The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens Page B

air and thumped them down on the floor. “That’s a good one! That table—this window— Oh, that’s rich!” Her tanned face became suffused with convulsive mirth.
    â€œWhat’s so funny about that? Don’t rock against Oliver’s bed like that, you jackass, you’ll hurt him. I don’t care what you say, that table was in this window, wasn’t it, Ollie?”
    â€œIt wasn’t even in this room,” said Violet, prolonging her laughter beyond the limit of her amusement, and coughing. Sometimes, if she were having a good time with a joke, she would laugh until she became black in the face and choked. “Tell her, Ollie.”
    â€œWhat? Oh, I don’t know.” He had hardly been listening to what they were saying. He was lying looking out of the window, letting the familiar crescendo act as a background to his thoughts. His sisters’ arguments had been a background to his life ever since Heather was old enough to say “shan’t” and “isn’t”.
    They were both wrong about the table. He knew quite well that it had stood in the middle of the room, because he used to sit at it occasionally to fill in the stamp album which it pleased his father to see him keep up, but he had learned long ago not to interfere or take sides. It only prolonged the argument, which would otherwise peter out eventually in favour of another which one hoped would be less boring. His sisters’ squabbling dated from kicking the furniture nursery days. It had increased in intensity and shrillness as they reached adolescence and dropped off slightly as Heather grew up, acquired more interests outside the family and came to accept Violet as something that could not be helped, like an act of God. Either because she was at home less, or because she said it less, her exasperated cry of “Oh,
Vi
!” rang less frequently through the house. Lately, however, she had reverted. The sight and sound of her elder sister was like a rash which she had to scratch. And like a rash, the more she scratched it, the more it irritated. Mrs. North had to resurrect her nursery voice: “Let your sister alone!” becausewhen Violet was goaded she became
farouche
and moody and would not come to meals and it was inconvenient to have her raiding the larder of tomorrow’s lunch after everyone had gone to bed.
    After the argument about the table had died down, Violet said (it was not always Heather who provoked the quarrels): “Why do we have to have that Black man to meals so often? Dinner on Monday and tea again today. Don’t they feed him properly at Ockney? He gives me a pain.”
    â€œYou give him a pain, more likely,” retorted Heather. “You hadn’t washed your hands for tea and that horrible dog of yours slobbered all over his trousers. I thought he was very good about it, considering dog-spit never comes off.”
    â€œHe’s pansy,” said Violet.
    â€œYou don’t know the meaning of the word.”
    Violet guffawed again. “That’s a good one!” Heather darned faster than ever, her kissable mouth clamped like the two halves of a shelf. Violet lurched upwards and sideways, took a book at random off Oliver’s table and began to read, holding it an inch from her eyes.
    Heather kept darting irritated glances at her and eventually burst out: “Why don’t you wear your glasses? No wonder your eyes are getting worse.”
    â€œThey’re not.”
    â€œThey are. That’s why you knocked over that glass at dinner, and upset the salt. Even you can’t be as clumsy as all that. I know you hate yourself in them, but what’s it matter what you look like? If they’re helping your eyes, I mean,” she added in a half-hearted attempt to disguise what she obviously meant. “Don’t you think she’s silly, Ollie?” And when he refused to be drawn, she rounded on him. “Oh,