Far From My Father's House by Elizabeth Gill Page A

didn’t like her.
    ‘When he married your mother he put us out,’ her grandmother declared.
    Sometimes Annie wondered why her father should be obliged to keep so many people. No wonder she and Madge had to go out and work.
    That autumn her aunt died. Annie found it difficult to be sorry, she was only glad that the doctor’s bills had ceased. Her father worked so hard and got no thanks for it but then sometimes when she wandered into the kitchen she caught her father kissing her mother or holding her just smiling, so maybe that was thanks enough.
    Madge liked working for the Harlingtons just as much as Annie disliked the farm work at Alistair’s house. She came home with tales of Mr and Mrs Harlington.
    ‘She drinks so much that she has to go to bed in the afternoons,’ Madge said.
    The Hall was a curious place, the biggest house that Annie had ever seen, and living so close – it was just across the field and up the hill – they had all spent a lot of time there when they were younger before Frank went away to school and afterwards in the school holidays.
    Like Alistair Frank was an only child. He lived there with his parents and his father’s two old aunts. The aunts wore dark brown clothes, skirts with big pleats and shapeless sweaters and they smelled to Annie of another century. They would tell her stories of when they were girls, of the parties, the picnics and the musical evenings. She could not understand why they had never married, they seemed no more ugly than anyone else and even plain women married – there were plenty of those everywhere – but when she had tried politely to enquire they said it was because they had no money, their father had drunk it away.
    Annie knew that there had once been another estate further down the country and a house in London. But those had gone.
    Mr Harlington did little work. He walked his spaniels in the afternoons with a gun broken over his arm and the villagers bowed or curtsied or acknowledged him in some other way as their superior. Mrs Harlington did even less. She talked to the cook and she wrote letters in her little sunlit room in the mornings. She took tea with the aunts in the afternoons and occasionally went visiting friends, driving precariously in their old car.
    Annie liked the house and she could see why Madge liked being there. It was shabby in a nice sort of way with a fire in the hall where the spaniels slept when they couldn’t persuade anybody to take them for a walk. Old Mrs Donaldson from the village was their cook and nice smells permeated the whole house all day and there were dark pictures on the walls of hopeful-looking people. Madge was given her meals and those who ventured near in mid-morning or afternoon were greeted with enthusiasm in the kitchen and given spice cake and hot tea. Often much of the food which went to the dining-room came back uneaten and Mrs Donaldson shook her head over people with small appetites.
    The rooms smelled of books and tobacco and sherry which Frank’s aunts drank in minute quantities. His father drank brandy and his mother drank anything but they drank a lot. Many of Frank’s parents’ days were spent in fuddled glee. All they had left now was the Hall and the farms in the valley.
    It seemed to Annie that the Harlingtons had no idea of how other people lived. Mr Harlington did nothing. He sat mostly in the library and read books which had probably never been read before or maybe he just dozed and drank and thought of how things might have been. There was an air of decay around the house, like an ending of some kind was taking place, as though something was over. The house was very shabby. Things were not replaced. Broken machinery was left in corners. Fences were falling down. The gardens were growing wild. That Christmas when Frank came home Madge seemed to be at the house more and more.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Rose said, taking scones from the oven one Sunday afternoon, ‘she’s not supposed to be there