Grave Matters Read Online Free PDF Page B

charge. I just followed where she led, but she made it all come alive for me. I understood the aesthetic side of what we saw, but she was the scholar who made the historical aspect real,’ she said.
    ‘You will miss her,’ Patrick said gently.
    ‘Yes. I never thought she would go first, she was always the strong one,’ said Miss Forrest. ‘I’ll get used to it. One gets used to anything.’
    Patrick thought of the cynicism with which the modern world would regard such a friendship between two women and the snide inferences it would prompt. Yet each had probably once hoped to marry; he could easily imagine Miss Forrest during the 1914-18 war on the arm of a subaltern soon to die.
    He was going to ask her if she remembered Jane during her last year at Slade House when Valerie and Ellen appeared from the back of the cottage, each with a tray.
    There were scones.
    ‘Bought, I’m afraid, from the village shop this morning,’ said Valerie. ‘But the jam’s home-made. Amelia got it at the church fete, it’s Mrs. Merry’s strawberry, and famous here.’
    ‘And,’ said Ellen, whose tray bore a yellow earthenware pot with a large bee on the lid, ‘there is honey still for tea.’
    Later, she walked with Patrick to the fence that divided the garden from the field beyond.
    ‘I thought no one read Rupert Brooke now,’ he said to her. ‘My pupils don’t, much.’
    ‘Oh,’ she shrugged. ‘Perhaps I wanted you to realise I could read and write, in spite of my obvious lack of education.’
    ‘You don’t seem ill-educated to me,’ said Patrick, who had given the matter no thought at all. ‘If you went to Slade House you must have learned a lot.’
    ‘I didn’t go there. Amelia never forgave my mother for not sending me, even though she’d retired. My father – Valerie’s brother – was killed in the war, and my mother married again when I was quite small. I’ve got two half-sisters and we all went to the local high school. We were very happy there. It’s gone comprehensive now.’
    ‘You probably had much more opportunity there than you would have at Slade House,’ said Patrick. She was older than he had thought at first, if she was born during the war.
    ‘Amelia didn’t think so. We were a bit short on the classics,’ Ellen said. ‘Valerie didn’t go to Slade House either. I’m not sure why – probably because she lived abroad. She’s a brilliant linguist.’ She plucked a blade of grass and rubbed it between her fingers. Some heifers in the field had moved closer to the fence and were looking at them both with mild-eyed interest. The beasts’ slow movements made the grass rustle. ‘My step-father’s a dear and I had a very happy childhood. I go home often,’ Ellen added.
    And you’ve got a giant chip of some sort on your shoulder or you wouldn’t be telling me all this, thought Patrick.
    ‘Good,’ he said, and after a suitable pause to show respect for this unknown man who had made a success of a difficult job, he changed the subject. ‘Is that the house with the bad reputation?’ he asked, pointing across the field to where a wing of Abbot’s Lodge was visible above its screening hedge.
    ‘Yes. How did you know about it?’
    ‘I had a sandwich at the pub. Some chap there mentioned it. It’s just been sold, hasn’t it?’
    ‘Yes. My firm handled it, in fact. I work for an estate agent in London.’ She named a well-known firm. ‘We thought we’d have it on our books for ever. People got interested. Then they faded away when they heard the stories.’
    ‘What’s so awful about it?’
    ‘Oh, the locals say it’s an unlucky house. Someone hanged himself there once, and there was a fire, and a couple who lived there during the war split up, and Mrs. Fellowes, the wife of the man who’s just sold it, died there.’
    ‘In mysterious circumstances?’
    ‘No. But tragically, of leukaemia. She wasn’t old.’
    ‘Well, these things happen, don’t they? That house must have been