was awake, and so was Edward. Edward was the good-looking one; his hair was not sandy like the rest of his family, but bright copper, his eyes were enormous with greenish lights in them. Strangers stopped to speak to Edward in the road just because they liked looking at him, and Edward took shameless pleasure in his popularity.
“It’s disgusting,” Alec often told him. “You’re a loathsome show-off.”
Edward was always quite unmoved, and merely tried to explain.
“I didn’t ask to be good-looking, but I like the things being good-looking gives me. I was the prince in the play at school.” Toby, when he heard that, had made noises as if he were being sick. “All right, make noises if you like, but I did like being the prince. There was special tea afterwards, for the actors, with ices.”
“But you can’t like people cooing and gurgling at you,” Toby always protested.
Edward seemed to consider the point.
“I don’t know. There’s you and Alec off to school and nobody knows you’ve been, and nobody cares. There’s me walks up the same street and everybody knows. I think it’s duller to be you.”
“It’s no good,” Alec would say to Toby, “wasting our breath on the little horror.”
“Just a born cad,” Toby would agree.
But Edward was neither a horror nor a cad, he was just of a very friendly disposition, a person who liked talking and being talked to. Already, although he had only been seven for one month, he had a good idea of the sort of people he liked talking to and the sort of people he did not. He was explaining this to Harriet when George came up to fetch her.
“It’s those silly sort of ladies with little dogs I don’t like, and people like bus conductors I do like.”
George went into Edward’s room.
“You’re supposed to be asleep, my son. Turn over and I’ll tuck you in. I’m taking Harriet downstairs.”
Edward sat up.
“What for? She’s supposed to be in bed and asleep too.”
George pushed Edward down.
“We’ve got something to tell her.” He could feel Edward rising up under his hand to protest that he would like to be told too. “Not tonight, old man, I dare say Harriet’ll tell you tomorrow.”
It was a cold night, so George not only made Harriet put on her dressing-gown but he rolled her up in an eiderdown and carried her down to the sitting room. Harriet was surprised to find herself downstairs. She looked round at her family with pleasure.
“Almost it’s worth being sent to bed with Edward to be got up again and brought downstairs. What did Dr Phillipson say?”
Olivia 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.
