The Four of Us Read Free Page B

windows.
    The surprise was in the other three bedrooms. Instead of flower-patterned wallpaper and muddy cream paintwork, one room was painted a pretty lavender-blue, another was painted shell-pink and the third had walls of pale mauve. The furniture in each room – wardrobe, dressing table and beds – was stripped pine, the curtains and bedding beautifully coordinated to the colour of each room’s walls.
    It was the beds, though, that were the real mystery. Each room held three. A bunk bed and a single bed.
    There were no personal items in the rooms, no framed photographs or articles of clothing. Bemusedly she wondered if Amelia had been renting out rooms to bed and breakfast guests. Looking at the bunk beds, it seemed highly unlikely. Tourists would no doubt put up with many minor inconveniences, but hauling themselves up into a child’s top bunk bed was surely not one of them.
    Wondering if the answer was that Amelia had bought the furniture and furnishings cheaply, as a job lot, she surveyed the bathroom. A chipped white porcelain bath stood in lonely splendour on ornate claws. The lavatory had a mahogany seat and an overhead cistern. The pedestal hand-basin looked as if it had come out of the Ark with Noah.
    She didn’t care. Deeply satisfied with all she had seen she went back downstairs, eager to get on with the task of carrying as much as possible from the car to the house before night fell.
    Two hours later, as darkness closed in, she was comfortable for the night. None of the mattresses was damp and she had carried a sleeping bag, pillow and duvet in from the car and laid them on Amelia’s bed. Though one of the other bedrooms also looked out towards the headland and the sea, the window in it was smaller than the one in Amelia’s room. In Amelia’s room the window was wide and deep with a comfortable window-seat, and it meant that when she woke she would be able to see the view out over the headland to the English Channel.
    With her most important chore out of the way she carried a cool-box from the car boot into the kitchen and, removing a bottle of milk and a packet of biscuits from it, gave herself a fifteen-minute rest break. Afterwards she lit the fire Matt Trevose had laid for her and the oil lamp she had had the sense to bring with her.
    For the remainder of the time until it grew too dark to continue she ferried her belongings from the car into the house.
    With the fire crackling and the lamp glowing, it had been an enjoyable task. Now, having allowed the fire to burn out, she was in pyjamas and dressing-gown and, utterly exhausted, the duvet round her shoulders, was seated in the window embrasure of what had been Amelia’s bedroom, a tumbler of whisky in one hand.
    The oil lamp she had brought upstairs with her lit the room with a soft glow. Outside, the darkness of the headland was so deep as to be impenetrable. Never before had she slept in a room from which streetlights could not be seen. It was a moment she had braced herself for – a moment when she had expected to feel panic-stricken and nervous. She didn’t. The whisky was warming, the light from the oil lamp comforting. She was in her new home and on the verge of a completely new way of life. It was a marvellous feeling – a feeling unlike any other she had ever known.
    Still curled in the window-seat, deeply happy and utterly content, she watched as stars began pinpricking the darkness, and then, climbing into bed, she closed her eyes and slept.

Chapter Three
    When she woke it was to the sound of rain falling against the windows. There were no other sounds. Previously when she woke, there was always noise. The distant roar of traffic from the constantly busy Jamaica and Lower Roads, the sound of people talking as they walked past her front door on their way to the nearby train station and of children chattering and squabbling as they made their way to school.
    This morning, there was only the sound of