Read Online The Trouble with Harriet by Dorothy Cannell - Free Book Online Page A

instinct?”
    “Harriet was one of life’s fragile blossoms! She disliked violence.” Daddy’s eyes took on a glow, as if reflecting a distant sunset. “I remember sitting with her one evening in the biergarten where we first met and her saying to me in that wonderful voice of hers that she had always shunned situations where someone was liable to be physically injured. She asked me to remember that; one of those woman things, I suppose, because Harriet wouldn’t have upset a teacup, let alone a person.” He rescued the urn from Ben and stood stroking it with the soft touch of a man who was swathed in clouds of contemplation.
    He now deposited the treasured repository on the bedside table and surveyed it tenderly before touching two fingers to his lips and transferring a butterfly kiss to the clay lid.
    “Sweet dreams, beloved.” He lay down on the bed, folding his hands across his chest.
    “Don’t go easy on the brandy, Bentwick,” he found the strength to murmur.
    “Coming up.” Ben got busy pouring, and I had just opened the wardrobe to make sure there were sufficient clothes hangers when the telephone rang—a muffled, almost apologetic sound coming from the extension in our bedroom and the one downstairs in the hall. This time it would surely be in-laws reporting on the children. Probably just to say that they were tucked in bed, sound asleep, but my mother’s heart smote me. What if Rose wouldn’t take her bottle? Or Abbey was homesick? Or Tam had put the tablecloth over his head and tried to parachute out the window?
    “Freddy must have gotten it.” Ben was handing Daddy his coffee when the telephone stopped ringing.
    “Yes, but ...” I headed for the door.
    “He’ll be back up in a jiff, Ellie, if it’s anything that he can’t take a message on.”
    “And in the meantime”—Daddy hoisted himself up on the pillows and took a sip, as if bravely endeavoring to follow doctor’s orders— “I will continue with the heart-wrenching story of my final days with Harriet.”
    “Yes, you must, if not immediately ... very soon.” I was swaying like a pendulum between the bed and the doorway when Freddy reappeared, looking glum.
    “That was the pater.”
    “Uncle Maurice?”
    “He’s the only father I’ve got, so far as I know.”
    “What did he have to say?” Ben eyed my cousin—his friend—with man-to-man concern.
    “Could I please have a decanter of brandy?” Freddy held out his hand, and when nothing found its way into it, he sagged against the chest of drawers. “I suppose I’ve got to be a man about this, but it’s not going to be easy.” His voice cracked. “To break it to you gently, my mother’s in a bad way.”
    “Dying?” Eyebrows going up in alarm, Ben handed over the decanter.
    “Oh, poor Aunt Lulu!” I whispered.
    “It’s not that”—Freddy dragged himself over to the bed and planted himself on Daddy’s feet— “although to hear the pater talk he’d much rather she was breathing her last. And I must say that the Mum has really done it this time.” Taking the stopper out of the decanter, he inhaled deeply. “She’s got mixed up in bad company. Big-time shoplifters, forgers, even a couple of train robbers.”
    “Wherever did she meet these people?” Ben and I asked as one.
    “At the rehab place where she had gone for the latest cure.”
    “Aunt Lulu’s a kleptomaniac,” I informed Daddy, who was trying to reclaim his feet.
    “That’s the problem with this modern age,” he rasped. “Every woman has to have a career.”
    “Uncle Maurice couldn’t have expected Aunt Lulu to stay at home changing nappies at nearly sixty,” I pointed out.
    “It was the pater’s idea to pack her off to Oaklands.” Freddy sounded understandably aggrieved. “And now he’s all het up because he walked in tonight on the mum hosting an aftercare group session in the sitting room. Apparently, such meetings are a strict requirement of being released into one’s own