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It was the first week of the autumn term. The Winter children sat around the dining-room table. They were supposed to be working. Actually there was not very much homework being done. Even Rachel, the eldest, who was twelve and usually almost as conscientious about her homework as she was about her dancing practice—and that was saying a great deal—did not have her mind on her work. Tim, the youngest, who was eight, was not supposed to do any real homework but was supposed to “fill in the time usefully,” really meaning anything except playing the piano, while the girls were doing their homework. On this evening he was drawing a picture of two cats meeting on the top of a brick wall, an inferior sort of drawing but one he sometimes did very well. Jane, the middle one, who was ten, never even on her best days worked at homework or, in fact, at anything else. The worst thing about Jane, as Rachel often said and so did those who taught her, was that she seemed to learn things without working. She did not know the things very well but she annoyed whoever was teaching her because when he or she said, “Jane, you’re not listening. What have I just been saying?” she nearly always could reel off every word that had been said and looked smug after she had repeated them. The children’s grandmothers, when they came to stay, said Jane had a difficult nature. And Jane was difficult to understand. Miss Bean, called by everybody Peaseblossom, a friend of the children’s mother who had come to the house to give a hand when Rachel was born and had stayed on doing everything that nobody else wanted to do ever since, said that Jane was all right if you took her the right way. When she said that, it made Jane’s mother sigh. Rachel and Tim did not exactly criticize Jane. Sometimes they groaned and made expressive faces, but mostly they just accepted her. There she was, with bad days, worse days, and worser days, but one thing she hardly ever had was a good day. The children’s father, before the accident, had called her his little millstone, because he said she was a millstone around his neck which was bowing his back, but the way he used to say that made everybody, including Jane, laugh. You could see that though, like all the others, he often found her terribly annoying, he was very glad she was there, millstone or not.
Rachel was trying to finish her algebra. Mathematics was not her subject. Even when she was giving her whole attention to it, she was not often able to get the right answer. Today, with not even a quarter of her mind on what she was doing, the answers she was getting would have disgraced the jury in Alice in Wonderland. You cannot work out the sort of problem which begins “Let x equal the number…” when both ears are strained until they feel as long as a donkey’s to hear little sounds that might tell you what is going on in the drawing room overhead.
Jane was not even pretending to read her chapter on the Magna Charta. She never had cared for history, and what she called “that old Barony bit” she hated worst of all. She was not pretty at the best of times, and now, with her braids untidy and a scowl on her face, she looked downright ugly. She felt a sort of emptiness inside which gave her a pressed feeling in front because she was frightened. Her ears were strained for sounds, just as Rachel’s were strained, only whereas Rachel tried to work to keep her mind off her worries, Jane let her feelings out by kicking at the leg of the table.
Tim looked up reproachfully.
“It’s not a very important drawing I’m doing, but this was a nearly perfect cat. Now you’ve kicked the table, and the tail has run all down into the brick wall.”
Rachel was in charge at homework. She knew, even if it was her duty to do so, it was no good telling Jane not to do something. Her voice showed she knew that what she was saying might just as well never have been said.
“Don’t kick the table, Jane.”
Rachel was pretty with the sort of prettiness that nobody argues about. She was small and fair; her hair, unlike Jane’s, curled, and, even more unlike Jane’s, her braids never got that hairs-standing-out-everywhere look. Even if Rachel got ink on her nose or had a cold, she remained more or less pretty. Jane thought it was one of the meaner things about life that Rachel should be pretty, and Tim noticeable, and she, in the middle, should be plain. There were so many things that Jane ranked as mean and hoped to put right one day that if she had written them out, they would have filled a whole exercise book.
“Doesn’t make any odds if I kick the table; nobody wants to see Tim’s drawing, and you’ll get all the answers wrong whether I do or don’t; you always do.”
This gloomy fact was so true that Rachel could not argue it. “You couldn’t be more right, but you know I’ve got to do them. I mayn’t do any practice until they’re finished.”
Rachel’s reasonableness was another thing that Jane found mean about life; she never felt reasonable herself. Now she said, “I couldn’t think that any child wanted to practice dancing with its father ill upstairs and the doctor there deciding if he’ll ever be well again.”