Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
A Biography of Dorothy Eden
ELLA HADN’T MEANT TO walk so far. But the afternoon was so beautiful, so hot and hazy and windless, with the fields full of tall waving grass, white daisies and red poppies, that she had not called to Kitty to stop.
Kitty, in her short yellow dress, danced ahead as lightly as the butterfly she hoped to snare in her net. She waved the net with such eager abandon, however, whenever she saw a butterfly alight on a twig or a flower, that it was gone, floating into the air like a scrap of charred paper, long before she reached it.
Then her enormous expressive eyes were turned on Ella in chagrin, and she complained that butterflies would never stay still, it wasn’t as if she intended to hurt them.
Kitty, it was well known, would not have hurt a fly, or an ant, or a worm, or the most humble of living creatures. Kitty was the one who was always begging for damaged things to be made whole. A butterfly in her net now would only be for the purpose of studying with wonder its colors, the iridescent sheen of a red emperor or a clouded yellow. A white cabbage moth would be better than nothing.
Ella remembered that when she had been a child it had been no surprise to find a purple emperor, a clouded yellow and a peacock all in one afternoon. Now, like larks and nightingales, butterflies were disappearing. It was sad.
She longed for Kitty to have all the pleasures she had had, and for this reason, when Kitty saw the vague shape of the ruined house in the distance, standing behind its screen of oaks and rhododendrons, like an image in a cloudy mirror, she didn’t insist that they go no farther. They had come a long way, and there would be the walk back, which Kitty’s six-year-old legs would find exhausting.
Besides, the house looked intriguing. She hadn’t known it was there. They could rest in the shade of a tree before tentatively exploring the garden, and perhaps the house itself. One imagined by the blank look of the windows that the place would be empty. It was a long way from the main road, and even this track across the fields seemed miles from the comfortable suburbia where they lived. Looking back, Ella could see only a low shimmer of roofs in the distance. They were deep in the country. They had never come so far before, simply because there had never been such a warm dreamlike day, since she and Max had lived in Collingham. There had been rain and wind and dripping trees and flattened wet grass. They had stayed in the confines of the garden and the tidy streets. But suddenly, in mid-July, summer had come, and the whole vista was changed. They had horizons beyond the rooftops of Collingham. Today, she and Kitty were explorers.
What fun to have found a ruined house to investigate. Perhaps the overgrown garden, undisturbed by power mowers and fertilizers, would be a haven for all the butterflies she remembered. It would be like turning her life back and becoming a child again.
She wore a sleeveless cotton dress and sandals, and her blond hair hung loose, like Kitty’s. She felt blithe and carefree, as she hadn’t done since she had lost the baby, certainly as she never seemed to feel when Max was home and his tensions pressed on her.
But what better recipe for being blithe and carefree than walking in the summer fields with one’s beloved daughter on a hot still afternoon?
She and Kitty peered through a rusted iron gate down a tangled dark weedy path. Kitty raised apprehensive eyes. Even Ella had the first stirring of rather enjoyable unease.
“Who lives in there?” Kitty whispered, as if the owner were lurking behind one of the dark tree trunks, listening.
“I shouldn’t think anybody does. I expect there’s a NO TRESPASSING sign on the front gate. But this is the back gate and it doesn’t tell us not to go in.”
Kitty’s hand slid into Ella’s and held on firmly. The gate gave a loud groan as Ella pushed it open. They tiptoed up the shaded path until a curve brought them in sight of the garden bathed in the hot hazy sunlight, and alive with the white cabbage moths, and buzzing bees. Beyond its neglected lawns and flower beds stood the old house. The uncurtained, uncleaned windows had a blind look. The house was faded, paintless, dilapidated. One corner of the roof was falling in, the slats beneath vanished tiles like exposed bones. Yet the house didn’t look so old, no more than a hundred or a hundred and twenty years. It might have been a Victorian vicarage, except that there was no church near. Or perhaps it had been a rather splendid farmhouse, only where were the stables and cow sheds?
There was the hum of bees, and the cawing of rooks in a nearby elm, and a strong scent of stock and sun-warmed wallflowers, and wild flowering currant.
Kitty was enchanted.
“Mummy, it’s a real garden.”
The overgrown plants and weeds came nearly to Kitty’s head. Was this what she had always imagined a garden should be, rather than the neat oblong that Max brushed and tailored every weekend?
“There’s millions of butterflies, Mummy. Oh, look, I’ve caught one!”
It was only one of the common pesty white ones, but it was Kitty’s first catch. She examined it eagerly, then shuddered and threw net and all on the ground. “Ugh, it’s got horrid wriggly legs. It’s like a caterpillar. I thought butterflies only had wings.”
Kitty’s first lesson in nonperfection?
“They’re caterpillars before they’re butterflies, darling. Look, here’s a dear little cobbled path. I think it leads up to the house. Shall we follow it?”
“Supposing there’s someone at home.” Kitty’s voice was again a whisper.
“Nobody’s lived here for years, by the look of it. I wonder who did use to live here.”
“Yes, who? Tell me.”
“I don’t know. A mother and a father and several children, I expect. And a nanny and an under-nanny and a cook and three housemaids and a boots’ boy, and a gardener.”
They were close to the house now. The path led to a terrace that ran past long low windows, and Ella, pressing her nose against the dusty glass, could make out a large room with two fireplaces, peeling crimson wallpaper, and a floor littered with fallen plaster and soot.
Kitty rubbed a bit of the glass clean, making a porthole through which to look.
“What an enormous room!”
“I expect it was the drawing room.”
“Is that where the mother and the father and the children would sit?”
“The mother and father, certainly. The children would be brought in by their nanny when they were clean and on their best behavior. Their mother would read to them out of a book called Ministering Angels and then kiss them good night.”
“How many children?” Kitty demanded.
“Oh, I should think six or seven.”
“Would their father kiss them, too?”
“Of course.”
“Before he went to the office?”
“He may not have had an office. I think he was probably a gentleman of independent means. That’s why he built this house away from town and yet not too far away. They would have a carriage and go shopping and visiting.”
“Look, Mummy!” Kitty squealed. “One of the children was very naughty. She wrote on the window. What does it say?”
Ella pored over the thin scratching. She had to read the letters backward. What was the name? Suddenly it seemed vital to know. She felt excited. Her make-believe was becoming reality.
“Edith,” she pronounced triumphantly.
“Who was Edith?”
“The eldest daughter,” Ella said with certainty. “The rebel. She thought living away out here was dull. She wanted to put on her best crinoline and go dancing every night.”
“Crinoline?” said Kitty, testing a new word.
“That’s a skirt that hung on a wire frame and looked like an enormous lampshade. Very becoming for young ladies with slim waists but also very uncomfortable. You had to have very wide chairs and wide doorways.”
“Then what happened to Edith when she put on her crinoline? Did she run away?”
“I don’t know. I expect she married a suitable husband.”
What was a suitable husband? Someone who was a good provider, who telephoned nightly when on one of his frequent trips abroad, and always brought back gifts for his wife and child, who didn’t have affairs with other women (as far as Ella knew, and she was sure she would know if Max did), who was personable and hardworking and ambitious. If anything, too ambitious, too conscious of money as a status symbol, though one admitted it was nice in other more practical ways. Would that kind of husband have satisfied Edith? Not the money part, perhaps. Money to her would have been a vulgar subject.
“Tell me more, Mummy,” Kitty demanded.
Ella laughed. “Darling, I’m only making it up.”
But she wasn’t, entirely. The room, dusky behind the grimy windows, seemed peopled with the family she had created in her mind. The hot dreamy afternoon, the wild garden with its vivid scents, the lonely silent house, were making so deep an impression on her that she wanted to go on wishing herself into the past, into being Edith, the rebel, who borrowed her mother’s diamond ring to cut her name in the windowpane, who married a devoted husband and watched Queen Victoria’s jubilee procession.
“Mummy, can I pick some flowers?”
Ella looked at the tangle of roses and foxgloves and purple willow herb and perennial phlox and marigolds and marguerite daisies. Who had last picked flowers in this garden? In a wooden basket, with the gardener looking on disapprovingly—as Max looked when she begged for some carnations or delphiniums from his immaculate borders.
“I expect you can, darling. Be careful of the thorns.”
She couldn’t tear herself away from the sun-baked terrace and the closed windows. She went to look in the next room where a piece of glass was broken out of the window and the dark musty smell of a closed forgotten house came out. Dust, birds’ nests, mice. This must have been the ballroom, but now the floor had gaping holes as if the damp had come up and everything was rotted.
There couldn’t have been anybody here for years. One wondered why this house had been left to die. Litigation over a will, perhaps. Some sinister happening in the past? A road being planned through the garden and smack through the middle of the house? Or merely bad foundations that would not warrant the expense of renovation?
“Oh, Mummy, there are prickles!” Kitty wailed.
Ella turned vaguely to look at Kitty’s small figure, then back to the empty room and fancied she saw something move. Not a rat. Something larger and shadowy in the dark passage beyond the open door.
She pressed her nose eagerly against the pane, then stiffened and gasped as the scream rang out.
Where did it come from? Somewhere in the invisible upper part of the house? A spasm of pure terror had seized Ella. She had to will herself to step backward to look upward at the rows of silent windows.
At the exact moment that she raised her eyes a white form burst from an attic window and floated over the garden, wings outspread. The window hung open after its departure.
Kitty was flying up the path, her face full of alarm.
“What was that, Mummy? That noise?”
“Only a screech owl, darling. Look, there it goes.”
Kitty clung to Ella, her small hands damp with perspiration.
“It makes a horrid noise.”
“Yes, doesn’t it? I’ve always thought owls are uncanny things. Have you got enough flowers? I’ll help you. Then we must go or Daddy will be home before us.”
She fancied, as she tugged marigolds out of the clinging weeds, that she heard a more mundane sound than the cry of a screech owl, the sound of a car starting. But she wasn’t sure. The rooks were cawing and there was a tractor put-putting in the distance. Walking to the side of the house to look, it seemed to her that there was a faint cloud of dust hanging over the drive, but on reflection she decided it was only the heat haze. She had meant to explore the front as well as the back of the house, but now thought better of it. She was still affected by that strange eerie feeling, and besides, they had lingered long enough. They would come back again another day. She would bring a picnic lunch and they would eat it on the terrace, and she would tell Kitty more about Edith and her brothers and sisters. Perhaps they had had a sadistic Victorian father who occasionally beat them. Or his wife…But she, poor thing, would have to suppress her screams in case the servants heard.
It was a haunted house, and Ella, always acutely susceptible to atmosphere, had picked up its aura. She mustn’t frighten Kitty. Max would laugh at her when she told him the events of their afternoon walk. He would say it was her subconscious desire for gracious living that had made her like the old house.
But how would he explain the instinctive terror, not entirely dissolved even when one knew its innocent cause?
It must have been that lingering uneasiness that made her imagine someone followed her and Kitty through the dark shrubbery. She thought she heard a twig snap, and when she looked back a branch swayed very slightly. Had a bird just alighted on it? There was no other sign of movement.
It seemed as if the sun had lost a little of its brightness when she and Kitty emerged into the open field and the safe path for home.
Safe? Why had she thought that, as if they had been in danger?
The haze had deepened, the town was a smoky blur in the distance. Looking back again compulsively to the house, shadowy and sad in its nest of greenery, she could see the attic window still hanging open after the owl’s precipitate flight.
What, she wondered, had disturbed the bird?
Well, one of a dozen things. Herself calling to Kitty, a stray cat, a stair creaking as stairs in old houses did, or even a nest of fledglings somewhere who would be demanding attention. It was nothing to concern her and Kitty. Their little adventure was over.
Except that she couldn’t get rid of the uncanny feeling that they were being followed. The path ran along the side of the hedge, thick with cow parsley, brambles and foxgloves. In some places it was higher than her head. Someone could easily be concealed on the other side.
Nobody was, of course. For who would want to follow a little girl with a butterfly net and a woman with her arms full of a tangled mass of flowers, and never make his presence known? What would be the point?
All the same, now that Kitty was going to school, she must warn her about strange men. It was so sad, having to spoil a child’s innocence. First there had been the promised baby that had never come, and now this necessary emphasis on the fact that everybody Kitty met was not her friend. Like the pretty silken butterfly with the ugly crawly feet.
That is life, Kitty, sad to say.
MAX TELEPHONED FROM the airport, and said he would be home in half an hour. He was going to treat himself to a taxi. He couldn’t wait for the day, Ella knew, when a company car would be sent to meet him after his trips abroad. He had secret hopes that that was going to happen quite soon. The export manager was retiring and applications for the job were open to Max and one or two other candidates. Although Max was the lowest in seniority he was not only hopeful but confident of getting it.
His aura of confidence was the thing that made him so successful a salesman. He managed to make his product an offshoot of his own sincerity and honesty. People trusted him. He usually came back from a trip abroad with a full order book.
If he got the job of export manager he wouldn’t need to travel so much, and when he did it would be done with more prestige. A chauffeur-driven car to take him to and from the airport, first-class air travel and first-class restaurants and hotels. It would all suit his taste for luxury.
Undoubtedly it would mean that they would have to get a bigger house, in a snob area, such as one of those new expensive housing estates outside Esher or Weybridge. Ella would have to entertain, too. That was inevitable. The only reason Max hadn’t insisted on small smart dinner parties before this was because he was now a little ashamed of their completely ordinary, tasteless house. He hadn’t been when they had moved to Collingham. He had thought it a suitable temporary house for a businessman on his way up. But since it was temporary he hadn’t wanted Ella to spend money on it, and anyway she had been defeated by it from the beginning. As a consequence she hadn’t persuaded him to let her do interesting things with the lounge-dining room, or the ugly staircase leading to the completely characterless bedrooms on the second floor.
One would have had to begin by pulling out the horrible brick fireplace, and that Max would have regarded as really a foolish waste of money. He quite liked it. Neither did he mind the rather coy archway dividing the sitting part from the dining part of the room. At least he hadn’t done so at the beginning. Now he was talking loftily of cocktail bars and terraces. He had outgrown the house.
But he had not outgrown his wife. He had been far more farseeing when marrying than when investing in property. Ella, he was very well aware, was a class above him. Indeed, her impoverished but proud country family hadn’t liked the idea of her marrying him at all. He frequently complained that they were still damned snooty toward him. But Ella, doing everything wholeheartedly, had flung herself into his arms and into marriage, and, with her looks, which always attracted attention (they were delicate and a little fey, not pretty, but distinctly unusual), and her natural social sense, Max had known that she would fit beautifully into the position of an executive’s wife, even that of wife to the managing director. As far as Max’s ambitions went, nothing was impossible.
Ella had always known these things about her husband. He had made no secret of them. Rather than repelling her, she had been fascinated by his drive, his enthusiasm, even his periods of acute tension when he was extremely difficult to live with. His dark good looks had excited her very much. She thought that he was twice the man her slow-drawling correctly mannered brothers were, and why was it vulgar to talk of money when money was the uppermost thought in most people’s minds, and export was being preached like a new religion?
She thought it would be amusing to be a managing director’s wife.
Six years later she knew she had made a mistake about that. It would be deadly dull. Boring, stultifying, hypocritical. Even to be the wife of the export manager would demand qualities which she simply hadn’t got, and moreover didn’t want to have. She would have to pretend all the time.
Fortunately she was quite good at pretending. She would do so for Max’s sake. Because she still loved him. She still waited eagerly for his return from his trips, hurrying to have the house clean, flowers on the table, a good meal prepared, and herself and Kitty freshly bathed and in their prettiest dresses. Max had a strong driving personality, and even in his bad moods he made the house come to life.
It was lucky today that they had found all those flowers in the garden of the old house. Now Ella didn’t need to plunder the garden, because she swore Max had counted every bloom and every bud before he went away, and would know exactly where she had cut the roses or the peonies.
That neat garden was his pride and his private therapy. It seemed as if for him no flower would dare not to bloom to the best of its ability. The trouble was that the garden was as lacking in a natural freedom and exuberance as a well-kept filing cabinet. It was like a healthy balance sheet. The summer flowers were planted so that they would bloom at exactly the time the daffodils and tulips were fading. The beds must never look impoverished or bankrupt. It was doubtful if a slug or an aphid had ever ventured through the garden gate. The birds using the birdbath had the glossiest of feathers.
Arranging her flowers in an overflowing colorful mass in an old soup tureen, Ella thought fondly of Edith’s garden. A bit of broken statuary covered with ivy, some intractable wild climbing roses, some strawberry plants among the polyanthus—that was what a garden needed.
But theirs was as well ordered as Max’s life and his plans for the future. It was planned to be immune to any disaster, except something cataclysmic such as a typhoon or a direct hit by a thunderbolt.
“Kitty,” Ella called. “You’ve left your dolls’ pram on the lawn. Go and put it away before Daddy comes. You know he doesn’t like the garden to be untidy.”
Kitty went obediently, but grumbling to herself. She returned, dragging the dilapidated perambulator full to overflowing with her shabby but much-loved dolls, her family as she called them.
“I don’t expect Daddy would care for our garden, would he, Mummy?”
“Our garden?”
“The one we found today.”
“It isn’t really ours, darling.”
“It is, because we discovered it. We’ll go there again, won’t we? It was sort of scary, but I liked it. I wish I had six brothers and sisters like Edith had. When will Daddy be home?”
“Any minute.”
Ella washed lettuce leaves and radishes and spring onions. It was too hot for anything but a salad and cold ham and hard-boiled eggs. A chilled melon to start. She wasn’t concentrating. She kept looking out of the window across the fields to the clump of trees, far off and dark on the horizon. She was like Kitty, a little bemused by that secret garden and the empty house. It must be the heat that was making them both dreamy and imaginative.
The chiming doorbell (a horror that Max found amusing) rang, and there was Max on the doorstep. He looked neat and well groomed as always, and only the slightest bit travel-stained. His dark good looks gave Ella her habitual feeling of pleasure. She was sure that even an emergency landing and a hasty exit down the escape chute would still leave him without a hair out of place, or a speck of dirt on his shining white shirt.
No long-haired fashion or psychedelic shirts or ties for Max. He was like his garden, spick-and-span and smelling of the right things. If ever there were a campaign against dishevelment, Max would lead it.
He stooped to kiss Ella briefly.
“God, I’m tired and filthy. London Airport was like the tropics. How long have you had this hot weather?”
“Since yesterday. Kitty and I—”
“Where’s Kitty? Isn’t she coming to welcome me home?”
Kitty appeared obediently and gave Max a prim kiss, but wriggled out of his embrace in a moment. She was not a demonstrative child. Max sometimes complained about this, not realizing, as Ella did, the intense passions shut in Kitty’s little breast. Ella only knew because she was the same herself.
Of course Max knew all about her passions, even if he found them a little inconvenient when they obtruded on his business preoccupation.
“I’ve got some things in my bag,” Max was saying. “But wait until I’ve had a shower, eh?”
Kitty stood back tentatively.
“Did you remember to bring something for Sam, Daddy?”
“Sam?”
Ella saw Kitty’s face and said quickly, “You must remember Sam, darling. He’s Kitty’s best friend.”
“I told you, Daddy,” said Kitty,
“Oh, yes, yes. Sam. Well, as a matter of fact—now look here, hasn’t he a father to get things for him?”
“Not one who goes abroad,” Kitty said. “It isn’t the same thing, just shopping in Collingham.”
Max frowned, then laughed.
“I quite agree. Next time I promise to remember Sam. Ella, we seem to have an expensive and sophisticated daughter. She prefers foreign goods. Bad for the national economy. Look, I must get that shower. Any calls from the office?”
“No.”
“Good. I can relax until tomorrow morning. I’ve had a great trip. Broken records. How about a bottle of vino with supper? Haven’t we got some of that Chianti left?”
He was in a good mood. The tension lines were absent from his mouth. Ella allowed herself a small sigh of relief. She knew what her gift would be. A bottle of French perfume, duty-free. She had a drawerful of small elaborately packaged bottles. Max never seemed to notice that she seldom wore the kind of perfume he brought her. It was too heavy and cloying. Not her at all.
If a man didn’t understand the kind of perfume that suited his wife, did he understand his wife? A moot point. Not one to get upset about, after six years of marriage. The significant thing was the gift, not whether she liked it. He remembered her. That was what mattered. Not like Kitty’s forgotten Sam. Funny little Kitty and her ardent devotions, of which her father was also unaware.
“Well, what have you two girls been doing on this lovely summer day?” Max asked at supper.
“We found a big empty house and garden,” Kitty said excitedly. “Look, we picked all those flowers out of the garden.”
“A lot of weeds,” Max said good-humoredly. “I wondered where they came from.”
“It was an untidy garden,” Kitty said explicitly. “Not like ours. And an owl screamed in the house.”
Max looked at Ella. Ella explained, “We went for a long walk looking for butterflies. We found this deserted house. Isn’t it strange how such a place could be allowed to fall into wrack and ruin? With the housing shortage you’d think someone would be glad to live there. There’d be room for several families.”
“Where is it?” Max asked, with only perfunctory interest.
“Across the fields. I should think about two miles from here.”
“Don’t know it. I expect it’s scheduled for demolition. Perhaps there’s a road going through there.”
“It’s a haunted house,” Kitty said, enjoying the importance of the word. “Once a mother and father and lots of children lived there and had nannies and balls and crinolines. And there was one girl called Edith—”
“Stop, stop! Your mother’s been making up stories for you again. You’re a great pair, you two. Living in a dream world. What’s this about an owl that screamed?”
“That really did happen, Max. It gave us an awful fright. It flew out of an attic window. I had a funny feeling for a minute that there was someone in the house. I’m like Kitty, I felt the place was haunted—”
Ella stopped as the telephone rang.
“Damn!” said Max. “Can’t I be left in peace for an hour?”
“I’ll get it, darling.”
“If it’s McIntosh tell him I’m not home yet. If it’s Brady, I’ll talk to him.”
In the hall, sitting on the telephone seat, Ella answered briskly, and an unfamiliar voice said, “Is your husband home, Mrs. Simpson?”
Ella hesitated. That rather common voice was neither Brady’s nor McIntosh’s.
“Who is speaking, please?”
“That’s none of your business, Mrs. Simpson. Just get your husband.”
“Who is it, Ella?” Max called.
Ella held her hand over the receiver.
“I don’t know. Someone who wants you. He’s rather impertinent.”
“Who the devil—” Max took the receiver from Ella, and said in his curtest business voice, “Simpson here.”
Then he listened, and Ella, a pace away, hearing the unintelligible mutter in the telephone, saw the tension lines come back to Max’s mouth.
Bother! Some business problem, and Max scarcely home, and jaded from a hard trip. Well, let’s hope Kitty doesn’t mention her dear friend Sam again this evening, or any other controversial subject.
“I don’t understand,” Max was saying. “What are you getting at?…But I’ve just got home from a damned tiring trip. Why is it so important to see you tonight?…Who are you?…I said, who are you?…What?…What’s that?…Who?”
As if he felt her anxious presence behind him, Max looked back at Ella, his expression disbelieving. Not at seeing her, of course, but at what he was hearing, He wasn’t really seeing her at all, she realized. He was listening too intently.
The mysterious caller must have asked a question, for suddenly he replied in a sharp clipped voice, “Very well. In twenty minutes. And it had better be important.”
He banged down the receiver, muttering, “Wasting my bloody time!” He only swore when he was tired, his temper frayed, his nerves stretched. Or when he encountered some overwhelming stupidity. His own brain was too sharp to tolerate easily other people’s less-quick wits.
“What is it?” Ella asked.
“I have to go out.”
“What for? Can’t it wait?”
“No!”
“Don’t you know what it’s about?”
“I will shortly.”
“But, Max—”
“For God’s sake, Ella! It’s bad enough having to go off on a wild-goose chase without you cross-examining me. It’s important, this fellow says, so I’ll have to take his word for it, won’t I?”
“Don’t you know who he is? But if he’s someone from the office—”
Max was at the door. “I’ll tell you when I get back.”
Of course it must be someone from the office. Max wouldn’t leave his half-finished supper, the half-empty bottle of wine, for anything else.
“That wretched office,” Ella said. “Can’t they leave you alone just when you get home?”
“It’s what I’m paid for, love.”
The door banged behind Max. In a few moments Ella heard his car start. So whoever he was meeting must be some distance away. Funny. He hadn’t known who it was. He had been mystified before he became angry. He would hardly have let himself show anger to one of his confederates. But it must be something concerning the office. Some intrigue. Something to do with the export manager’s position. Anything to do with that would receive top-priority attention from Max.
Oh, well, she would know soon enough what this was all about. At least, as much as Max would tell her. He had always judged how much she should know. He thought women talked indiscreetly. He trusted her loyalty to him, but cautiousness was a deep instinct in him. Something to do with his insecure childhood. She did understand. She used infinite patience with him.
But it was a pity their supper was spoiled. Kitty was toying languidly with her bread and butter, her long hair hanging over her plate. A sure sign that she was upset when she hid behind a veil of hair. She was acutely sensitive. The tension she had heard in Max’s voice would have communicated itself to her immediately. She hated loud voices, angry voices, worried voices. She was too gentle for this world, Ella thought.
“You’ve got to grow another skin, darling,” she said absently.
“What sort of skin?” came Kitty’s voice, muffled. “Like a lizard?”
“Any sort, just so long as you don’t think the end of the world has come because Daddy has had to go out on business. He’ll give you your present when he comes back. Anyway, it’s tails lizards grow, not skins.”
An hour later Max had not returned. The long dusk was turning into night although the heat remained, sticky and airless. Ella sat on one of the uncomfortable wrought-iron chairs on the small square of flagstones that Max called a patio, worrying a little, but not too much.
It was not Max going off so suddenly, but the mood in which he had gone off, angry but uneasy, too. He might have thought he concealed his uneasiness, but she knew him too well. There must have been a crisis at the office since he had been away. Someone was warning him about it before he went in tomorrow.
He would be able to cope. He always did.
It was strange that she felt lonelier at this moment than when he was abroad. Kitty was in bed, there was nothing she wanted to watch on television, she had finished her library book, it was too hot to be indoors. And she was conscious of this vague nagging apprehension that had really been with her ever since she had thought someone watched her in that old empty house.