“Yes, now”
Later: “Will you have the brown tweed or the green’m?”
“The heather mixture. Janet, these stockings each have a hole in the heel. I wish you would not put me out stockings that are unfit to wear.”
She was in one of her tempers to-day, and no wonder. But as the cook had said at supper last night, “No one to give notice till a year ’as passed by.”
She was washing behind the screen, splashing and blowing. Then her teeth were being attacked. Work and forget, work and forget, till some plan emerged. She would send for Mabel Palmer and they would talk it out.
She almost fell asleep while Janet was doing her hair.
Diving upwards through the heather-mixture skirt, she said, “Tell William to ring up Mrs. Palmer, Norbury 27, you know, to ask her if she will come to tea to-day.”
“Yes’m.”
She struggled into the brown jumper and before the looking-glass put in the fox-head pin. There was old Pinch in the herbaceous border doing nothing already. She had never seen him about so early, it was really extraordinary. She looked a long time at Ralph in his photograph, but he was absolutely the same. His smile said nothing, gave her no advice, but only waited to be told what to do, just as he had been obeying the photographer then. He would have had more in common with the boy perhaps, would have been able to talk to him of pig-sticking out in India in the old 10th days. She could do nothing to distract him. But then he didn’t hunt, he didn’t shoot, he only fished and that sitting down, and he couldn’t fish now. Perhaps it was just as well he had given up huntin’ it would have been terrible had that been taken away from her suddenly.
How heavy her skirt felt, and she was stiff. She felt old to-day, really old: this terrible affair coming suddenly like this, just when the Nursing Association was beginning to go a little better, too. And she could do nothing for the poor boy, nothing. But something must be done, there must be some way out. Of course, he would never see again, it was terrible, she had seen that the first time the doctors saw her at the hospital, where the appalling woman was head nurse. She had not had a ward all through the war for nothing, she had seen at once. Some occupation must be found for him, it was the future one had to think about, and Mabel Palmer might know of something. Or his friends might—but then he hadn’t any, or at any rate she had never seen them. There it was, first Ralph falling down dead of his heart on the stairs, and now fifteen years after her boy was blinded, worse than being dead. What could one say to him? What could one do?