A Place Of Strangers Read Free Page A

the panelled drawing room warm for
supper. Bea wore a sheer silk dress stitched with beads of French jet and in
the half light of evening, still looked like a beguiling Deborah Kerr cast
against Francis’s ageing David Niven.
    McCall told them about Evie and asked if she might come for
Christmas. Bea could hardly contain her delight. Francis remained quiet as he
had for most of the meal. Then he left, saying he had matters to attend to.
    Bea and McCall moved to the wing backs either side of the
sooty brick inglenook. She rested her feet on a small, embroidered stool. The
table candles died one by one and the pious whiff of wax drifted in the silence
between them.
    ‘I’m overjoyed you’ve got a new girl, Mac – ’
    He nodded and fixed his gaze on the child’s alphabet sampler
behind her, sewn in the days of smocks and fealty.
    ‘– because you have to start afresh. Never forget that one
gets over absolutely anything in the end.’
    ‘Is that what you believe, Bea?’
    ‘It’s what I know, dear. Love’s a cruel sickness... never
easy to recover from it.’
    The wind was getting up. It tore through Garth Woods and
bits of twig shot against the drawing room’s leaded windows as they talked. The
forecast was for rain turning to snow. Bea asked McCall to check the buckets
for her.
    ‘What buckets?’
    ‘In the attics. The roof’s leaking all over the place.’
    ‘Why don’t you get the builders in?’
    ‘Have you any idea what that roof would cost to repair?’
    The six attics were reached by a narrow wooden stairway,
winding up from the back landing which servants once used to get to their beds.
    McCall unlatched the wide plank door and felt at once the
draught of childhood unease which frightened him the first time he dared to
walk up. The treads were gritty with peeling lime-wash and grains of fallen
plaster. Here and there were the folded husks of dead bats amid the frass and
fume of decay.
    A moment later, he stood where once he played in the magical
land of his own imaginings – a kingdom only he could see, only he could rule.
    He saw again the forgotten soldier’s helmet from the Great
War, the guts of old wireless sets, broken tinplate trains, brown boots and
white pumps, sepia portraits in wormy frames and drawers full of gossipy
letters from the Empire’s outposts, slowly being torn to bedding by the
generations of mice which ran in the dancing dust.
    Here were ghosts and treasures caught in the cobwebs and
slanting sunshine where he would hide and seek that which could not be found or
properly explained. All was as it had been and it transfixed him now as much as
then.
    Who am I... who am I?
    A jump cut newsreel of memories flickered through his head –
rope swings, secret hide-outs in the woods, a cowboy outfit and a silver
six-shooter firing caps in a cornfield bloodied with poppies... always a
confusion of poppies, soaking into the earth.
    Bang! Bang! You’re dead.
    And they all fell down and didn’t get up again but it was
only playing, wasn’t it?
    *
    Alone at her bedroom dressing table, Bea was conscious of
not feeling entirely well. An odd, almost out-of-body sensation came over her,
as if she was drifting away from her reflection to somewhere between this world
and the next.
    She was an intruder in a house she knew intimately and
wanted to cry out but the mouth in the mirror would not form any words. Then,
without warning, Bea dropped to the floor. Her face pressed into the rough
carpet pile yet she could not move – not her hands, her legs or even her
eyelids to blink. All that was familiar became remote. It felt like dying,
afraid and alone, her confession unheard, her sins unforgiven. She saw the
first flakes of snow blow across the window. And Bea was drawn back into a past
she had never left.
    *
    It is dawn, pitilessly cold but the sunrise sky is clear.
The puddles in the narrow street of worn cobbles glisten gold like pools of
smelted metal. They catch Bea’s reflection. There