I should have been grateful. In a way I was. But all I really thought about was that he obviously wasn’t going to turn me out of old Mrs. Fisherton’s. Provided I went along with him and acquiesced in these educational plans, I could stay. Of course, I was never going anywhere to study the subjects Max had mentioned. It would only be the same story as at GUP all over again. By the time we were discussing this in his dining room I knew I wanted to turn my back on academe in any form and work in the building trade. I’ve said going on the roofs and being alone up there and silent had helped teach me to know myself and sort out what I wanted from life. What I wanted, I was beginning to see clearly, was to work with my hands and to do so with the utmost knowledge and expertise that could be achieved.

I knew what would be the result of saying any of this to Max. My steeplejack rejoinder still rankled, though he said nothing about it on this occasion but asked me if I’d told my parents. “Not yet,” I said.

“Tell them, Clodagh. Tell them. Open confession is good for the soul, remember.” He sounded quite jolly all of a sudden. “And better drop a word about spending at least a week with them in the long vacation. I know how keen you young ones are on London, but your people miss you. Remember that.”

Who would have thought that only two weeks later he’d have evicted me?

Chapter 14

14

A LETTER CAME FROM my husband this morning. He writes about the great heat and the conditions of a once green country drying up and becoming a desert. And he’s bothered, as he sometimes is, as he probably always is, by the problem of aid workers having food while the starving population they’re ministering to have practically none. Of course, he knows the Famaid people must be adequately fed if they’re to do their job, and the food they have is very basic and not plentiful, but still it troubles him when he eats and the children in the camp cry with hunger. It makes him eat less because every mouthful is a reproach. He writes that he’s losing weight and jokes about rapidly returning to the figure he had when first I knew him.