Read Online The Flower Boy by Karen Roberts - Free Book Online Page A

breudhers from old Dutch recipes. She iced countless Yule Logs and chopped thousands of nuts, sultanas, crystallized ginger, pumpkin preserve and other things for the Christmas cake.
    While Appuhamy shone in the house, Premawathi shone in the kitchen, looking for all the world like a typical English housewife preparing for a typically English celebration.
    â€œIt’s all so strange,” the Sudu Nona was heard to say to similar-minded, magazine-reading, tea-drinking English ladies. “Not only does she speak passable English, but she makes passable mince pies too. Thank God—imagine having curry for Christmas, my dear!”
    ON THE TWENTIETH of December, Jonathan reluctantly returned home for his school holidays. He looked even more lonely and out of place than he had before he left. He found his mother even more unbearable, his father even more reticent and his sister even more buried in her books.
    The only bright spot in his otherwise gloomy existence was his new baby sister, Lizzie.
    He doted on her and spent hours playing with her and talking to her, never seeming to get bored with her limited conversational abilities like most almost-eleven-year-olds would have. Instead, he seemed to delight in her gurgles and spit bubbles and even her wet nappies.
    His mother couldn’t understand it. To her, the baby was a necessary evil that had been visited on her one night, the Third Child. Jonathan was her beloved firstborn.
    She had envisioned the two of them having many cozy chats in front of the fireplace, taking long hand-in-hand walks through the gardens and generally making up for lost time. Instead, she lost her son to her baby.
    She bitterly resented the time Jonathan spent with Lizzie and although she tried valiantly to conceal it, it would often snake out in a petulant comment.
    â€œMama would
occasionally
like to talk with you, dear.”
    â€œDarling, you’ve plenty of time to learn to change nappies, you know.”
    â€œWhat do you two
talk
about?”
    And so on.
    Jonathan soon learned to ignore the comments and instead of loving his mother less, he loved Lizzie more. He felt an odd kinship with this happy, smiling creature who had come into his life so unexpectedly.
    In spite of the fact that he had been cosseted and pampered by his mother from the day he was born, he was lonely, and felt that Lizzie was too.
    But unlike him, she didn’t seem to mind, finding her own happiness in rattles and spit bubbles and, lately, in shiny baubles and tinsel emerging from dusty boxes like hibernating animals after their long sleep.
    IN THIS CROWDED sea of Christmas excitement, Chandi floated like an uninhabited island, hugging his happy thoughts to himself. Even at the church school, where the nativity play rehearsals were in full swing, he was frequently pulled up for not concentrating, but he didn’t mind.
    This was Mr. Aloysius’s big chance to show the tiny world of Glencairn what a great theatrical director/producer he could have been. He had already appointed Father Ross from the tiny Glencairn church to be his official assistant, although the good father’s role was limited to collecting old sheets, towels, tinsel and clothes to be used for costumes and props.
    So far they had done quite well, and the motley assortment sat in an old tea crate under Teacher’s table.
    Father Ross had come out to Ceylon to convert natives and spread the word of God, before going on to India where more heathens awaited his ministrations.
    Having traveled no farther than London from his native Scotland, he had imagined Ceylon to be a wild, untamed place with naked, spear-toting, sunworshiping natives everywhere. The reality had both disappointed and relieved him. Being of a teaching background and because of a dire need for dedicated (which actually meant underpaid) teachers, he had been sent to Glencairn and put in charge of the church and church school.
    He had grown to like it here and was