The Hanging Valley Read Online Free PDF Page B

passed by and struggled up the stairs. Finally, they dumped their burden on the bedspread and left Katie in the room with him. At first she didn’t move. She just stood by the window looking at Fellowes in horror. Surely Sam knew how much she hated and feared drunks, how much they disgusted her. And Mr Fellowes had seemed such a nice, sober man.
    She couldn’t really picture her father clearly, for he had died along with her mother in a fire when Katie was only four, but he had certainly been a drunk, and she was sure that he was at the root of her feelings. The only vague image she retained was of a big, vulgar man who frightened her with his loud voice, his whiskers and his roughness.
    Once, when they hadn’t known she was watching, she saw him hurting her mother in the bedroom, making her groan and squirm in a way that sent shivers up Katie’s spine. Of course, when she gotolder, she realized what they must have been doing, but the early memory was as firmly established and as deeply rooted as cancer. She also remembered once when her father fell down and she was afraid that he’d hurt himself. When she went to help him, though, he knocked her over and cursed her. She was terrified that he would do the same thing to her as he had done to her mother, but she couldn’t remember any more about the incident, no matter how hard she tried.
    The fire was a memory she had blocked out, too, though strange tongue-like flames sometimes roared and crackled in her nightmares. According to her grandmother, Katie had been in the house at the time, but the firemen had arrived before the blaze reached her room. Katie had been saved by the grace of God, so her granny said, whereas her parents, the sinners, had been consumed by the flames of hell.
    The fire had been caused by smoking in bed, and her grandmother had seemed especially satisfied by that, as if the irony somehow marked it as God’s special work, an answer to her prayers. It had all been God’s will, His justice, and Katie was obliged to spend her life in gratitude and devoted service.
    Katie took a deep breath, rolled Fellowes over carefully, and pulled back the sheets—they could be washed easily, but not the quilted spread. Then she unlaced his walking-boots and put them on some newspaper by the bed. They weren’t muddy, but fragments of earth had lodged in the ribbed treads.
    “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” her grandmother had drilled into her. And a lot easier to achieve, Katie might have added if she had dared. Apart from an unusually long list of its attributes—mostly “thou shalt nots,” which seemed to include everything most normal people enjoyed—Godliness was an elusive quality as far as Katie was concerned. Lately, she had found herself thinking about it a lot, recalling her grandmother’s harsh words and “necessary” punishments: her mouth washed out with soap for lying; a spell in the coal-hole for “swaying wantonly” to a fragment of music that had drifted in from next door’s radio. These had all been preceded by the words, “This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you.”Fellowes stirred and snapped Katie out of her reverie. For a second, his grey eyes opened wide and he grasped her hand. She could feel the fear and confusion flow from his bony fingers through her wrist.
    “Moving,” he mumbled, falling back into a drunken sleep again. “Moving . . .”
    Spittle gathered at the edges of his lips and dribbled down his chin. Katie shuddered. Leaving him, she hurried back downstairs. There was still the evening meal to prepare, and the garden needed weeding.
    III
    Banks leaned over the edge of Rawley Force and watched Glendenning coming up in the winch. It was an amusing sight. The tall, white-haired doctor sat erect trying to retain as much dignity as he could. A cigarette dangled from the left corner of his mouth, as usual, and he clutched his brown bag tightly against his stomach.
    Luckily, there had been hardly any rain