Read Tim for Free Online Page B

again, mentally expunging all polysyllables from her vocabulary. ‘I’m not really all that old, Tim, it’s just this white hair of mine that makes me seem so old. I don’t think your Pop would mind if you called me Mary.’
    ‘Doesn’t your hair mean you’re old, Mary? I always thought it did! Pop’s hair is white and so is Mum’s, and I know they’re old.’
    ‘He’s twenty-five,’ she thought, ‘so his Pop and Mum are probably only slightly older than I am,’ but she said, ‘Well, I’m younger than they are, so I’m not quite old yet.’
    He got to his feet. ‘It’s time for me to go back to work. You’ve got an awful lot of lawn, Mary. I hope I finish it in time.’
    ‘Well, if you don’t, there are plenty of other days. You can come some other time and finish it, if you’d like to.’
    He considered the problem gravely. ‘I think I’d like to come back, as long as Pop says I can.’ He smiled at her. ‘I like you, Mary, I like you better than Mick and Harry and Jim and Bill and Curly and Dave. I like you better than anyone except Pop and Mum and my Dawnie. You’re pretty, you’ve got such lovely white hair.’
    Mary struggled with a hundred indefinable emotions rushing in on her from all sides, and managed to smile. ‘Why, thank you, Tim, that’s very nice of you.’
    ‘Oh, think nothing of it,’ he said nonchalantly, and hopped down the stairs with his hands flapping at each side of his head and his behind poking out. ‘That was my special imitation of a rabbit!’ he called from the lawn.
    ‘It was very good, Tim, I knew you were a rabbit the minute you started hopping,’ she replied. She gathered up the tea things and carried them inside.
    She found it terribly hard to alter her conversation to a toddler level, for Mary Horton had never had anything to do with children since she ceased being a child herself, and she had never really been young anyway. But she was perceptive enough to sense that Tim could be easily hurt, that she had to mind what she said to him, control her temper and her exasperation, that if she let him feel the sting of her tongue he would divine the tenor of the statement if not the actual words. Remembering how she had snapped at him the previous day when he had been, as she thought at the time, deliberately obtuse, she was mortified. Poor Tim, so utterly unaware of the nuances and undercurrents of adult conversation, and so completely vulnerable. He liked her; he thought she was pretty because she had white hair, as did his mother and father.
    How could his mouth be so sad, when he knew so little and functioned on such a limited scale?
    She got her car out and went down to the supermarket to shop before lunch, since she had nothing in the house that would appeal to him. The chocolate cake was her emergency entertaining fund, the cream a fortuitous mistake on her milkman’s part. Tim had brought his lunch with him, she knew, but perhaps he hadn’t enough, or could be charmed by the production of something like hamburgers or hot dogs, children’s party fare.
    ‘Have you ever been fishing, Tim?’ she asked him over lunch.
    ‘Oh, yes, I love fishing,’ he replied, beginning on his third hot dog. ‘Pop takes me fishing sometimes, when he isn’t too busy.’
    ‘How often is he busy?’
    ‘Well, he goes to the races and the cricket and the football and things like that. I don’t go with him because I get sick in crowds, the noise and all the people make my head ache and my tummy go all queer.’
    ‘I must take you fishing sometime, then,’ she said, and left it at that.
    By the middle of the afternoon he had finished the backyard and came to ask about the front. She looked at her watch.
    ‘I don’t think we’ll bother about the front today, Tim, it’s nearly time for you to go home. Why don’t you come back next Saturday and do the front for me then, if your Pop will let you?’
    He nodded happily. ‘All right, Mary.’
    ‘Go and fetch your bag