Kiss Kiss Read Free Page A

absolutely fascinating.”
He turned away from the dog and stared with deep admiration
at the little woman beside him on the sofa. “It must be most
awfully difficult to do a thing like that.”
      
“Not in the least,” she said. “I stuff all my little pets myself
when they pass away. Will you have another cup of tea?”
      
“No, thank you,” Billy said. The tea tasted faintly of bitter
almonds, and he didn’t much care for it.
      
“You did sign the book, didn’t you?”
      
“Oh, yes.”
      
“That’s good. Because later on, if I happen to forget what
you were called, then I can always come down here and look
it up. I still do that almost every day with Mr Mulholland and
Mr . . . Mr . . .”
      
“Temple,” Billy said. “Gregory Temple. Excuse my asking,
but haven’t there been any other guests here except them in
the last two or three years?”
      
Holding her teacup high in one hand, inclining her head
slightly to the left, she looked up at him out of the corners of
her eyes and gave him another gentle little smile.
      
“No, my dear,” she said. “Only you.”
William and Mary
    William Pearl did not leave a great deal of money when he
died, and his will was a simple one. With the exception of a
few small bequests to relatives, he left all his property to his
wife.
      
The solicitor and Mrs Pearl went over it together in the
solicitor’s office, and when the business was completed, the
widow got up to leave. At that point, the solicitor took a
sealed envelope from the folder on his desk and held it out to
his client.
      
“I have been instructed to give you this,” he said. “Your
husband sent it to us shortly before he passed away.” The
solicitor was pale and prim, and out of respect for a widow
he kept his head on one side as he spoke, looking downward.
“It appears that it might be something personal, Mrs Pearl. No
doubt you’d like to take it home with you and read it in
privacy.”
      
Mrs Pearl accepted the envelope and went out into the
street. She paused on the pavement, feeling the thing with her
fingers. A letter of farewell from William? Probably, yes. A
formal letter. It was bound to be formal—stiff and formal.
The man was incapable of acting otherwise. He had never
done anything informal in his life.
My dear Mary, I trust that you will not permit my departure
from this world to upset you too much, but that you will

continue to observe those precepts which have guided you so
well during our partnership together. Be diligent and dignified
in all things. Be thrifty with your money. Be very careful that
you do not . . . et cetera, et cetera.
          
A typical William letter.
      
Or was it possible that he might have broken down at the
last moment and written her something beautiful? Maybe this
was a beautiful tender message, a sort of love letter, a lovely
warm note of thanks to her for giving him thirty years of her
life and for ironing a million shirts and cooking a million meals
and making a million beds, something that she could read over
and over again, once a day at least, and she would keep it for
ever in the box on her dressing-table together with her
brooches.
      
There is no knowing what people will do when they are
about to die, Mrs Pearl told herself, and she tucked the
envelope under her arm and hurried home.
      
She let herself in the front door and went straight to the
living-room and sat down on the sofa without removing her
hat or coat. Then she opened the envelope and drew out the
contents. These consisted, she saw, of some fifteen or twenty
sheets of lined white paper, folded over once and held together
at the top left-hand corner by a clip. Each sheet was covered
with the small, neat, forward-sloping writing that she knew so
well, but when she noticed how much of it there was, and in
what a neat businesslike manner it was written,