Read Online Shadow Baby by Margaret Forster - Free Book Online Page B

did not eat it for several minutes. She wanted to look at it, at all the raisins and currants embedded in its yellow flesh. There had never been this kind of cake in the Home, only very
     
    occasionally a hard, dry kind of gingerbread which left a gritty taste in the mouth. This cake was beautiful. Evie ate it in tiny bites, savouring every last morsel. She would have licked the paper if she had been on her own, but the woman took it from her as soon as she saw the slice of cake was finished.
    It was dark before they arrived on the outskirts of a long village. Evie was exhausted and had several times dozed off only to jerk herself awake in case she missed the arrival at wherever the cart was going. Twice she had thought that moment had come but the stops had been to water the horse and for the man, Ernest, to put a coat on. When they stopped for good, Evie was still not certain that they would not trundle off once more, and it needed the woman to lift her down to convince her this journey was over. She was lifted down and set on her feet and her bag was put into her arms, and then the woman opened the door of what Evie could dimly make out was a house of some strange kind. ‘Mind the step,’ the woman said. ‘I only whitened it yesterday, I don’t want mucky footprints on it.’ Obediently Evie lifted each foot carefully over the white part of the step. She knew about whitening steps and about rudding them too. Her grandmother had whitened her own step once and Evie had loved to help. She thought about offering there and then to whiten this woman’s step the next day but as usual the words would not come as spontaneously as she would have liked, and by the time she had thought them out they were in a living-room and the woman was saying, ‘Straight to bed, there’ll be plenty to do in the morning. Take your shoes off here and follow me, I’m dog-tired myself.’
    Evie followed her up one flight of carpeted stairs, the rough carpet feeling scratchy under her thinly stockinged feet, and another, uncarpeted, into the smallest room she had ever seen. It was a slot of a room with a skylight in its sloping roof and the bed filled it so completely that the door had to open outwards. ‘You’ll be all right here, it’s a good bed, too good for a child. You’re not frightened of the dark, I hope? No silliness?’ Evie shook her head. ‘Good. I’ll knock you up in the morning and I want no shilly-shallying when I do. There’s a chamber-pot under the bed, be careful you aim properly. I’ll show you tomorrow where you empty it. Go on then, into bed with you ‘ Ev ie hesitated. The only way to get into bed was to climb on to it from the doorway. She clambered up and turned herself round and hesitated again. The woman was still watching her, the lamp she was carrying held high so that Evie was in the
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    shadows of its glow. ‘You don’t sleep with your clothes on, I hope,’ said the woman. ‘They haven’t brought you that low in that place?’ Evie shook her head again and began to unbutton her pinafore at the side and then the neck of her thick woollen frock at the back. The woman put the lamp down on the floor outside the open door and, surprisingly, said, ‘Here, come to the end of the bed, I’ll help you.’ Evie had never been helped to dress or undress in all her life in so far as she was able to remember and was embarrassed, but she did as she was told and the woman unbuttoned her down to her liberty bodice. ‘Do you keep this on?’ she asked. Evie nodded. In the Home, liberty bodices were only removed once a month for a washdown of the whole body.
    She found her shift in her bag and put it on and got into the bed. The sheets were cold but they were proper sheets and not the bits of bleached sacking used in the Home. The blankets were heavy and she felt trapped, they were tucked in so tightly. ‘Goodnight, then,’ the woman said, and then, ‘I notice you haven’t said your prayers, Miss, unless