The Exiles

then go and listen outside the kitchen door.’
    ‘Well? Did you hear anything?’ Ruth asked when Rachel returned a few minutes later.
    ‘No. Nothing that made sense. I can’t remember it anyway.’
    ‘Why on earth have you got your pyjamas on? It’s not even five o’clock. Are you ill?’
    ‘I thought I’d probably be sent to bed,’ Rachel replied, ‘so I thought I might as well get ready.’
    Her sisters looked at her in despair. They believed in behaving as though they were innocent at least until they were proven guilty, and quite often even after that.
    ‘It was a very weak-spirited thing to do,’ pronounced Naomi pompously, ‘especially when I said you could say that I made you.’
    ‘Go and get changed again,’ ordered Ruth. ‘You’ve got to learn to stick up for yourself whatever you’ve done!’
    ‘Can I say you made me?’ asked Rachel, slowly getting to her feet again.
    ‘If you must.’ Ruth sighed as she watched her sister trudge once more to the house.
    ‘No moral strength,’ remarked Naomi.
    ‘I know,’ said Ruth, ‘but she’s got to be trained.’
    ‘She’s lucky to have us really,’ said Naomi.

    ‘There she was, covered in paint,’ related Mrs Conroy late that night, when explaining her heartless behaviour to her husband, ‘and Ruth and Naomi just encouraging her to misbehave, and I suddenly thought it wouldn’t hurt them at all.’
    ‘Do them the world of good,’ agreed Mr Conroy.
    ‘And as for what happened when we told them!’
    For teatime, when the news of the sudden wealth of the Conroy family had been broken, had been rather tense.

    ‘I am going to make a family announcement,’ Mr Conroy had begun. Ruth and Naomi glanced at each other.
    ‘What?’ asked Rachel, forgetting she was in disgrace and stabbing a whole sausage onto her fork.
    ‘Use your knife !’ scolded Mrs Conroy as Rachel bit the sausage in half, ‘and I thought I told you not to get changed!’
    ‘Ruth and Naomi made me!’
    ‘What announcement?’ asked Naomi.
    ‘Go on, John, tell them then,’ Mrs Conroy said.
    ‘Right then,’ said Mr Conroy, and told them.
    For a few moments his daughters sat around the tea table in complete silence, too surprised to move, too surprised to think, staring at their parents in amazement. Phoebe’s mashed potato fell off her fork onto the table-cloth and Rachel picked it up and ate it without even knowing what she was doing.
    ‘That’s taken the wind from your sails,’ said Mr Conroy. ‘I must say it rather did mine when I first heard it.’
    ‘Why’d he leave it to us?’ asked Rachel. ‘He doesn’t even know us.’
    ‘Because we’re his family,’ explained Mrs Conroy, ‘or your father is, but it’s the same thing. Not that it all went to family, not by any means!’
    ‘Five thousand pounds!’ repeated Rachel. ‘Five thousand pounds! It’s the first time I’ve ever been rich!’
    Ruth started to think quickly. Five thousand pounds between six. That was, six eights are forty eight, so six eight hundreds are forty eight hundred, and that was still less than five thousand pounds. More than eight hundred pounds each! She would buy a horse and still have plenty left to get it food and a stable. Where did one buy a horse from? She would have to get someone to help. Lots of people would probably be glad to.
    ‘Eight hundred and thirty pounds each!’ said Naomi who had also been calculating. ‘When do we get it?’
    Rachel was thinking, ‘I need some money.’ She wasn’t sure exactly what for, but she knew she never had anything like enough. She started trying to remember all the things she had always wanted.
    Phoebe had mentally gone through her Christmas Present List and decided she could buy everything on it. She could hardly wait to tick them off.
    Mrs Conroy said, ‘We’ve decided to have the kitchen enlarged this summer. It will mean knocking down the larder wall of course, and we’re having the outside of the house painted, and a new bathroom suite put in. It’s going to mean having workmen in the house for a few weeks, but still, summer is the best time for getting work like that done.’
    ‘That’ll be nice,’ said Ruth politely, but not really listening, ‘I’m buying a horse with mine.’
    ‘You’re not going to have much left,’ remarked Naomi to her mother, ‘or are you and Dad clubbing together to get all that done?’
    ‘Can I have mine now?’ asked Rachel.
    ‘Your what?’
    ‘My eight hundred and