Read Online The Devil's Music by Jane Rusbridge - Free Book Online Page A

belly, slack after Elaine’s birth, are tangled with tension, the sense that something awful is about to happen. Susie waves from her new seat on the Silver Cross as Jean manoeuvres the pram down the kerb to cross the road. Susie has a harness with metal clips to attach her to the seat’s frame but still the whole arrangement seems precarious, perched high above the gleaming black body of the pram where Elaine lies, out of sight. You’d fussed, tucking her down with a blanket, fiddling with the angle of the sun canopy, until Jean put a hand on yours and said, ‘Stop.’ This is Jean’s idea, after Andy ran away to your father’s house yet again, this time in the middle of the night. She says you need some time with him, time without one or other of the babies constantly in your arms or on your lap. But today Andy is flushed and irritable. Perhaps he has a temperature. The mumps are doing the rounds.
     
    You step into the cool of the larder with the butter dish in your hand and stand for a moment in the half light, listening to the distant rattle and pause, rattle and pause of a lawnmower: yet another summer afternoon.
        Lying open on the kitchen table is a hard-backed notebook where you’ve set out, on blue-lined pages, lists of things to do.
        Monday: washday, grocery shopping for the week.
        Tuesday: turn out the dining room, ironing, polish the front step.
        Wednesday: dust through house, rugs, baking.
        Thursday:
        Friday:
        The twin tub stands in the middle of the kitchen floor, filled with damp washing that needs to be put through the wringer, and there’s the lining of the new winter curtains to finish. But there’s that weight of slowness, a silting. Sometimes you just sit. You sit on the edge of the armchair as if you’re about to get up and get on with something.
        You count the stairs as you climb them. In Andy’s bedroom, a red wigwam takes up most of the floor space and every night since his fifth birthday he’s slept in there. His bow and arrows lie on the floor by the entrance. Through the tasselled door flaps, the space inside the tent is inviting, red and warm from the glow of the sun on the material. Andy’s stroking the coloured feathers of his headdress from base to tip. He wriggles over to the back of the wigwam to make room.
        You slip off your shoes, get down on hands and knees and crawl in. There’s the smell of cheap, dyed cotton. No room to lie flat, so you tuck your legs up. Already the skin behind your knees is damp and slippery. He leans across you and pulls at the door flaps, trying to make them meet. The manufacturers have been economical with the fabric and it is flimsy, the hemmed edges flop apart again. You prop Hiawatha on your thighs and Andy snuggles close, thumb in his mouth. The top of his head is warm and biscuity.
        You begin to read and his fingers on the feathers slow, then stop, so you ease the headdress from his head, lower the book on to the eiderdown and look up into the cone of the wigwam where the four long canes meet and poke through the cloth. The repetitive rhythm of Hiawatha laps at your mind:
     
    dark behind it rose the forest,
    rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
    rose the firs with cones upon them,
    bright before it beat the water.
     
    Your eyes have closed. The outside sounds of the June day buzz at your ears: the lawnmower a few gardens away; sparrows landing on the gutter. Then, the whoosh of car tyres, slick, glides you along, takes you with it, and you’re back at St Mary’s, years ago, it’s raining, and you’re hurrying from the nurses’ home, shutting the door on the steamy, crowded kitchen: the clothes airer in front of the stove hung with stockings and suspenders; Hoggie at the ironing board again because she has a date and is trying to straighten her red frizz by ironing it through brown paper; Nurse Pierce, limp on a chair, just come in from her shift, her feet in a bowl of water. You