The Secret House of Death Read Online Free PDF

gulped. The tears had made her childish face pink and puffy. She put up a hand to her hair, retrieving wisps and poking them back into the piled lacquered structure that gave her an extra two inches. ‘You must think me very uncontrolled, coming here and breaking down like this when we hardly know each other.’ She bit her lip and went on miserably. ‘But my friends are all Catholics, you see, and I don’t like to talk to them about it. I mean, Father O’Hara and Eileen and people like that. I know what they’d say.’
    Susan had forgotten Louise was a Catholic. Now she remembered seeing her go off to church sometimes with Eileen O’Donnell, black lace scarves in their hands to put over their heads at the mass. ‘Of course, I can’t get a divorce,’ Louise said, ‘but I thought—Oh, dear, I can’t put it into words. I’ve taken up your time getting into a state and now I can’t seem to say it.’ She gave Susan a sidelong glance. ‘I’m like you, you see, I’m rather reserved.’
    Susan didn’t altogether care for the comparison. Reserve doesn’t take itself into a neighbour’s house and weep and borrow handkerchiefs. ‘Well, suppose you sit there and calm down a bit while I make the tea?’
    â€˜You’re awfully kind, Susan.’
    The drills began their deafening clamour while Susan was cutting bread and butter. She began to think what she should say to Louise when she returned to the living-room, but she feared any advice she could give would differ hardly at all from that proffered by Eileen or the priest. As to what Louise was about to say to her, she had no difficulty at all in guessing. It would be a defiant recital of how love gave you the right to do as you chose; how it was better to spoil one life now than ruin two for ever; how you must take what you can get while you were still young. Julian had said it all already and had expressed it more articulately than Louise ever would. Should there be any hesitations or gaps in her narrative, Susan thought bitterly, she could always provide excuses from Julian’s own logical and entirely heartless apologia. She went back with the teacloth and the plates. Louise was standing up now, watching the quivering elms and the cold rushing sky, her face stricken with woe.
    â€˜Feeling a bit better?’ Susan asked, and she added rather repressively, ‘Paul will be in in a moment.’ She hoped her face made it plain to her visitor that she didn’t want her son, the child of a broken marriage and already the witness of grown-up grief, to hear yet again an adult’s marital problems and see an adult’s tears.
    But Louise, like her husband, had little interest or concern to spare for other people’s anxieties. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said pathetically, ‘and Doris Winter with him, I suppose. Susan, I’ve been screwing up my courage all afternoon to come to you. It took me hours and hours before I dared. But you were so nice and friendly to me in the garden and I . . . Look, Bob’s going to be late tonight and I’ll be all alone. Would you come in to me? Just for an hour?’
    The side gate clicked and slammed. For a second the two women’s eyes met and Susan thought how innocent Louise looked. As if she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Why bother with flies when you can torture people?
    â€˜Hi, there!’ Doris called from the back door. ‘Late again. I’m dying for a cup of tea.’
    â€˜Will you stay and have one?’
    Louise shook her head and picked up her coat from the chair. Her face was still blotched and tear-stained. She looked up when Doris came in and a small pathetic smile trembled on her lips.
    â€˜Oh, I didn’t know you’d got company,’ said Doris, ‘or I wouldn’t have come bursting in.’ Her eyes were wide with excitement at the idea she might by chance have come upon