front garden to look for snowdrops in the border by the kitchen area. She
knew that Jenny's dead body lay on the sofa under the kitchen window
behind the blind and the white painted iron bars. She hoped that she
would not have to see it; but she was not afraid of Jenny's dead body. It
was sacred and holy.

She wondered why Mamma sent her to Uncle Edward and Aunt Bella. From the
top-storey windows of Chadwell Grange you could look beyond Aldborough
Hatch towards Wanstead Flats and the City of London Cemetery. They were
going to bury Jenny there. She stood looking out, quiet, not crying. She
only cried at night when she thought of Jenny, sitting in the low nursery
chair, tired and patient, drawing back from her violent caresses, and of
the grey silk dress laid out on the bed in the spare room.

She was not even afraid of the City of London Cemetery when Mark took her
to see Jenny's grave. Jenny's grave was sacred and holy.




IX


I.

You had to endure hardness after you were nine. You learnt out of Mrs.
Markham's "History of England," and you were not allowed to read the
conversations between Richard and Mary and Mrs. Markham because they made
history too amusing and too easy to remember. For the same reason you
translated only the tight, dismal pages of your French Reader, and