“Well, scripture,” Harry was saying.
“Come, they give you plenty of scripture?”
“Oh, don’t they just! Tons and tons!”
Listen to him! How merry he was now! “Tons
and tons. First lesson every morning. But
don’t ask scripture, father. Father, what’s
the use of learning all that stuff, about the Flood,
about the Ark, about the Israelites, about Samuel,
about Daniel, about crossing the Red Sea, about all
that stuff: what’s the use?”
Time closed his fingers on his haft and took a stride
to Rosalie.
She sat upright. She stared across the table
at the boy.
Harry said, “Here, steady, old man. ‘What’s
the use of Scripture?’”
“Well, what is the use? It’s all
rot. You know it isn’t true.”
Time flashed his blade and struck her terribly.
She called out dreadfully, “Huggo!”
“Mother, you know it’s all made up!”
She cried out in a girl’s voice and with a girl’s
impulsive gesture of her arm across the table towards
him, “It isn’t! It isn’t!”
Her voice, her gesture, the look upon her face could
not but startle him. He was red, rather frightened.
He said mumblingly, “Well, mother, you’ve
never taught me any different.”
She was seen by Harry to let fall her extended arm
upon the table and draw it very slowly to her and
draw her hand then to her heart and slowly lean herself
against her chair-back, staring at Huggo. No
one spoke. She then said to Huggo, her voice very
low, “Darling, run now to see everything is
in your playbox. Doda, help him. Take Benji,
darlings. Benji, go and see the lovely playbox
things.”
When they had gone she was seen by Harry to be working
with her fingers at her key-ring. In one hand
she held the ring, in the other a key that she seemed
to be trying to remove. It was obstinate.
She wrestled at it. She looked up at Harry.
“I want to get this”—the key
came away in her hand—“off.”
He recognised it for her office pass-key.
Caused by that cry of hers to Huggo and by that ges-ture
with her cry, and since intensifying, there had been
a constraint that he was very glad to break.
He remembered how childishly proud she had been of
that key on the day it was cut for her. They had
had a little dinner to celebrate it, and she had dipped
it in her champagne glass.
He said, “Your pass-key? Why?”
She said, “I’m coming home, Harry.”
“Coming home?”
She was sitting back in her chair. She tossed,
with a negligent movement of her hand, the key upon
the table. “I have done with all that.
I am coming home.”
He got up very quickly and came around the table to
her.
