Complete Short Stories (VMC) Read Online Free PDF

drawing-room to be surprised at Hester’s absence. That averted look, which she assumed when she entered rooms where Robert and Hester were alone, would have been wasted.
    Hester leant far out of the window. Only the poplars made any sound – a deep sigh and then a shivering and clattering of their leaves. The other trees held out their branches mutely, and she imagined them crowded with sleeping birds, and bright-eyed creatures around their holes, arching their backs, baring their teeth, and swaying their noses to and fro for the first scents of the night’s hunting. Her suburban background with its tennis-courts, laburnum trees, golden privet had not taught her how to be brave about the country; she saw only its vice and frightfulness, and remembered the adders in the churchyard and the lizards and grass-snakes which the boys collected. Fear met her at every turn – in her dealings with people, her terror of Muriel, her shrinking from nature, her anxiety about her future – (‘You are scrupulously untidy,’ Robert had said. Only a relative would employ her, and she had none but him.)
    She made spasmodic efforts to come to terms with these fears; but in trying to face Muriel she fell, she knew, into sullenness. Nature she had not yet braved, had not penetrated the dense woods or the lush meadows by the lake where the frogs were. This evening – as a beginning and because nature was the least of her new terrors, and from loneliness, panic, despair – she moved away from the window, stumbling on her cramped legs, and then went as quietly as she could downstairs and out of doors.
    In the garden, at each rustle in the undergrowth, her ankles weakened, but she walked on, treading carefully on the dew-soaked grass. A hedgehog zig-zagged swiftly across her path and checked her. She persisted, hoping thus to restore a little of her self-respect. She was conscious that each pace was taking her from her safe room, where nothing made her recoil but that phrase of Muriel’s that she carried everywhere – ‘Of course you are in love with Robert.’ ‘It was better when we wrote the letters,’ she thought. ‘I was happy then. I believe.’
    As the severest test, she set herself the task of walking through the churchyard where a mist hung over gravestones and nettles. The sound of metal striking flint checked her, and more normal fears than fears of nature came to her almost as a relief; as even burglars might be welcomed in anexcessively haunted house. The dusk made it difficult for her to discern what kind of figure it was kneeling beside a headstone under the church walls; but as she stepped softly forwards across the turf she could see it was an old lady, in black flowing clothes and a straw garden-hat swathed with black ribbon. She wore gardening gloves and was planting out salvias and marguerites.
    Hester tripped and grazed her arm against some granite. At her cry of pain, the old lady looked up.
    ‘Oh, mercy!’ she exclaimed, holding the trowel to her heart. ‘For pity’s sake, girl, what are you doing?’
    Her white face was violin-shaped, narrowing under her cheek-bones and then widening again, but less, on the level of her wide, thin, lavender-coloured lips. The sagging cords of her throat were drawn in by a black velvet ribbon.
    ‘I was only going for a walk,’ said Hester.
    ‘I should call it prowling about. Have you an assignation here? With one of those schoolmasters from the house?’
    ‘No.’
    The old lady drove the trowel into the earth, threw out stones, then, shaking another plant from a pot, wedged it into the hole. The grave resembled a bed in a Public Garden, with a neat pattern of annuals. The salvias bled hideously over a border of lobelias and alyssum. Their red was especially menacing in the dusky light.
    ‘I think a grave should have
formality
,’ the old lady said, as if she knew Hester’s thoughts and was correcting them. ‘“Keep it neat, and leave it at that,” I warned myself