Designs on Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

Helen envied her. When the girl had gone, promising to come again in three days’ time, Helen thought how comic it had been to confuse someone so robust, even for a moment in the dim light of the hall, where she had looked grey and wraith-like, with the beautiful maid of long ago, who had been the cause of murder.
    Colin again returned to the flat at about six o’clock in the evening, bringing with him some packages of Chinese carry-out food, and told Helen that he had spent the day in the National Library, reading up on Scottish social history.
    “It’s appalling how little I know about it,” he said. “If you’re educated in England, it’s extraordinary how little you learn about the rest of the British Isles. I’ve a lot to catch up on.”
    He seemed to be in a better mood this evening than he had been the evening before, glad that Fiona MacNab had arrived to clean the flat, as she had promised, and he presented Helen with two paperback thrillers that he had bought for her during the day.
    “You must be getting pretty bored,” he said. “Isn’t there anyone here whom you used to know in the old days whom you could ask to come and see you?”
    “I thought of trying that,” she said, “but it’s more than ten years since we moved away and I haven’t kept in touch with anyone.”
    “Let’s see, all the same.”
    But something gave Helen the feeling that he was forcing himself to be amiable, to make up for their quarrel the day before, and when they had eaten their king prawn chow mein and drunk some tea, he seemed to have forgotten his suggestion. Helen did not remind him of it. When she thought about the schoolgirls whom she had once known in Edinburgh, they seemed utterly remote. Even if they still lived here, they had very likely got married and changed their names, and if she tried to find them in the telephone directory, there would be no trace of them. In any case, the chances were that they had completely forgotten her. She must face it, her only acquaintance here was Mrs. Lambie. She settled down to read one of the thrillers that Colin had brought her, while he picked up a history that he had bought for himself, but which he left unopened on his knee while he gazed broodingly at the fire.
    After a little while, Helen glanced up at him and found that that brooding gaze had been transferred to her face, as if he were asking himself some profound question about her. She smiled and asked him what he had on his mind.
    He muttered, “Nothing,” and opened his book. But he went on staring at the first page for so long that she knew he was not reading it.
    At breakfast next day he told her that he was going back to the library, and as soon as he had done the washing up he left the flat again. He had hardly spoken at breakfast, but once he had gone, the complete silence in the flat seemed suddenly unbearable. Limping from room to room, she tried to fight off a new and terrifying sense of claustrophobia. She had never suffered from it in this way before. It felt as if the walls of the flat were closing in on her and were going to crush her.
    The kitchen seemed specially sinister. It had a modem sink and a gas cooker, but the floor was of great, uneven blocks of stone, which must have been there since the house was built, for at no later time would a floor so many storeys up have been paved with such slabs. They were very cold to stand on. Helen found herself thinking of the maid of long ago, so beautiful and so dangerous, who had probably had to live in this kitchen, feel the chill of the floor through her shoes and get down on her knees to scrub it. The thought of her sent Helen back as fast as she could go to the sitting-room, wishing that somehow, if only for a little while, she could get out of the flat and talk to the butcher and the greengrocer and the baker, flesh-and-blood ordinary people who had never driven any man or woman to their deaths.
    Going to the window, she wondered if, after all, she