A Twist of the Knife Read Online Free PDF Page B

from her mother. If he’d merely left her, she’d have tracked him down and turned up, pointing angrily at her watch, asking if he realized what the hell the time was.
    Yes, she had been a difficult woman, a tyrannical clock-watcher, selfish, petulant, unreasonable and, in her last years, spoilt and paranoid. Sandra’s brother, Bill, had emigrated to Australia.
Escaped
, as Tony put it. And her sister, Marion, had gone to America; also
escaped
, according to Tony. So the duty of looking after their mother fell to her.
    Tony had always criticized her for that. She was too weak with her mother, he warned. She had always allowed the older woman to walk all over her, to dominate her, forcing her to live at home to look after her until she was past the age when she could have children of her own. It was not a bond of love, he told her, but of fear. He was right. Her mother had hated Tony for taking Sandra away, and she had hated him even more for not allowing Sandra to let her come and live with them until these last two years when she had been dying.
    Now, as Sandra sat clutching her mother’s lifeless hand, she realized that for the first time she was free. She would no longer have to set the alarm for six-fifteen in order to take her mother a cup of tea in bed at six-thirty precisely – as her father had always done. She would no longer have to bring her breakfast up at seven-fifteen precisely, or bath her every morning at eight o’clock precisely. She would no longer have to set her mental clock to call her every hour, on the hour, whenever she was out of the house, and no longer have to suffer the abuse when she was late with a call, or came home later than she had stated, or was late with the afternoon tea tray or the supper tray or the cup of warm milk at eleven o’clock.
    Slowly, half reluctantly, half anticipating her new freedom, she prised away the lifeless fingers one at a time, then laid her mother’s skeletal arm down. She turned out the light, closed the door, walked slowly to her own bedroom and slipped, exhausted, into bed beside Tony’s sleeping frame.
    No need to wake him. It could wait. A few hours of sleep and she would be better able to cope with the grim business ahead – choosing the coffin, the hymns, the wording for the death notices in the papers. She lay still, drained after her weeks of vigil, her eyes wet and her heart hollow with grief.
    She dozed fitfully, listening for the chimes of the grandfather clock, but heard only the rising, then abating, dawn chorus. Finally, she got out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown, closed the door and stood for a moment on the landing. Bitumen-black shadows rose out of the darkness to enfold her. She stared at the door of her mother’s room and felt a tightness grip her throat. Normally she would have been able to hear the clock ticking, but it was silent. Puzzled, she went downstairs into the hall. The hands of the grandfather clock pointed to three o’clock. It had stopped, she realized, her eyes sliding to her own wristwatch. It was six-forty-five.
    Then she felt a deep unease. Three o’clock. She remembered now; it was coming back. She remembered what grief had made her forget earlier. Three o’clock. She had glanced at her watch to imprint it on her mind. Information the doctor might want to know: her mother had died at three o’clock precisely.
    A tiny coil of fear spiralled inside her. The clock had been her mother’s wedding present to them. Stark, institutional, rather Teutonic, it dominated the small hall, stared her in the face each time she came into the house as if either to remind her it was time to call her mother or to reproach her for forgetting. Tony disliked it, but he had been trying, in those early days, to make friends with her mother. Thus the clock had stayed and had been given pride of place. He had taken to joking that there was no need to have a portrait of her mother in the house – the clock was a near perfect likeness