Journeying Wave by Richmal Crompton

Author:Richmal Crompton [Crompton, Richmal]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter Thirteen

HESTER moved to and fro about her bedroom, dusting and tidying mechanically. At first she simply hadn’t been able to believe it. It wasn’t that the man Humphrey had done something wicked. (He had done something wicked, of course, but guiltily she felt that she wouldn’t have minded that very much. Men were wicked. You’d only to read the newspapers to find that out. Even the nicest men seemed to have a horrid side to them. Hester had long ago decided that she was glad she hadn’t married.) It was that the child Humphrey, who had played with her in the garden and walked with her over the moor, who had crept into her bed for a story in the morning and said his prayers to her at night, had suddenly ceased to exist. What she had heard about the man Humphrey had killed him. The man Humphrey had once stayed with her for six weeks as a little boy. That was all there was to it now. . . . And panic swept over her as she realised that her Escape had gone for ever. She had nowhere to retreat now when Harriet fussed and worried her. There was no part of her life now that didn’t belong as much to Harriet as to herself. Desperately she tried to recover her dream, but her mind shrank back from it in revulsion. The man Humphrey had spoilt it—had left a smear of foulness over every part of it. She tried to summon a picture of the child Humphrey, but he always turned into the man Humphrey furtively entering the door of the flat where he kept his mistress. She tried over and over again, and he always turned into that, even before she’d been able to see him clearly as the child. A vague featureless childish shape, then the man, painfully vivid, slinking up a dark stairway to a half-open door.

Panic gripped her more tightly. How was she to go on to the end of her life belonging to Harriet like this, not having a single memory that Harriet didn’t share? She passed her duster over the wardrobe, then opened the door and looked at the dresses hanging there. In Harriet’s wardrobe hung identically the same dresses—same number, same material, same style.

Never in all her life had she had a dress that wasn’t just like Harriet’s . . . and she never would have. It was as if she had been born chained to Harriet. Revolt surged through her at the thought. She hadn’t been born chained to Harriet. It was only because she was so weak that she had let Harriet dominate her so completely all these years. There was nothing to stop her walking out of the house now at this very minute and never coming back. She had enough money to live—very economically—by herself. There was certainly nothing to prevent her going into the town and buying a dress of her own choice, a dress that wasn’t an exact replica of one of Harriet’s.

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