“I thought you were sleeping. Don't tell me now. There's heaps of time. It's six weeks till Christmas.”
“But Joan and I have talked about it,” he persisted. “We don't want him, if you don't want him.”
“What is he, dear? If he doesn't cost too much, you shall have him.”
Robbie procrastinated now that he had brought his mother to the point of listening. It was a delicate proposal that he was about to make. “I don't know whether you can get one,” he hesitated. “A boy at my school got one without asking, and it wasn't even Christmas.”
He was sitting up in bed now, very intense and serious, and very much awake.
“But you've not told me yet what it is you want. If you don't tell me, I can't say whether I can afford it.”
She slipped her arm about the square little body and feeling how it trembled, held it close against her breast. He hid his face in the hollow of her neck. “Robbie's place,” she whispered. “If it's difficult to say, whisper it to mother there.”
His lips moved several times before a sound came and then, “If it isn't too much trouble, we should like to have a Daddy.”
Against his will she held him back from her, trying to see his eyes. “But why?”
It was he who was crying now. “Oh Mummy, I didn't mean to hurt you.... To be like all the other little boys and girls.” When at last he was truly asleep and she had come down to the lamp-lit room in which she sewed, she did not take up her work. The parrot tried to draw her into conversation with his eternal question, “What shall we talk about?”