciding whether Mrs Fitzgibbon would be a suitable wife and step-mother for Brookside House.

'Have you ever watched cricket?' asked Jane. 'Or do you ride horses?'

Frances thought: The poor little things must be pretty hard-up for eligible females to grab me so quickly.

And then: They probably are hard-up. Mostly they'll only meet their friends' mothers (was that where the one-parent-family interest came in? Had they already looked over that field and found it wanting? Or didn't they fancy step-sisters as well as a step-mother?).

And then: Or their friends' elder sisters, who would be too young (and she herself was almost too young).

And then: Yet maybe not so unsuitable, at that: an army widow (one tick there), in the same line of work (so she'd know the score there - two ticks), who liked Chinese take- away meals and obviously didn't actively dislike cricket.

Poor little things indeed! Diana going off to University, the first bird to fly the nest, would have brought home to them that they were getting older and the world wouldn't stand still; and that Father was travelling a lonely road which could only become more lonely as they followed Diana - in their place would she have thought that far ahead, like this?

And then, brutally: Sod it! She wasn't in the business to solve teenage girls' family problems - her business wasn't to be either merciful or cruel.

'I've done both, as a matter of fact, Jane. And I wield a mean hockey stock, too.' And I play dirty, too, Jane dear. 'But I didn't know your mother was French. Tell me about her -

how did your father meet her, for a start - ?'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Paul Mitchell came to Brookside House like a thief, very quietly, after dark and by the back entrance, following her instructions to the letter, but arriving inconveniently nevertheless, just as Frances was demonstrating her pancake-tossing expertise to a devoted audience.

Because of that it was Jane who answered the knock on the door.

'There's a man for you, Frances.'

'A man?' The kitchen was separated from the back-door by a lobby, and the fizzling of the pancake mixture in the frying-pan had drowned the back-door dialogue. 'What sort of a man?'

Jane sniffed - not a pancake-sniffing sniff, a disapproving sniff. 'A young man. Not a policeman.'

'How d'you know he's not a policeman? Policemen can be young.'

'He smiled at me.' Jane didn't elaborate on the significance of that, but doubtless Baggers had warned her against smiling strangers. 'He wants to talk to you, he said.'

'Have you let him in?' Frances toyed with the notion of sending Paul - it had to be Paul - away until the girls had gone to bed. But there was always the possibility that Colonel Butler would come back later, and that might be why Paul had come earlier than she had bargained for.

'No fear! I didn't like the look of him, so I put the door on the chain.'

'We always put the door on the chain,' supplemented Sally. 'I think we ought to have dogs, myself. A pair of Rhodesian Ridgebacks - 'Lion-dogs' - and we'd be as safe as anything ... and we wouldn't have been burgled today, either. But Nannie doesn't like dogs, worse luck.'

'I bet you like dogs, Frances,' said Jane with perfect confidence. 'Of course, we'd look after them - and take them for walks, and everything, if you didn't want to.'

The chickens were already being counted, thought Frances sadly. The poor little things would probably spend half the night now planning how to sell the suitable Mrs Fitzgibbon to Father, that knight sans pew et sans raproche.