Read Online The Lotus House by Katharine Moore - Free Book Online Page A

had never really seen them before. Her room was a proper bedroom after all, and it was the only one in which you could lie in your bed and see the sky above you. Andrew had said so.
    “Hurry up, Harriet,” came Margot’s voice down the passage, “supper’s ready,” and Harriet hurried.
    The next few days were a rush of getting ready for the new school. A uniform had to be bought. Harriet had looked forward to this, it seemed grand and important for there had been no school uniform at Queensmead.
    “I’m afraid she’s at least two sizes larger than the average for her age,” said Margot, smiling apologetically at the young shop assistant. “It’s a quite hideous brown, don’t you think?” she went on, “Why, do you suppose, any school should want to choose anything so unbecoming? You could carry it off with that nice fair colouring, but for anyone sallow it’s abominable.”
    Harriet, listening, knew without any doubt from the way the shop assistant then looked at her that she must be the “anyone sallow”. “Sallow”, she hadn’t met the word before and it sounded horrid. The day’s shopping with her mother to which she had eagerly looked forward became as dust and ashes.
    “Really, dragging that child about London got me down,” complained Margot that night.
    “What does sallow mean?” Harriet asked Andrew next time they were alone together. You could ask Andrew things safely because he never wanted to know why you asked them.
    “Sallow,” he said, not bothering to look up from the paper he was reading, “it either means a kind of willow-tree or a sort of greyish, yellow colour - rather a nasty colour really.” That was that then. She knew she wasn’t a tree so she must have a sort of greyish yellow face. Perhaps that was the reason she hadn’t ever had a proper friend — no one would want to have a person of that sort who was also called ‘Fatty’ for a best friend. She examined her face closely in the bathroom mirror, she hadn’t one of her own, and it was true, though she had never noticed it before, her face wasn’t pink and whitelike her mother’s or red and brown like Andrew’s, it was sallow, sallow, sallow. And soon she would have to take it to the new school in the now hated uniform, but perhaps she would die first. “Oh, God, let me die now.” But she didn’t die, and at first school was so noisy and crowded and altogether bewildering that she was too stunned to think of anything at all. She was always getting lost in endless passages and bells rang suddenly, which meant you had to be in another classroom, or in the cloakroom, or in the hall, or in the playground, and she was hardly ever in the right place or knew how to get there.
    After some time, though, it got easier and there were so many people at this school that they didn’t seem to notice her much as long as she kept quiet, and by the second term, though she hadn’t found a friend, she had found a hero. He was a boy in the same class and he had found her on one of those early days when she had got hopelessly lost, and had told her where she ought to be and had taken her there. He had freckles and a nice grin and hair like a yellow bush, and she had found out that his name was Ben. He could do handstands longer than any one else and keep two balls going up in the air for ages, too, and he actually lived in the housing estate at the back of the Lotus House. After she knew that she used to watch for him, over the fence, hidden in the old lilac bushes. Margot had said the garden didn’t really belong to them at all — the bit by the basement flat belonged to Miss Cook and the rest to Mrs Sanderson, who had kindly said that Harriet could play there whenever she wanted to. She didn’t want to play there. There was nothing to play at and no one to play with, but she spent quite a long while watching the children playing on the estate. There were two distinct groups of these — one she called “the Terribles” who