Double Vision Read Free Page B

couldn’t do it. She couldn’t work at all without an assistant, and even the best assistant would leave normal working hours curtailed. She regularly started at five or six o’clock when things were going well. That would have to change, and not only that. The way she worked. Everything.
    She hobbled back to her chair, missing the other patients whose slow progress back to mobility had mirrored her own. Round about now the visitors would be leaving. The nurses would be stuffing flowers intovases, drawing the blinds, settling people down for the night – and her solitary, shuffling progress suddenly seemed lonely and pathetic. Sometimes the only cure for feeling sorry for yourself is a good long sleep. She would make herself stay up till ten o’clock, make a few calls, watch television, have a couple of stiff whiskies and go to bed.
    She was just about to switch on the television when she heard a car approaching. The forest road at night was not much frequented even in good weather, and she wondered who it might be, and hoped it wasn’t Lorna or Beth or Alec come to see how she was. The car slowed to take the bend. She pictured the unknown driver spotting the damage to the trees and wincing – though by now the snow would have covered the tyre marks on the verge. She waited for it to pick up speed again, but it slowed still further, crawling along, looking for the entrance. A shifting skein of light drifted across the wall and stopped as the car stopped. Going to the window, she opened it slightly and heard the crunch of approaching footsteps, but could see nothing. The drive was thickly lined with rhododendrons that in winter formed a long dark tunnel. The footsteps grew louder. A young man with bent head, his dark hair stringy with melted snow, emerged from between the bushes. The security light flicked on as he broke the beam, and flung his shadow behind him up the wall of thick green rubbery leaves.
    The door bell rang.
    She almost knew who it was. The name was on thetip of her tongue, but to be on the safe side she put the chain on before she opened the door and peered through the crack.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘I believe you’re looking for an assistant.’
    ‘Ye-es.’
    ‘Alec Braithewaite sent me. I used to do the churchyard last summer, do you remember?’
    ‘Yes, of course.’ She released the chain and opened the door. Light streamed on to the path, catching his glasses so that for a moment he looked blind. ‘Come in.’
    He stepped over the threshold, bringing with him a smell of wet hair and wool, and began stamping his snow-clogged boots on the mat, shaking off thick curds of white. Snowflakes caught in his hair and on his shoulders dissolved as she gazed.
    ‘I didn’t realize it was still snowing.’
    ‘It’s not.’ He smiled. ‘I knocked a branch and got a shower. I think I’d better take my coat off. I’m only going to drip all over your carpet. And these,’ he said, looking down at his feet.
    ‘I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’
    ‘Peter Wingrave. Look, would you like to ring Alec and check?’
    ‘No, it’s all right. He did mention you.’
    She was thinking it was no wonder she hadn’t recognized him. Last time she saw him he’d been suntanned, stripped to the waist, wielding a scythe on the long grasses between the headstones. She’d bumped intohim once or twice as she was walking across the churchyard on her way to the shops, and they’d exchanged a few words about the cull. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ they’d said in passing, as people did who weren’t directly involved. There was no ignoring it. Clouds of oily black smoke from the pyres dominated the skyline. The smell of burning carcasses had hung over the village for weeks.
    The cull was the reason for his presence. Until last summer the grass had been cropped by sheep imported for the purpose. Black sheep – she suspected Alec of a clerical joke. They kept the grass down and their droppings, even when deposited on a grave,