The Crimson Rooms Read Online Free PDF

end Gifford simply climbed out of the trench and clambered the hundred yards or so to the boy. Miss Gifford, you ask me specifically about his injuries, you tell me not to spare you. He lost an eye and was severely wounded in the right shoulder. He was still alive when they finally reached him the next night, and died when they tried to move him.
    Night after night, after reading the letter, I stood in the fusty gloom of the dugout, listened to the boy crying in the mud, and tried to fathom my brother’s decision to step outside and die. What absurd, feckless, reprehensible courage. I used every possible argument to change his mind but out he went time after time, under a clear sky. Try as I might, I could not preserve him.
    When I showed the letter to my father, he said we should keep the details to ourselves. Meanwhile, Grandmother shrank into a corner of the sofa and knitted sock after sock, Mother took to her bed, Father the bottle, and I continued as usual. But two months after James’s death, on the last Sunday of January, I found myself with an unexpected opportunity to be alone. The girls were to spend the afternoon with an ancient aunt in Tooting, and we had been invited to lunch with Prudence, who at that time was still living in Buckinghamshire. As soon as the trip was mooted, I knew I wouldn’t go (“Mother, I’m under the weather. Please explain to Father. The time of the month . . .”), even though I had an inkling of what would happen once the house was empty.
    And how right I was. The instant they’d driven away and I had closed the front door, the absolute quiet surged back and I was alone with James’s hat and summer blazer. Limp as a puppet, I waited to be engulfed.
    I was seized by anguish that twisted my guts so that I choked and retched and slumped down to the brick-red and yellow tiles of the hall floor, voiceless and gaping. The only words that formed in my mind were, I want him back. I saw him, instead of the smart youth of the photographs, lying in a swamp of gore and mud with his shoulder blown off and an eyeball hanging from its bloody socket.
    When I got up at last to wash my face, I was a hundred years old.
    But by the time my parents and grandmother came back, I was composed. Rose served us hot milk, which we drank together before bed (Father’s laced with a stiff whiskey). They reported that Prudence’s hens weren’t laying, presumably the time of year, and that her cottage was always ridiculously chilly, because though Father ensured she was well provided for, she would not spend money on creature comforts (this from Mother). I sipped my milk, jolted by an occasional shuddering breath, and realized with an unexpected pang of regret that my opportunity for mourning was over.

    Those memories never went away: each time I returned to the house, back they all came, the toasting fork, the telegram, the frantic letter-writing, the prostration on the hall floor. But on the evening after Meredith’s arrival and the interview with Leah Marchant, I was distracted the instant I stepped through the front door, because a well-traveled trunk had arrived, along with various other items of luggage stacked in front of the potted fern, including a hatbox with racy stripes. Even before I’d removed my hat, Mother shot out of the drawing room, gripped me by the wrist, ushered me inside, and closed the door.
    Everything was much as ever; Prudence was seated at the writing desk with her back to the room in a posture of frigid restraint, and Grandmother perched at the very far end of the sofa, holding her crochet to the dim light that filtered through thick lace curtains. There was no sign of our visitors.
    “She’s still here,” whispered Mother, hands on hips.
    “Of course. She would be.”
    “For heaven’s sake, Evelyn, what have you done to your face?”
    “It’s nothing.”
    Mother looked baffled but continued: “Well, anyway, she’s unpacked.”
    “She must wear clean clothes, I