Death in Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

tarnished frames, the Egyptian rugs on the wide boards of the floor, the rosewood sofa-table, the white marble of the mantelpiece, Georgian coins.
Rigby, Charing Cross
, the engraving on the carriage clock beneath a glass dome recorded. He would go on being sent away to school, his mother said the day his father died: arrangements had been made for that. Not selling the things, going away to school: all of it was part of something, and the penury must be borne.
    ‘We’ve talked it over,’ comes Mrs Iveson’s voice from the hall, and then there is the opening of the hall door, a rasping sound that is particular to it. When his mother died Father Rzadiewicz stayed overnight, and pointed about him at the possessions that had been kept and said that really it was ridiculous not to sell them. Thaddeus agreed, but still did not do so. Instead, as his mother had, he sold the apples and the gooseberries, the pears and plums. He cultivated parsley beds and went in for other herbs, for asparagus and new potatoes, Belle de Fontenay. It was then that he teased back to health the vine in the conservatory. For all his years alone, other people did not come to the house, as they hadn’t before: solitude was what he knew and did not fear. ‘Yet you have married me in order to be rescued from it,’ Letitia pointed out, preferring to believe that.
    ‘Well, that’s that, poor little thing.’ Returning, Mrs IvesonInterrupts these flickers of memory. ‘Down in the mouth, I’m afraid.’
    ‘You’re really sure about all this?’
    Thaddeus doesn’t ever address his mother-in-law by name, ‘Mrs Iveson’ seeming unnecessarily formal, and there has never been an invitation to be more casual in this regard. The question he has asked her is academic; he knows she’s sure, and wonders how long it will be before he becomes used to this face across the breakfast table, beauty’s remnants in lips that were a rosebud once, in fragile bones beneath well-tended skin, eyes the feature that has not aged. Again he is unnerved, filled with apprehension, and for a single instant he feels that none of this is real, that Letitia has not come back yet on her bicycle, that all that’s happening is the nonsense of a dream.
    ‘Yes, I am sure.’
    He doesn’t want to nod and yet he does, signifying gratitude and finality. Death is mysterious, he finds himself reflecting, in ordering so calmly what life can not. It is a graveyard’s gift that a grandmother’s rights are sturdier than they were before. Privately rejected when she made it, Letitia’s last request will be honoured now: Mrs Ferry will be visited and money paid to her.

3
    ‘A mansion,’ Pettie reports. ‘He’s left with this kid in a mansion.’
    Albert’s ovoid countenance remains impassive. He nods an acknowledgement in the Soft Rock Café. Pettie says:
    ‘Garages and that.’
    As she speaks, the house she has visited becomes vivid for her, as in a photograph: red-brick façade and tall brick chimneys, slender and rounded, spikily decorated; blue paintwork setting off the windows, a blue front door, tarmacadam turn-around, grass and roses and stone steps. The dado of stairway lincrusta – in shiny green – appears, and blue blinds half drawn, softening the sunlight in the dining-room she could see into while she waited in the hall.
    There was scarlet-striped wallpaper in the room where the interview took place. There were armchairs in the hall, and a glass door that led to a conservatory full of flowers.
    ‘You get the job, Pettie?’ Albert’s question is not accompanied by the inflection that indicates interrogation. His voice is toneless, as it invariably is when he is worried, and this morning he is worried about his friend. He smiles to cheer her up, a huge upset in the curve of his features, like an eggshell exploding. Then all expression goes and his eyes are dead again.
    Bleakly, Pettie shakes her head. She fishes in a pocket of her short denim skirt for a cigarette,