thought how terribly thin Harriet’s face looked, sticking out of a bulgy eiderdown. It made her speak very gently.
“He wants you to take up skating, darling.”
Nothing could have surprised Harriet more. She had been prepared to hear that she was to go for rides on the top of a bus, or do exercises every morning, but skating was something she had never thought about. George stroked her hair.
“Dr Phillipson is arranging for you to get in free.”
Alec said:
“So the only expense will be the hiring of your skates and boots, and that’s fixed.”
Toby looked hopefully at Harriet for some sign that she was working out the cost of skates and boots, but Harriet never worked out the cost of anything. She just accepted there were things you could afford and things you could not.
“When do I start?”
Olivia was thankful Harriet seemed pleased.
“Tomorrow, darling, probably, but you aren’t going alone, the doctor’s going to take you.”
Harriet tried to absorb this strange turn in her affairs. She knew absolutely nothing about skating; then suddenly a poster for an ice show swam into her mind. The poster had shown a girl in a ballet skirt skating on one foot, the other foot held high above her head, her arms outstretched. Thinking of this picture Harriet was as startled as if she had been told that tomorrow she would start to be a lion tamer. Could it be possible that she, sitting on her father’s knee rolled in an eiderdown, would tomorrow find herself standing on one leg with the foot of the other over her head? These thoughts brought her suddenly to more practical matters.
“What do I wear to skate, Mummy?”
Olivia mentally ran a distracted eye over Harriet’s wardrobe. She had grown so long in the leg since her illness. There was her school uniform, but that wanted letting down. There were her few frocks made at home. There was the winter party frock cut down from an old dinner dress which had been part of her trousseau. Dimly Olivia connected skating and dancing.
“I don’t know, darling, do you think the brown velvet?”
Harriet thought once more of the poster.
“It hasn’t got pants that match, and they would show.”
“She must match,” said Toby. “She’ll fall over a lot when she’s learning.”
Olivia got up.
“I must go and get our supper. I think tomorrow, darling, you must just wear your usual skirt and jersey; if you find that’s wrong we’ll manage something else by the next day.”
George stood up and shifted Harriet into a carrying position.
“Come up to bed, Miss Cecilia Colledge.”
Harriet’s skating ceased to be a serious subject and became funny. Olivia, halfway to the kitchen, turned to laugh.
“My blessed Harriet, what is Daddy calling you? It’s only for exercise, darling.”
Alec drew a picture of Harriet on his blotting paper: she was flat on her back with her legs in the air. Under it he wrote, “Miss Harriet Johnson, Skating Star.”
Toby gave Harriet’s pigtails a pull.
“Queen of the Ice, that’s what they’ll call you.”
George had a big rumbling laugh.
“Queen of the Ice! I like that. Queen of the Ice!”
Harriet wriggled.
“Don’t laugh, Daddy, it tickles.”
But when she got back to bed Harriet found that either the laughing or the thought of skating next day had done her good. Her legs were still cotton-woolish but not quite as cotton-woolish as they had been before her father had fetched her downstairs. Queen of the Ice! She giggled. The giggle turned into a gurgle. Harriet was asleep.
ALEC CALLED ON Mr Pulton after supper. Mr Pulton had been born over the newspaper shop and so had his father before him, and likely enough rows of grandfathers before that. Nobody could imagine a time when Pulton’s newsagents had not been a landmark in the High Street. By luck, or because Pulton’s did not hold with meddling, the shop looked as if it had been there a long time. It was a little, low shop with a bow-fronted window, and there were the remains of some old bottle glass in one pane. Nobody knew Mr Pulton’s Christian name, he had always been just Mr Pulton to speak to, and C. Pulton when he signed his name. There was a lot of guessing as to what the C. stood for; local rumour had decided it was Carabas, like the marquess who was looked after by Puss in Boots. There were old men who were at school with Mr Pulton, who ought to have known his name, but they only remembered he had been called Pip Pulton. This was so unlikely a name for Mr C. Pulton that nobody believed the old men, and said they were getting on and had forgotten. It was true they were getting on, for anyone who had been at school with Mr Pulton was rising eighty.
Alec went to Mr Pulton’s back door for the shop was closed. He knocked loudly for Mr Pulton was a little deaf. After a moment there was a shuffling, grunting, wheezing sound, and Mr Pulton opened the door. He was a very thin, very pale man. His hair was white, and so was his face, which looked as if it had been a face for so long that the colour had been washed out of it, and it had been battered around until it creased and was full of wrinkles. His hands were pale too, long and thin and spidery; he wore clothes that nobody had ever seen anyone else wear; a little round brown velvet cap with a tassel hanging down on one side and a brown velvet coat and slippers embroidered with gold and silver thread. His paleness and thinness sticking out of the brown skull cap and brown velvet coat made him look like a delicate white moth, caught in a rough brown hand. There was, however, nothing delicate or mothlike about Mr Pulton’s mind; that was as quick and as tough as a lizard. This showed in his extraordinarily blue, interested, shrewd eyes. His voice was misleading for it matched his body and not his mind. It was a tired voice, which sounded as if it had been used such a lot that it was wearing away. Mr Pulton looked at Alec and his eyes showed he was remembering who he was, and anything that he knew about him.
“What can I do for you, young man?” Alec explained that he had come about the paper round. There was a long pause, not a pause of tiredness but a pause in which Alec could feel Mr Pulton was considering his paper round, and whether he was the sort of boy who could be trusted to deliver papers without bringing dishonour to Pulton’s Newsagents. Evidently his thoughts about Alec were nice, for suddenly he said a very surprising thing. “Come inside.”
Alec had never been inside Mr Pulton’s house before, and neither, as far as he knew, had anybody else. He had often wanted to go inside, because leaning across the counter waiting for his father’s paper he had sometimes seen glimpses of a back room, which seemed to be full of interesting things. Now he was inside the room and he found it even more interesting than he had thought it might be. It was a brownish kind of room, so evidently Mr Pulton was fond of brown. There were brownish curtains, and brownish chair covers, and brownish walls. There was a gay fire burning, but in spite of it the room was dark because Mr Pulton had not yet got around to electric light, and could not be bothered with lamps, so he lit his home with candles, which gave a queer, dim, flickering light. In spite of the dimness Alec could see the room was full of pictures, and the pictures were all of horses, which was amazing, for nobody had ever thought of Mr Pulton as being interested in horses. There were dozens of portraits of horses: race-horses, hunters, shire horses, almost every sort of horse. As well on the top of a bookcase, on brackets and on tables there were bronze models of horses. It seemed such a very horse sort of room that Alec thought it would not