Read Online Consequences by Penelope Lively - Free Book Online Page B

world without Molly, but it was also an impossibility, an anachronism. Molly was so emphatically present, so undisputedly there—how could she ever not have been? She ran in and out of the cottage; she brought small offerings from the garden—a twig, a berry; she pointed—“Bird!”; she listened—“Train!” Her discovery of the physical world became a rediscovery for Matt and Lorna; they too gazed at spider webs, at the tapestry of a butterfly wing, at the red spires of lords and ladies in the hedgerow. Matt, seeing suddenly with Molly’s intimate close-up attention, began a new series of engravings in which small things became intimate structures, studies in form and pattern: shells, leaves, the firework display of dried cow parsley heads.
     
    Mrs. Mason in the village shop said, “I don’t care to look at the papers anymore, myself. All this war talk. It just depresses me. Sure you want The Times, dear? I just stick to the Western Gazette these days. Local news is good enough for me. Sugar, flour, bread, marg., tea, a quarter pound of bacon—is that all? My brother’s joined the ARP in Williton. Trust him—he always did enjoy bossing people about. I told him: you’re going to be really disappointed if it all comes to nothing, aren’t you? No swanning around in a fancy helmet. Well, we’ll see. Personally, I don’t want to think about it.”
     
    Lucas wrote: “Matt’s star remains in the ascendant. Three of the exhibition engravings sold out the entire edition; high demand for the rest. I am the complacent middleman, stashing away the shekels. How do I remit to you? Check? Or are you still keeping money in an old sock? There has been a run on Lamb’s Tales, too—much packaging and posting. It has been a question of all hands to the mill, Miss Kelly and I shoulder to shoulder. I am wondering about an Arabian Nights. Does that attract you, Matt? Or are you committing further infidelities with the Curwen lot—or, heaven forbid, Golden Cockerel? Now that you are the man of the hour, I must become a humble supplicant. Well, think about it. Or, if the oriental theme doesn’t inspire you, what about Gilbert White of Selborne? Or The Compleat Angler ? More appropriate, perhaps, given your back-to-nature way of life.
    “Have gas masks reached deepest Somerset? I received mine without enthusiasm. Pictures in the paper of responsible citizens filling sandbags for the protection of key points, with much jollity. It is all surreal, is it not?
    “How does your garden grow? And Molly? Lorna, I have not yet skinned a rabbit, but I have my eye on the deer in Richmond Park, if the worst happens.”
     
    “Now that this wretched war scare is over, we are off to Menton for a fortnight,” wrote Marian Bradley. “Heaven. The Med should still be warm enough for swimming, and Daddy will get some golf. Roddy and Sally join us there, leaving little Peter with Nanny.”
     
    Whenever a parcel arrived from Lawrence’s in London, with fresh blocks, Molly was allowed the brown-paper wrapping as drawing material. Lorna would cut the sheets up into small pieces, and the little girl would sit at the kitchen table, the tip of her tongue stuck out in concentration, and scribble with her crayons. She was being Matt, Lorna knew, and her creations must be treated with respect, given cardboard frames, placed in a cardboard portfolio and tied with tape.
    That fourth winter in the cottage, they were veterans—not impervious to cold and damp, but resourceful. Lorna had the measure of recalcitrant oil lamps and the sullen kitchen range; Matt kept the log pile stacked high from the wood dumped periodically at their gate by the farmer. They were established local figures now, in a sparsely occupied landscape where everyone was known to everyone else within a radius of several miles, where information traveled as though on the wind, where every chance encounter required a ritual exchange. Matt, out sketching, would be greeted and sized up