Why Aren't They Screaming? Read Free

Loretta turned to the business of taking down Clara’s instructions on how to get to her house tocollect keys to the cottage. Ten minutes later she went to bed, more than a little concerned about what to expect from her hastily arranged visit to Oxfordshire.
    Moving out of London at three days’ notice, even for a short period, posed more problems than Loretta had anticipated. There were discussions at college as to how her work should be shared out among colleagues over the next few weeks; clothes to be cleaned and packed (a task made all the more difficult by Loretta’s resistance to what she thought of as ‘country’ clothes and their consequent absence from her wardrobe); books to be returned and borrowed from the London Library; and arrangements to be made with her downstairs neighbour to water plants and forward mail. She was quite relieved when she shut the front door of her flat on Saturday morning and carried her bags down to her white Panda. She had arranged to stop for lunch at an Indian restaurant in Holloway Road with a friend from her department, and it was just after three when she finally set off for Clara’s.
    The weather was warm and sunny, just as it should be but rarely is in mid-May, and she was in high spirits. These slumped suddenly on the M40 just beyond High Wycombe as a bout of tiredness combined with an unwelcome thought: she had not travelled along this road since the previous autumn, when she’d had a brief and exceedingly painful affair with someone she’d met at Bridget’s house in Oxford. She wondered fretfully whether this was an omen for the present trip, then laughed at herself. Usually the least superstitious of people, she had recently discovered a morbid tendency, which she attributed to her illness, to seek out signs and coincidences. Pop music was the answer to this non-sense, she decided; picking up a tape from the parcel shelf, she pushed it into the cassette player and filled the car with Tina Turner. She sang along happily, and in no time at all she was at the end of the motorway and had spotted the right turn off the A40 to Forest Hill.
    Turning off the main road, Loretta drove along a twisting lane through the village and found herself in what seemed like another world. The hedgerows to either side groanedunder a weight of white blossom, and the fields were a patchwork of bright and mossy greens. She passed thatched cottages so overgrown with lilac and white flowers that they themselves might have been rooted to the spot. A herd of long-horned cattle gazed incuriously at her from a field; one of them, larger than the rest, rubbed his head patiently against the top strand of the wire fence. A couple of miles further into this paradise Loretta saw a road to her right and a sign pointing along it to the village of Flitwell. Although this was Clara’s postal address, Loretta followed her instructions and drove on, keeping an eye out for the narrow lane which apparently preceded the house. In the event, she saw the house first, a long and slightly forbidding building standing alone on the right-hand side of the road, flanked on either side by trees. The lane, down which Loretta had been told to drive, was so overhung that it looked like the entrance to a tunnel; the diminution of light when the car began to make its way down the narrow hill was startling. At the bottom she saw a dusty lay-by to her left, empty even though it was large enough for several cars, and parked. Deciding to leave her luggage in the car for the time being she made her way back up the hill. It was steep, and she found herself panting before she reached the top. Turning right at the main road, she stopped for a moment to get her breath back and take in the details of Clara’s house. She was in the right place; a modest wooden sign above the front door bore the name ‘Baldwin’s’. Loretta wondered whether it had been built, or at least owned, by someone of