Read Online Opposite the Cross Keys by S. T. Haymon - Free Book Online Page B

– two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a chin with a cleft down the middle – but the outline was smudged, it lacked definition. Something was missing, just as something was missing from the way Tom’s arms and legs were joined to his body, the way he moved, the way he spoke.
    At first, that first day, except for ‘Sylvie’, which he sang rather than spoke, I couldn’t make out a single word he said. Nobody else seemed to have any such difficulty as the table talk went on between the absorbed business of eating, Tom’s mouth opening, now to take in vast shovelsful of food, now to let out sounds whose significance escaped me. My contribution was to smile and nod my head vigorously to show I was taking it all in. Every now and again I caught Tom looking at me puzzled and a little pitying, as well he might: one of those cracked city folk, sitting there grinning like an idiot, with a brain to match.
    I sat facing the two photographs, the old men on the wall over the sofa. One of them particularly – the other looked sad but accommodating – regarded me sternly over the top of his high, stiff collar. I dropped my eyes and tried to get on with my dinner, which wasn’t easy. I am sure now that Maud, knowing my finicky ways, had deliberately selected for me the most chipped and crazed plate out of the motley pile she had placed on the table. It was a kind of test, like the gritty cabbage, potatoes and bits of gristle she spooned out of the soot-caked saucepan which had been simmering on the fire, dumping the mess on top of my portion of roast chicken and thus, from my point of view, rendering the whole inedible. The whole day was a kind of test.
    Maud wasn’t even looking at me, but the old man on the wall over the sofa did. I didn’t like the way he looked at me at all; and just to spite him, I picked up the awful old knife and fork with which Maud had provided me, took up a mouthful of food, and ate it.
    To say that I did not enjoy it is an understatement, but I got it down somehow, and after that the going was easier. Not because the second and the following mouthfuls were any more to my taste than the first, but because, though nothing in her face showed it, I could feel Maud’s approval radiating like sunlight through my entire being. Inconspicuously, and as though I were licking a morsel of food off my upper lip, I put out my tongue at the old man. Tom said, and I understood every word of it, ‘Want me to catch you a toad this arternoon?’
    â€˜Oh, yes please!’ I exclaimed, before I realized the wonder of it, the miracle. ‘Yes, please!’
    Tom said, ‘I know where there’s a good toad, if no one’s bin an’ got there first.’
    Tom not only kept his cap on at table, as his father did his trilby hat, he kept on his coat as well: in fact, all the time I knew him I never saw him not wearing it. It was a khaki greatcoat which had lost most of its buttons and acquired, with age, the look of bark covered with lichen.
    Tom put his hand into one of the pockets and brought out a large snail, which he placed among the plates and food on the table.
    â€˜You can have him too, if you want.’
    As it happened, I had been afraid of snails ever since Dorothy Coulton, a girl at Eldon House, had shown me how, if you poured salt on to the opening in their shells when they were curled up inside, they frothed like Eno’s Fruit Salts and died, except that the froth was green, or sometimes prussian blue. So I was relieved when the snail, which was waving its eyes about in a way which boded no good to anyone, moved towards Mrs Fenner’s plate, not mine.
    If it had been Dorothy Coulton, iron-nerved as she was, sitting there in my place, she would undoubtedly have seized the packet of Saxa Salt which stood on the table, and sprinkled the little monster without a qualm, but I was made of weaker stuff. How many tests, I wondered agonizedly, did you have to