It was not just cold. The gale made sure of that. Simon had brought his children over the night before last. Their house was near the edge, where the wind hit hardest. I could not very well allow them to stay there during a storm like this.
The builders had not done a sterling job of fixing the sealing on the window frames so that the cold did not seep into my house. But Simon had less money and had used the same builders I had; I can only imagine the damp that managed to creep in on that side of town. So I rang him around noon on Tuesday to invite him and the children to stay. They arrived that evening, the children drowning in their raincoats and wellingtons with two packed bags between the three of them.
Simon had done a good job of raising his children, I knew this by the way they shimmied out of their boots and left them to dry at the door, after all, if they had not, Gertrude would have the lovely job of scrubbing the mud off tomorrow. Mud in this town had a nasty habit of sticking between the wooden floorboards, and in the grout between the tiles in the kitchen. In hindsight, the builders had done an awful job of just about everything.
The younger of Simon’s children, Beatrice, was a petite girl, even for her age. My youngest, Mary, was in the same class as Beatrice at school. They were even born less than a month apart, but still, Beatrice was shorter by a head. That is how we came to know Simon, Mary and Beatrice were best friends since their first year at school. It has been seven years since then.
Simon’s other child, Nathan, was a quiet boy with a good temperament, just two years older than Mary and Beatrice. He mostly read books and kept to himself. When he did speak he was polite and always smiled. Overall he just seemed good natured. I was however surprised some three weeks ago when I heard the news that he had gotten into a fight at school. Beatrice had been over to play that same day, so when Nathan came to pick her up I asked him what happened. He was a mess that day, eye half shut and purple, lip cut and swollen, his left arm in a sling and his trousers muddy and torn. He looked down and simply said “The boy was speaking about my mother.” I did not ask anything more, her sickness was not a topic any of us liked to be reminded of.
All these children in the house made me miss my Charlotte terribly. She had left to attend culinary school four months ago. The house has not been the same without her. My husband, Edmund, was stationed overseas; he would be back in the spring; just a few more months. Mary and Charlotte never went without a male in the house though. My own father still lived with us. Charlotte and him would spend endless hours in the study together. And he would find recipes in the newspaper that he asked her to make him, and she did so with a great, broad smile. Sometimes I would even hear them in the kitchen late at night laughing over cups of tea and slices of sweet bread.
Perhaps it was not so much that I was concerned about Simon and his children that I invited them to stay, but also that I longed for the feeling of a full house. That night, after dinner, I could almost hear the house sigh as every room was filled. It was still cold, the cold never left and the light rain never stopped. But I could not hear the howling of the wind over the sound of Mary and Beatrice giggling down the hall. So I slept comfortably in the cold.
By: Leilah Bhyat
And another thing 