Read Online After Such Kindness by Gaynor Arnold - Free Book Online Page A

too.’
    ‘Aren’t you going to help me dress?’
    ‘Sorry, Miss Daisy, I’m to pack straight away.’
    ‘Aren’t you even coming to church?’ Papa was strict about everyone attending even if they had a cold or headache and I could not imagine he would excuse Nettie now.
    ‘I have to pack, Daisy. I told you, I have to go.’
    ‘What, today?’ I couldn’t believe that Nettie, whom I had known all my life, was to depart with such awful suddenness. ‘ But who will look after me? ’
    ‘Like I said, you’re old enough to manage on your own. Hannah will help you with your hair I expect, and you can pretty much do everything else for yourself; and what you can’t do you must learn.’ Nettie pulled her old portmanteau from under her bed and started to open the drawers of the wardrobe and remove neat piles of white linen which she put inside the bag with a good deal of steady attention, as if she was doing arithmetic in her head.
    ‘But you’ll still come back and see me, won’t you?’ I felt a terrible numbness descend. It was like the world coming to an end.
    ‘Better not,’ she said, at the wardrobe again, with her back to me. ‘Your ma says a clean break is the best. And I expect I’ll have my time cut out with the new children I’ll be looking after, especially if I have to go to London for a position. I couldn’t keep popping back to ask after you every five minutes.’
    The idea of Nettie with some other children cut me to the quick; especially the notion that she might enjoy herself with them so much that she couldn’t be bothered to see me. ‘Don’t you love me any more, Nettie?’ I cried, my voice thick with grief.
    She turned to me, and the face that I’d thought was so familiar to me seemed that of a stranger. The way her face was puffy and the tears were rolling uncontrollably down her cheeks made her look so different from the Nettie I knew.
    ‘Oh, Miss Daisy,’ she cried, putting down a pile of linen. ‘I love you more than anything. Don’t you know that? And Benjy’s like my very own child. I always knew I’d have to go one day and leave you all behind – but never like this. Never like this. It’s too cruel!’ She gave out a kind of howl and opened her arms and I howled too and ran to her and breathed in her warm, biscuity smell and felt the scratch of her starched apron against my cheek.
    ‘I won’t let you go!’ I said, hugging her as hard as I could. ‘I’ll hold on to you so tight they won’t be able to separate us, and you’ll have to take me with you wherever you go.’
    She laughed through her tears. ‘My, that would be a bit of an inconvenience – me carrying you round my waist like an extra apron and you clinging on for dear life! We’d never get as far as the bottom of the street like that.’ She took her work-worn thumb and wiped my tears outwards, one side after the other, so that I felt them roll wetly by my ears and down my neck. ‘You have to be brave. We both have to be brave. Things is painful sometimes. We can’t do or have what we want all the time. It’s part of growing up.’
    ‘Then I don’t want to grow up,’ I retorted, hugging her tighter than ever.
    ‘We all have to,’ she said. ‘It’s the way of life. You can’t be a child for ever. Now get your Sunday clothes on and show me how well you can dress yourself.’
    ‘If I make a mess of it, will they let you stay?’
    ‘I don’t think so, Miss Daisy.’
    ‘Why not?’ I cried out.
    ‘Because I’ve been paid a month in lieu of notice and I’ve agreed to go. Them’s the rules,’ she said, trying to disentangle my arms from around her back.
    ‘Whose rules?’ I said.
    She seemed a bit flummoxed by this. ‘The rules of England, I suppose – what everybody agrees to in order to make the world go round smoothly.’
    ‘But it’s not going round smoothly for you!’ I cried angrily. ‘Or for me! I think they’re silly rules!’
    ‘Look, Daisy,’ she said. ‘Life is a good