The Glimpses of the Moon Read Online Free PDF

they took them all away. Because after they’d gone, don’t you know, I couldn’t have a fall.’
    â€˜You mean you’d had a lot of falls.’
    â€˜No, none. I
never
had a fall, not even when I was learning to ride, as a child. Well, you can see what that implied. Theory of Probability and so forth,’ said the Major, jouncing along briskly with the aid of his stick. ‘The longer I went on without having a fall, the more likely it became that I
would
have one. In the end it got a bit unnerving, because every time I got on a horse, the chances were about a billion to one against my
not
having a fall. I won through, though,’ he said proudly. ‘I survived. No fall. I’m here to tell the tale. Padmore, do you ride?’
    Padmore said not.
    â€˜Don’t ever be tempted to try,’ said the Major. ‘Not unless you fancy sitting astride a mobile double bed with ten homicidal lunatics carrying it.’
    On their left they passed the straight stony cart-track, with wire fencing on either side, which led to the grounds of AllerHouse; through the trees and the massed pylons they caught glimpses of the Church Fete stalls and marquees. Then on their right, coming round a bend into Aller hamlet, they passed the lane leading up to Broderick Thouless’s bungalow, to Youing’s pig farm, and to the Dickinsons’ cottage which Fen was occupying.
    Finally, round a second bend, they arrived at the Rector’s house, a huge, lowering mid-Victorian erection in a comfortably large garden.
    The Rector’s house was called Y Wurry.
2
    The Rector’s family had lived in Aller continuously ever since one of his remoter forebears had fled to Devon to avoid being burned to death for Protestantism under Bloody Mary. Confirmed demolishers and rebuilders, they had put up house after house after house on the same site, a habit which had kept its impetus till the 1860s, when the Rector’s great-grandfather had invested the family fortune in a Tavistock arsenic mine, and lost the lot. Not that the Burges were impoverished, exactly, even then. Though one of their dominant genes caused them to regard houses as infinitely expendable, another had made them very tenacious of other kinds of property, so that in the course of five centuries they had accumulated a staggering quantity of furniture, pictures, porcelain, silver, books, brocades and so forth, much of it rubbish, but some of it extremely valuable; and despite the fact that a great deal of this had been sold off during the last hundred years, enough still remained to fill three of the five attic rooms where once the damp souls of housemaids had despondently sprouted (thirty-five miles to the nearest Music Hall).
    To do the Rector justice, Y Wurry hadn’t been his idea. Up to 1937 the place hadn’t been called anything in particular; but then in that year the Rector had gone off to India to preach better behaviour to the polyandrous Todas, and had decided on a furnished let during his absence, to help top up the Church funds. Not realizing what they were letting themselves in for, a trusting couple from Hinchley Wood had taken on the lease on the agent’s say-so. The wife, normally a stoical woman, hadburst into tears ten minutes after entering the front door, but since they weren’t specially well off, and couldn’t afford to compound for the rent, they had had to make the best of it. It was not, they wrote to friends, that there was anything definite they could complain about. It just wasn’t home-y, that was all. ‘Great big rooms with pointy sort of windows,’ the wife wrote, more tears splodging on to the page, ‘and all heavy dark furniture not like our nice Civil Service Stores and all heavy drapes dust traps and I’ll swear there are mice or even rats! though Roland says don’t be silly as we’ve put down cheese and no one’s eaten it.’ Eventually they had taken to