Death in Summer Read Free

gratifying desire. Even after six years of marriage he didn’t know his wife well enough. She could have suspected everything or nothing: her tone gave no clue when next she spoke, only a freshness in it marking the end of the contretemps.
    ‘This summer will be an idyll,’ she said, and he knew she meant because it was Georgina’s first. A quality in Letitia often anticipated happiness, and for a moment Thaddeus regretted his own shortcomings in this respect.
    ‘I have the pullet chicks to collect this afternoon.’ Shesmiled and crossed the room to kiss him. ‘Thanks for doing the box.’
    That morning he had attached a wooden box to the carrier of her bicycle, large enough to contain the six chicks she had arranged to fetch. Since she did not drive, Letitia cycled about the lanes – to collect honey from a bee-keeper she had got to know, or tomatoes because Thaddeus didn’t grow them any more, or to call in to see old Mrs Parch or Abbie Mates. Even when it was cold, or raining quite hard, she preferred cycling to walking or being driven. She had made the lanes her own, local people approvingly remarked to Thaddeus, and he agreed that his wife knew the lanes well by now.
    ‘I’ll settle Georgina in the garden before I go. The sun is trying to come out at last.’
    Thaddeus opened the french windows, Rosie lunged to her feet. Why Letitia should wish to keep chickens would once have been bewildering, as would her concern for a woman she had never laid eyes on. She didn’t know about chickens. She won’t know whether the half-dozen shown to her are good of their kind or not. Nor will she know if the man selling them is telling the truth about their being disease-free or about whatever other hazards there may be. She will believe the man, every single word he utters, and somehow her purchases will survive disease and lay the eggs expected of them: when Letitia trusted to luck she was more often than not rewarded. This irrational trust, and Letitia’s goodness, the practical steeliness of her resolve, were entangled in a nature that was disarmingly humble. It was his considerable loss, Thaddeus was every day aware, that he did not love his wife.
    ‘Yes, it’s going to be sunny,’ he agreed.
    That morning, too, he had constructed a coop, eight posts driven into an out-of-the-way patch of ground, chicken-wire stapled into place, a crude door, mostly of chicken-wire also. The pullets will spend only their nights in it, safe from the jaws of foxes. By day, they’ll scratch about among the silver birches.
    ‘I don’t think I should be long,’ Letitia predicted. ‘An hour maybe.’
    ‘I’ll cut the grass.’
    ‘You’ll keep an eye on Georgina?’
    ‘Yes, of course.’
    In the dining-room Maidment gathered up his cloths and polish tin. In the kitchen Zenobia beat up eggs for a sponge cake, saying to herself that one of these Sundays they must drive over to see the Scarrow Man, a wonder cut from the turf of Scarrow Hill. Georgina was wheeled into the garden, and settled beneath the big catalpa tree in case the sun became bright.
    Later, Maidment watched his employer throwing an old tennis ball for his wife’s dog, then starting up the lawn-mower, although in Maidment’s opinion the grass was still too wet to cut.
Why don’t you make a sign?
a previous communication from Mrs Ferry had chided, the violet writing-paper stained in a corner with a splash of something yellow, which he had unproductively sniffed.
I am a nuisance perhaps. Or are you gone away? ‘Has the old house become too much for him?’ I say to myself. ‘Has he ages ago gone from it and do my letters lie dusty in the hall, picked up by no one? Yet how attached he was to that house!’ I say again. ‘It would fall down around him yet he would not leave!’ How mucha single line would mean! That and any little you can spare a needy friend
.
    Maidment’s reconstruction of the friendship had established that Mrs Ferry was aware his employer was