The Story of the Amulet | Page 4

or something like that, was its name. And Mother,
poor dear Mother, was away in Madeira, because she had been very ill.
And The Lamb--I mean the baby--was with her. And Aunt Emma, who
was Mother's sister, had suddenly married Uncle Reginald, who was
Father's brother, and they had gone to China, which is much too far off
for you to expect to be asked to spend the holidays in, however fond
your aunt and uncle may be of you. So the children were left in the care
of old Nurse, who lived in Fitzroy Street, near the British Museum, and
though she was always very kind to them, and indeed spoiled them far
more than would be good for the most grown-up of us, the four
children felt perfectly wretched, and when the cab had driven off with
Father and all his boxes and guns and the sheepskin, with blankets and
the aluminium mess-kit inside it, the stoutest heart quailed, and the
girls broke down altogether, and sobbed in each other's arms, while the
boys each looked out of one of the long gloomy windows of the parlour,
and tried to pretend that no boy would be such a muff as to cry.
I hope you notice that they were not cowardly enough to cry till their
Father had gone; they knew he had quite enough to upset him without
that. But when he was gone everyone felt as if it had been trying not to
cry all its life, and that it must cry now, if it died for it. So they cried.
Tea--with shrimps and watercress--cheered them a little. The
watercress was arranged in a hedge round a fat glass salt-cellar, a
tasteful device they had never seen before. But it was not a cheerful
meal.
After tea Anthea went up to the room that had been Father's, and when
she saw how dreadfully he wasn't there, and remembered how every
minute was taking him further and further from her, and nearer and

nearer to the guns of the Russians, she cried a little more. Then she
thought of Mother, ill and alone, and perhaps at that very moment
wanting a little girl to put eau-de-cologne on her head, and make her
sudden cups of tea, and she cried more than ever. And then she
remembered what Mother had said, the night before she went away,
about Anthea being the eldest girl, and about trying to make the others
happy, and things like that. So she stopped crying, and thought instead.
And when she had thought as long as she could bear she washed her
face and combed her hair, and went down to the others, trying her best
to look as though crying were an exercise she had never even heard of.
She found the parlour in deepest gloom, hardly relieved at all by the
efforts of Robert, who, to make the time pass, was pulling Jane's
hair--not hard, but just enough to tease.
'Look here,' said Anthea. 'Let's have a palaver.' This word dated from
the awful day when Cyril had carelessly wished that there were Red
Indians in England--and there had been. The word brought back
memories of last summer holidays and everyone groaned; they thought
of the white house with the beautiful tangled garden--late roses, asters,
marigold, sweet mignonette, and feathery asparagus--of the wilderness
which someone had once meant to make into an orchard, but which was
now, as Father said, 'five acres of thistles haunted by the ghosts of baby
cherry-trees'. They thought of the view across the valley, where the
lime-kilns looked like Aladdin's palaces in the sunshine, and they
thought of their own sandpit, with its fringe of yellowy grasses and
pale-stringy-stalked wild flowers, and the little holes in the cliff that
were the little sand-martins' little front doors. And they thought of the
free fresh air smelling of thyme and sweetbriar, and the scent of the
wood-smoke from the cottages in the lane--and they looked round old
Nurse's stuffy parlour, and Jane said--
'Oh, how different it all is!'
It was. Old Nurse had been in the habit of letting lodgings, till Father
gave her the children to take care of. And her rooms were furnished 'for
letting'. Now it is a very odd thing that no one ever seems to furnish a
room 'for letting' in a bit the same way as one would furnish it for

living in. This room had heavy dark red stuff curtains--the colour that
blood would not make a stain on--with coarse lace curtains inside. The
carpet was yellow, and violet, with bits of grey and brown oilcloth in
odd places. The fireplace had shavings and tinsel in it. There was a very
varnished mahogany chiffonier, or sideboard, with a lock that wouldn't
act. There