“Ten minutes after would be better. Then you can turn out the gas, too. I don’t like turning out gas. I have to get out of bed again to see if I’ve done it properly. Several times. Did you do that?”
“There was no gas in my home. Lamps downstairs, candles upstairs. And on a very moony night, I didn’t light my candle. We don’t pull down our bedroom blinds in the country, and the lady could look in if she liked and I could look out and see her trailing her skirts over the treetops. And the owls used to hoot as she went by.” She straightened the quilt over Ruth’s motionless little body. “Go to sleep. Good night.”
“Just shut the door for a minute, please Miss Mole.” Ruth said quickly.
Hannah obeyed, and as she turned back to the bed she was thankful for the nights of her childhood in the bare bedroom with the sloping roof and the open window free of these lace curtains and Venetian blinds and she was sorry for Ruth who was saying slowly, “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard an owl.”
“Not in Beresford Road, I’m afraid.”
“No, not owls.” She looked at Hannah as though she meant to say something, and then decided to say something else. “Do you go to your home when you have a holiday?”
“It isn’t mine any longer. It was sold when my father and mother died, twenty years ago.”
“Twenty years! Then,” said Ruth, shutting her eyes and creasing her forehead, “I suppose you’ve got used to it by this time,” and Hannah knew Ruth was thinking about death and about her mother, and the question it had been impossible to ask Robert Corder was answered.
She felt a sharp pain in her throat, yet she could envy Ruth a love which, in all probability had been without a blemish. The memory of it was something to be cherished, and such a memory had been denied to Hannah Mole.
She heaved a deep sigh. “I don’t think getting used to things is the right way to deal with them,” she said. “I think—” she was talking more to herself than to Ruth, “I think that’s wasting them. You’ve got to use them all the time.” She changed her tone and said cheerfully, “And I didn’t lose the whole of my home. I kept a tiny bit of it, a little cottage and an orchard. I couldn’t bear to let it go and that’s all I could afford to keep when the debts were paid.”
“Then you can go there, in your holidays, and hear the owls again.”
“Well, no, I can’t very well,” Hannah said.
“Why not?”
“It’s let.”
“Oh, I see. What a pity. But you get the money for it.”
“That’s the idea,” Hannah said.
Ruth sighed regretfully. “I’d like to hear those owls, Miss Mole—” there was the pause Hannah was beginning to know—“do you like parrots? I hate them.”
“You’re full of hates, child. What’s the matter with parrots? God made them, I suppose.”
“Yes, but he made Mr. Samson, too. When you were in the country, you hadn’t any neighbours, had you?”
“Cows, sheep, horses, pigs, the owls—”
“But not a parrot or Mr. Samson. I wish he didn’t live next door. He always tries to talk to me when he sees me, over the hedge of the back garden. And once he asked me to go into the house. He said he’d got a kitten for me. So I said I didn’t like kittens, but really, Miss Mole, I adore them. But I was frightened of him and sometimes I dream about him. But I used to find—I mean, if you talk about nasty things to somebody, they stop worrying you.”
“And how long has this been worrying you?”
“Oh, ever since—about two years ago when he tried to give me the kitten.”
“Poor old man!” Hannah said.
“I think he’s an old beast.”
“There you are again! Is there anything you happen to care for, besides kittens?”
“Lots of things,” Ruth said.
“Well, I should like to hear about them, some time, for a change. And I daresay Mr. Samson’s lonely too.”
“Too?” Ruth repeated with a catch of her breath.
“Yes. Like me,” Hannah said. “Good night.”
A surprising answer for that little egotist and a good exit, she said to herself with satisfaction. It would do Ruth no harm to learn that other people, even those middle-aged people who seem so secure to youth, could suffer like herself, and Hannah doubted whether, until this moment, anyone in the house had given Miss Mole a thought detached from some personal connection. Her comfort and happiness, for which the family might have felt some responsibility, was either assumed or ignored. She could well believe that Robert Corder considered any inmate of his house a fortunate person, but even to Wilfrid, who was as much an alien as herself, she was only a kind of mirror in which he could study his own reflection, while Ruth’s growing curiosity was only a love of hearing stories. This lack of interest was not flattering, but it had its advantages—like everything else—she told herself, as she entered her dark bedroom and went to the open window.
She knelt down and, laying her hands on the sill, she rested her chin on them. The roofs of the opposite houses were wet with a shower the clouds had dropped as they scurried before a harassing little wind, like ships sacrificing their cargo under pursuit, and the wind that chased them brought to Hannah’s credulous nostrils a damp smell of apples and moss. Far away, against the dark sky, sweeping in ascending fields from the docks of Radstowe, she thought, or imagined, she could see the high ground hiding her own country. It lay snugly behind that barrier, with its little farms and orchards, its flat lands crisscrossed by willow-edged ditches and cupped by hills. It was a country that satisfied two sides of Hannah’s nature. She loved
