The Secret Passage by Nina Bawden

she was still sitting there, staring thoughtfully and somehow sadly in front of her, the letter still in her hand.
    “Anything wrong?” he asked, surprised. Aunt Mabel didn’t often sit like this, doing nothing.
    Aunt Mabel glanced at him. “You’d better read this,” she said shortly.
    Uncle Abe took the letter and read it. Then he folded it carefully and handed it back to her. “Poor little beggars,” he said softly. “Do they miss their father very much?”
    “I think so,” Aunt Mabel said. “They don’t talk about him—but Mary runs to the letter box every morning. I hear her feet scampering down the passage and then coming back, very slowly. He hasn’t written to them, not once. It looks as if he has quite forgotten about them. You saw what Mrs Epsom said? He seemed half out of his mind with grief …”
    Uncle Abe blew his nose very loudly. He said, “He must have loved their mother very much.”
    “He’d have fetched her the moon out of the sky, if he could,” Aunt Mabel said in a dry voice. She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair in the way she often did when she was thinking very hard about something. “He wasn’t in a fit state to go off into the wilds on his own. Suppose something happens to him? What will happen to the children then?”
    “I daresay he’ll turn up safe and sound,” Uncle Abe said slowly.
    Aunt Mabel sighed. “I hope so. They’re my sister’s children and I shall do my best to do my duty by them. But it won’t be easy. They expect such a lot—their parents adored them, spoiled them, to my mind.”
    “They don’t seem spoiled to me. What do you mean?” Uncle Abe said.
    Aunt Mabel shrugged her shoulders impatiently. “Oh—they just seem to expect everyone to love them. I haven’t got time to fuss over children. I can just about afford to feed them as long as they’re not particular but I can’t afford to give thema lot of clothes and toys. I can’t afford to give them anything …”
    Uncle Abe was looking at her with an odd expression on his face. He said suddenly, “You can give them a home. That’s the most important thing. I know that—after all, you’ve given me one. Oh—I know I’m supposed to be a lodger, but when did I last pay my rent? Tell me that?” He threw out his chest and thumped it with his big fist.
    “Oh—don’t ask silly questions,” Aunt Mabel said. She got up from her chair and started to lay the table for supper, putting down the knives and forks with a lot of unnecessary noise.
    Uncle Abe said, “It’s not a silly question. I owe you a lot of money—money that you need now, for the children.”
    Aunt Mabel took no notice. Her cheeks were rather red and her eyes very bright.
    Uncle Abe cleared his throat and said loudly, “As a matter of fact, I may be able to pay you back sooner than you expect. I’ve got an interview tomorrow, with a man who runs a big Art Gallery in London. He wrote and said he’d like to see some of my stuff.”
    Aunt Mabel smiled. She didn’t often smile, but when she did it was usually at Uncle Abe who reminded her of her young husband who had been drowned at sea. Mr Haggard had been younger than Uncle Abe when he died, but he had been a big, brawny man too, with flaming red hair.
    She said, “In that case, you’d better remember to put on a clean shirt when you get up in the morning. And wash your neck thoroughly and clean your nails. They look as if they could do with it.”
    She spoke to Uncle Abe in the same sharp, almost angry way that she spoke to the children but Uncle Abe didn’t mind because he was used to it.
    *
    John had the bunch of keys fastened to his belt. They were all wearing the dirty old clothes they had worn the day before but they couldn’t get into the passage until Aunt Mabel was out of the house.
    They thought she would never go. Usually she went shopping as soon as breakfast was cleared away but today she had taken it into her head to turn out one of the kitchen