There was a tremendous scraping of chairs as I came in, and a pack of Radletts hurled themselves upon me with the intensity and almost the ferocity of a pack of hounds hurling itself upon a fox. All except Linda. She was the most pleased to see me, but determined not to show it. When the din had quieted down and I was seated before a scone and a cup of tea, she said:
‘Where’s Brenda?’ Brenda was my white mouse.
‘She got a sore back and died,’ I said. Aunt Sadie looked anxiously at Linda.
‘Had you been riding her?’ said Louisa, facetiously. Matt, who had recently come under the care of a French nursery governess, said in a high-pitched imitation of her voice: ‘C’était, comme d’habitude, les voies urinaires.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Aunt Sadie under her breath.
Enormous tears were pouring into Linda’s plate. Nobody cried so much or so often as she; anything, but especially anything sad about animals, would set her off, and, once begun, it was a job to stop her. She was a delicate, as well as a highly nervous child, and even Aunt Sadie, who lived in a dream as far as the health of her children was concerned, was aware that too much crying kept her awake at night, put her off her food, and did her harm. The other children, and especially Louisa and Bob, who loved to tease, went as far as they dared with her, and were periodically punished for making her cry. Black Beauty, Owd Bob, The Story of a Red Deer, and all the Seton Thompson books were on the nursery index because of Linda, who, at one time or another, had been prostrated by them. They had to be hidden away, as, if they were left lying about, she could not be trusted not to indulge in an orgy of self-torture.
Wicked Louisa had invented a poem which never failed to induce rivers of tears:
A little, houseless match, it has no roof, no thatch,
It lies alone, it makes no moan, that little, houseless match.
When Aunt Sadie was not around the children would chant this in a gloomy chorus. In certain moods one had only to glance at a match-box to dissolve poor Linda; when, however, she was feeling stronger, more fit to cope with life, this sort of teasing would force out of her very stomach an unwilling guffaw. Linda was not only my favourite cousin, but, then and for many years, my favourite human being. I adored all my cousins, and Linda distilled, mentally and physically, the very essence of the Radlett family. Her straight features, straight brown hair and large blue eyes were a theme upon which the faces of the others were a variation; all pretty, but none so absolutely distinctive as hers. There was something furious about her, even when she laughed, which she did a great deal, and always as if forced to against her will. Something reminiscent of pictures of Napoleon in youth, a sort of scowling intensity.
I could see that she was really minding much more about Brenda than I did. The truth was that my honeymoon days with the mouse were long since over; we had settled down to an uninspiring relationship, a form, as it were, of married blight, and, when she had developed a disgusting sore patch on her back, it had been all I could do to behave decently and treat her with common humanity. Apart from the shock it always is to find somebody stiff and cold in their cage in the morning, it had been a very great relief to me when Brenda’s sufferings finally came to an end.
‘Where is she buried?’ Linda muttered furiously, looking at her plate.
‘Beside the robin. She’s got a dear little cross and her coffin was lined with pink satin.’
‘Now, Linda darling,’ said Aunt Sadie, ‘if Fanny has finished her tea why don’t you show her your toad?’
‘He’s upstairs asleep,’ said Linda. But she stopped crying.
‘Have some nice hot toast, then.’
‘Can I have Gentleman’s Relish on it?’ she said, quick to make capital out of Aunt Sadie’s mood, for Gentleman’s Relish was kept strictly for Uncle Matthew, and supposed not to be good for children. The others made a great show of exchanging significant looks. These were intercepted, as they were meant to be, by Linda, who gave a tremendous bellowing boo-hoo and rushed upstairs.
‘I wish you children wouldn’t tease Linda,’ said Aunt Sadie, irritated out of her usual gentleness, and followed her.
The staircase led out of the hall. When Aunt Sadie was beyond earshot, Louisa said: ‘If wishes were horses beggars would ride. Child hunt tomorrow, Fanny.’
‘Yes, Josh told me. He was in the car – been to see the vet.’
My Uncle Matthew had four magnificent bloodhounds, with which he used to hunt his children. Two of us would go off with a good start to lay the trail, and Uncle Matthew and the rest would follow the hounds on horseback. It was great fun. Once he came to my home and hunted Linda and me over Shenley Common. This caused the most tremendous stir locally, the Kentish week-enders on their way to church were appalled by the sight of four great hounds in full cry after two little girls. My uncle seemed to them like a wicked lord of fiction, and I became more than ever surrounded with an aura of madness, badness, and dangerousness for their children to know.
The child hunt on the first day of this Christmas visit was a great success. Louisa and I were chosen as hares. We ran across country, the beautiful bleak Cotswold uplands, starting soon after breakfast when the sun was still a red globe, hardly over the horizon, and the trees were etched in dark blue against a pale blue, mauve, and pinkish sky. The sun
