An Episode of Sparrows

by Rumer Godden

  “I don’t need to telephone Doctor Wychcliffe,” said Mr. Anstruther.

  “But please do it.” Olivia spoke firmly but the hand that smoothed her gloves had trembled. “You see, I want to alter my will,” she said. “Alter it in rather a monstrous way.” And she smiled. “When you have telephoned the doctor I should like you to draw up a draft.”

  “I drew it up, there and then,” said Mr. Anstruther to Noel and Angela.

  “I haven’t so very much to leave,” Olivia had said, “not like Angela, but I think it will be enough—enough for what I want,” she had added, seeing Mr. Anstruther’s inquiring look. “Noel and Angela think I should leave it to Noel’s children. Well, they must be disappointed. The annuity to Ellen is to stand, of course,” said Olivia, “but the rest . . .”

  Noel’s face had had a look of complacent expectancy as Mr. Anstruther came to that, but Angela had asked, “The rest?” with sudden disquiet.

  When Mr. Anstruther had finished reading there was such a dazed silence that he said, “Perhaps I had better explain it to you in non-legal terms.”

  Olivia had apologized for the will herself. “It seems a roundabout way of doing it,” she had told Mr. Anstruther, “but it was difficult to find a way that would fulfil all requirements. All requirements,” she had said, smoothing her gloves. “If I had left it all to Lovejoy, she would have been separated from Tip, and that little girl needs not to be separated. She needs a home, and the home she wants is with Vincent and Mrs. Combie, so . . .”

  “A trust is to be set up,” Mr. Anstruther began to explain, “to open a restaurant in the West End—” But Angela interrupted.

  “Olivia and a restaurant! I can’t believe it!”

  “How did she come to be mixed up with people like this?” asked Noel wrathfully. “It’s you and your miserable charities, Angela.”

  “But she never would be mixed up in my charities,” said Angela. She still sounded dazed.

  Mr. Anstruther went on. “The restaurant is to be managed by this man Vincent, Mr. Combie, once of Catford Street, on condition that he and his wife provide a home for Lovejoy Mason, treating her, in all respects, as if she were their own child. If the restaurant seems profitable, Vincent is to be given a half-share after five years; the other half is to be divided between the boy Tip Malone and Lovejoy Mason. Mrs. Combie, the wife, is to be paid three pounds a week by the Trustees for the care of Lovejoy, who is to have thirty pounds a year paid to her personally for her clothes.” Miss Chesney said, “Lovejoy will manage well on that.” “When Lovejoy Mason is eighteen, or when she marries, she is to have two hundred pounds for a training or towards furnishing a home.

  “Tip Malone is to visit Lovejoy when he and she like, or when his mother will let him. The trustees are Inspector Russell of Mortimer Street Police Station”—“That nice Inspector,” Olivia had called him—“the man Vincent, Mr. Combie, Father Lambert of the Church of Our Lady of Sion in Catford Street, and you, Miss Angela, if they will serve on the trust with you.”

  “And if not?” asked Noel hotly.

  “Then the trustees are Inspector Russell, Vincent, and Father Lambert.”

  Olivia had always been blunt, but, anxious for the smooth working of the trust, she had not foreseen that it would sound quite as blunt and hard as it did—it had an effect she would never have believed, for Angela began to blush. It was a blush as painful and humiliating as any of Olivia’s own.

  CHAPTER XXV

  THE admiral was showing the new member of the Garden Committee round the gardens. “We’ll have some wallflowers here,” he said, pointing with his stick at the long borders.

  “No, sir,” said Lucas.

  “What do you mean, ‘No, sir’?”

  “Miss Chesney asked the Committee to remember the residents don’t like wallflowers, sir.”

  The admiral did not regain his temper until they came to the shrub beds. “This is where the trouble was,” he said.

  “What trouble, Admiral?”

  “Street children,” said the admiral with a quelling look at Lucas. “You’d never think they stole loads of earth from there? The funny thing is that the holes are closing up; we didn’t do anything, they’re closing themselves, making new earth. Don’t ask me how,” said the admiral, “because I don’t know.”

  RUMER GODDEN (1907–1998) grew up in India, where her father ran a steamship company. When her husband left her penniless in Calcutta with two daughters to raise, she turned to writing to pay off her many debts. She wrote more than sixty books for adults and young adults, including The Doll’s House, Impunity Jane, and The Greengage Summer, and, available from the New York Review Children’s Collection, Mouse House and The Mousewife.