Read Online The Well by Elizabeth Jolley - Free Book Online Page A

like some tea and toast?’ Katherine, who was sitting by the bed, stood up and leaned over, smoothing the sheet and the pillow and Hester’s hair with her cool little hands.
    â€˜No thank you Kathy,’ Hester said. She felt weak and tired and tearful. ‘I’ll try and sleep. You go out in the air a bit. You can’t sit by me all day.’
    The headache lasted two days. Hester felt the pain go away during the afternoon of the second day. She lay in the bed hardly daring to move. Tears of relief squeezed out from the corners of her eyes and spilled, trickling down her cheeks. How sweet and kind Katherine always was during this recurring nuisance. She must be feeding the poultry, it was the kind of noise she could hear now from the yard.
    As she felt better thoughts and words formed in her mind. She thought about grass, the west paddock by the farmhouse came right up to the bedroom windows which opened like narrow doors on to the verandah. At a certain time of the year the grass was rich and sweet smelling. She thought about the word meadow, a grassy paradise – someone had written that about a meadow. Somewhere in her childhood reading there were daisy chains and buttercups and the idea of crawling through a hole in a hedge into some magic place, a meadow it was called, deep with long grass and yellow flowers. Hester, for a moment, recalled her father and thought of him dismissing the flowers, cape weed, with disgust. Grass, she remembered more words in the spreading freedom as the pain seemed to be lifted from her brow;
a fragrant garment of the earth filled with ripe summer to the edge
. And more words;
all spring and summer is in the fields silent scented paths
. Was that Ruskin she wondered. She had all these words copied out in her neat schoolgirl writing. Some lines were even translated into French and German, Fräulein Herzfeld made her translate everything …
    No headache at all now. She tried to remember where the apostrophe in
fields
should go.
    â€˜It doesn’t matter,’ she said aloud and was startled by her own voice, ‘there are only two possible places. Katherine!’ she called, ‘Katherine!’, knowing that her voice could not be heard over the raucous insane cackling from the yard. ‘Katherine!’
    But Katherine heard and came. ‘Yes, Miss Harper, dear?’
    â€˜Kathy. I think I could take some tea now, very weak and no milk.’
    â€˜Oh yes, Miss Harper, dear, of course I’ll make it at once.’
    Joanna replied to the invitation, accepting it, and at once they began suitable preparations for the visit. Joanna’s letter, decorated with
Snoopy
and the paper made to look like denim, lay on the corner of the dresser. It was impossible while passing not to look at the letter; the large unformed handwriting was compelling, it seemed full of life and the expectation of happiness. From time to time Katherine picked up the letter and re-read it though she must have known its contents by heart. Hester noticing the quick re-readings bit her lip and said nothing. It seemed to her that the pages of the letter had a sweet heavy scent, something powerful which she could not define. Sometimes she thought Katherine smelled like the letter but perhaps that was because she was so often holding it. Hester could not bring herself to speak about it. She had read once, in a magazine, an article, a heart-breaking article about a mother detecting drugs used by her daughter because she, the mother, had noticed a smell. The awful part was that the mother’s nose had been too slow and the daughter had gone blind. When discussing the article with Katherine at the time, Katherine, assuming an air of importance, had said that she knew a lot of people who were stoned wild regularly and not one of them was blind or had anything wrong with them at all. ‘Perhaps the lady is a foreign lady Miss Harper, dear,’ she said. They write awful stuff in