Читать книгу The Counterplot онлайн

27 страница из 75

Teresa mounted the wide, easy stairs, and, passing through another green baize door, entered the children’s quarters, and then the nursery itself. There, tea finished and cleared away, a feeling of vague dissatisfaction had fallen on the two children. Every minute bed-time was drawing nearer, and anxious eyes kept turning towards the door; would any one come before it was too late, and Jasper was already plunging and “being silly” in the bath, while Anna, clad in a pink flannel dressing-gown, her hair in two tight little plaits, was putting tidy her books and toys, and—so as to perform the daily good deed enjoined by the Girl Guides—Jasper’s too?

Their craving for the society of “grown-ups” was as touching and inexplicable, it seemed to Teresa, as that of dogs. She had noticed that they longed for it most between tea and bed-time—it was as if they needed, then, a viaticum against the tedium of going to bed and the terrors of the night. Nor, she had noticed, was Nanny, dearly though they loved her, capable of giving this viaticum, nor could any man provide it: it had to be given by a grandmother, or mother, or aunt.