Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [6]
School was a room behind the church. The teacher was Miss Draper, who had a mustache and was usually angry about nothing that Win could understand. Once or twice a week, the vicar came in and talked to them until he was as angry as Miss Draper, then blessed them and went out in a swirl of coattails.
Strangely — unnaturally, almost — Win quickly learned to read. She helped her elder brother with his lessons, which were mostly passages from the Bible. She moved her finger along the text while he stumbled across words that had no meaning for either of them: epistle, foreskin, Jericho, abomination, deliverance.
Stanley looked like his mother: soft and pale and worried.
The father of these ill-starred children was a small, hard, bearded patriarch called John Sparling. He was the head stockman for the Mortimers, who owned that part of the world, including the cottage the family lived in. Sparling wore brown leather boots and gaiters, which his wife cleaned and oiled every night before going to bed. He smelled of cow. (Until she died, Win would picture him whenever she got a whiff of manure.) The death, disappearance, and madness of his first three sons shamed and angered him. The gentleness of the fourth dismayed him. He blamed his wife: some wrongness in her bloodline or a crookedness of her womb. The late birth of a daughter was a sort of irrelevance, a mishap. But, surprising himself, he came to love her. Winifred was sharp and watchful, like himself. By the time she was four, she was standing on a stool alongside her mother, peeling potatoes at the sink with the second-best knife. She ran to greet him on his homecoming, asking after the sick calf he’d spoken of the night before. In the parlor, after dinner, Stanley would say, “Tell that rhyme we learned at school terday, Win.” And she would recite it, word-perfect, and Sparling would take her on his knee and say, “Yer smart as a whip, gal. Smart as a whip.”
But Win grew away from him. She got older before he wanted her to, before he’d noticed. By the time she was ten, she had outgrown his rough advances. She had sided with her mother, had come to regard men as A Cross to Be Borne. She was keen on chapel, singing clearly and accurately the hymns her father mumbled.
In 1914 John Sparling died of what was then called farmer’s lung. His persistent light cough had deepened during the autumn of the preceding year. By Christmas he was spitting blood into his handkerchiefs, and he died just before Easter.
His wife’s fear was greater than her grief. The cottage was tied, which is to say that it came with her late husband’s job. The possibility — the very real possibility — of becoming homeless made her sick with dread. So when she saw Edmund Mortimer awaiting her at the cemetery gate, she faltered and gripped Stanley’s arm.
Mortimer removed his black hat and held it in front of him by its brim. Win observed the nervous way his fingers toyed with the sleek fabric. It meant that he was embarrassed to be giving them notice, and she was glad.
“I’m deeply sorry for your loss, Mrs. Sparling.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And I share it,” Mortimer said. “John was as good a man with livestock as any in the county. I scarce know what I shall do without him.”
Win’s mother kept her head lowered. “Nor dunt I,” she said.
It was as bold a thing as Win had ever heard her say.
“No. I . . .” Mortimer cleared his throat. “What I wanted to say, Mrs. Sparling, is that I don’t want you worrying yourself about the cottage. I’m putting Sam Eldon in charge of the stock, and he and Mrs. Eldon are well settled where they are. So I’ve no need of your place. It’s yours for as long as you want to stay. The rent is something we might talk about some other time.”
At this point Mrs. Sparling wept for the first time in a week. She snuffled her gratitude, almost choked on her relief. Stanley made an awkward humming noise that was perhaps meant to be