Death of a Fool Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoulder she could see her five uncles — Dan, Andy, Nat, Chris and Ernie — and her grandfather, old William. There was something odd about seeing them like that, as if they were images in a glass and not real persons at all. She found this impression disagreeable and to dispel it called out loudly, “Hullo, there! Hullo, Grandfather!”
    Camilla’s mother, whose face was no longer perfectly remembered, advanced out of the past with the smile Dan offered his niece. She was there when Andy and Nat, the twins, sniffed at their knuckles as if they liked the smell of them. She was there in Chris’s auburn fringe of hair. Even Ernie, strangely at odds with reality, had his dead sister’s trick of looking up from under his brows.
    The link of resemblance must have come from the grandmother whom Camilla had never seen. Old William himself had none of these signs about him. Dwarfed by his sons he was less comely and looked much more aggressive. His face had settled Into a fixed churlishness.
    He pushed his way through the group of his five sons and looked at his grand-daughter through the frame made by shelves of bottles.
    “You’ve come, then,” he said, glaring at her.
    “Of course. May I go through, Trixie?”
    Trixie lifted the counter flap and Camilla went into the Public. Her uncles stood back a little. She held out her hand to her grandfather.
    “Thank you for the message,” she said. “I’ve often wanted to come but I didn’t know whether you’d like to see me.”
    “Us reckoned you’d be too mighty for your mother’s folk.”
    Camilla told herself that she would speak very quietly because she didn’t want the invisible Mrs. Bünz to hear. Even so, her little speech sounded a bit like a diction exercise. But she couldn’t help that.
    “I’m an Andersen as much as I’m a Campion, Grandfather. Any ‘mightiness’ has been on your side, not my father’s or mine. We’ve always wanted to be friends.”
    “Plain to see you’re as deadly self-willed and upperty as your mother before you,” he said, blinking at her. “I’ll say that for you.”
    “I am
very
like her, aren’t I? Growing more so, Daddy says.” She turned to her uncles and went on, a little desperately, with her prepared speech. It sounded, she thought, quite awful. “We’ve only met once before, haven’t we? At my mother’s funeral. I’m not sure if I know which is which, even.” Here, poor Camilla stopped, hoping that they might perhaps tell her. But they only shuffled their feet and made noises in their throats. She took a deep breath and went on. (“Voice pitched too high,” she thought.) “May I try and guess? You’re the eldest. You’re my Uncle Dan, aren’t you, and you’re a widower with a son. And there are Andy and Nat, the twins. You’re both married but I don’t know what families you’ve got. And then came Mummy. And then you, Uncle Chris, the one she liked so much and I don’t know if you’re married.”
    Chris, the ruddy one, looked quickly at Trixie, turned the colour of his own hair and shook his head.
    “And I’ve already met Uncle Ernie,” Camilla ended and heard her voice fade uneasily.
    There seemed little more to say. It had been a struggle to say as much as that. There they were with their countrymen’s clothes and boots, their labourers’ bodies and their apparent unreadiness to ease a situation that they themselves, or the old man, at least, had brought about.
    “Us didn’t reckon you’d carry our names so ready,” Dan said and smiled at her again.
    “Oh,” Camilla cried, seizing at this, “that was easy. Mummy used to tell me I could always remember your names in order because they spelt DANCE. Dan, Andy, Nat, Chris, Ernie. She said she thought Grandfather might have named you that way because of Sword Wednesday and the Dance of the Five Sons. Did you, Grandfather?”
    In the inglenook of the Private, Mrs. Bünz, her cider half-way to her lips, was held in ecstatic suspension.
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