Windfallen Read Free

her things?”
    “Oh, and you don’t, Mother Superior?”
    The two girls grinned at each other and then sprinted back toward the municipal park, cardigans and skirts flying out behind them.
    T HE DRIVE TO A RCADIA H OUSE HAD ONCE BEEN CIRCULAR ; its remaining neighbors could still remember processions of long, low cars that halted with a crisp bite of gravel before the front door, then continued around its graceful sweep and exited back down the lane. It had been an important house, sited well inside the railway tracks (so significant was this distinction that houses in Merham were advertised as either “inside” or “outside”). It had been built by Anthony Gresham, the eldest son of the Walter Greshams, when he returned from America, having made his fortune creating an unremarkable piece of engine equipment that was bought by General Motors. He had wanted it, he said grandly, to look like a film star’s house. He’d seen a house in Santa Monica, owned by a famous actress of the silent screen, that was long and low and white with great expanses of glass and smaller windows like portholes. It spoke to him of glamour and new worlds and a brave, bright future (a future that, ironically, had not been his; he died aged forty-two after being hit by a car. A Rover). When the house had been finally completed, some of Merham’s residents had been shocked by its modernity and had complained privately that it was not, somehow, “fitting.” So that when the next owners, the MacPhersons, finally moved out several years later and it was left empty, a few of the older villagers felt curiously relieved, although they might not have said as much.
    Now the northern side of the drive had become completely overgrown, a tangle of brambles and elder prematurely ending it by the gate that once led to the sea path and causing a large amount of gear crunching and swearing from those drivers of the delivery vans who, having offloaded the last of their cargo, were now trying to reverse around each other back to the lane, partially blocked by a car that had entered behind them.
    Lottie and Celia stood for a while watching the puce faces and sweaty efforts of those still carrying furniture, until a tall woman with long chestnut hair pulled severely into a bun ran out, waving a set of car keys and pleading with them “just to wait a moment. Hold on. I’ll move it over to the kitchen garden.”
    “Do you think that’s her?” whispered Celia, who had inexplicably ducked behind one of the trees.
    “How would I know?”
    Lottie held her breath, Celia’s sudden reticence having prompted her own sudden sense of awkwardness. They pressed close to each other, peering around the trunk, holding their full skirts tight behind them with their hands to stop them from billowing out.
    The woman sat in the car and looked around her at its instruments, as if considering which one she should use. Then, with an anguished bite of her lower lip, she started the ignition, wrestled with the gearshift, and, relaxing slightly, took a deep breath and shot straight backward with an almighty crunch into the front grille of a removal van.
    There was a brief silence, followed by a loud expletive from one of the men and the lengthy blast of a horn, and then the woman raised her head and the girls realized that she had likely broken her nose. Blood was everywhere—down her pale green blouse, over her hands, even on the steering wheel. She sat straight upright in the driver’s seat looking a little stunned, and then, glancing down, began to search for something to stem the bleeding.
    Lottie found herself running across the overgrown lawn, her handkerchief already in her hand.
    “Here,” she said, reaching the woman at the same time as several exclaiming people began to congregate around the car. “Take this. Put your head back.”
    Celia, who had hurried behind Lottie, peered at the woman’s spattered face. “You’ve taken an awful crack,” she said.
    The woman