His mornings were always spent with old Parlow, and in the afternoon he was
allowed to ramble about by himself, so that it was only at mealtimes and
during the horrible half-hour after supper before he went up to bed that he
saw his father.

He really saw more of old Curtis the gardener, but half an hour with his
father could seem a very long time. Throughout the rest of his life that
half-hour after supper remained at the back of his mind--and he never
forgot its slightest detail. The hideous dining-room with the large
photographs of old grandfather and grandmother Westcott in ill-fitting
clothes and heavy gilt frames, the white marble clock on the mantelpiece, a
clock that would tick solemnly for twenty minutes and then give a little
run and a jump for no reason at all, the straight horsehair sofa so black
and uncomfortable with its hard wooden back, the big dining-room table with
its green cloth (faded a little in the middle where a pot with a fern in it
always stood) and his aunt with her frizzy yellow hair, her black mittens
and her long bony fingers playing her interminable Patience, and then two
arm-chairs by the fire, in one of them old grandfather Westcott, almost
invisible beneath a load of rugs and cushions and only the white hairs on
the top of his head sticking out like some strange plant, and in the other
chair his father, motionless, reading the _Cornish Times_--last of all,
sitting up straight with his work in front of him, afraid to move, afraid
to cough, sometimes with pins and needles, sometimes with a maddening
impulse to sneeze, always with fascinated glances out of the corner of his
eye at his father--Peter himself. How happy he was when the marble clock
struck nine, and he was released! How snug and friendly his little attic
bedroom was with its funny diamond-paned window under the shelving roof
with all the view of the common and the distant hills that covered Truro!
There, at any rate, he was free!