The Time of the Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page B

began bulging again. The idea hovered—just behind the name Jenkins—that it was nonsense to say the rest of my life. It was quite possible Sally was a ghost and her life was over already. Sally fought to keep this idea behind Jenkins’s name, safely hidden, and the idea fought to come out. In the battle Sally herself was tumbled off again, through the thick hedge, back into the orchard, where the hens fled cackling, and then whirled toward the house. There she stopped, hanging stiffly against the branches of the last apple tree. A new idea had been let out in the fight.
    Suppose , Sally said, I left a letter—or made a note—or keep a diary.
    The notion was a magnificent relief. Somewhere there would be a few lines of writing which explained everything. Sally did not quite see herself doing anything so methodical as keeping a diary, but right at the back of her transparent, swirling mind, she found a dim, dim notion that she might have written a letter. Alongside this notion was a fainter one: If there was a letter, it was to do with the Plan Fenella had talked about.
    The house quivered with Sally’s excitement as she whirled inside it.

CHAPTER
3
    In the kitchen Cart was actually doing the washing-up. She was standing at the sink with her heavy feet planted at a suffering angle, slowly clattering thick white cups. Her face had a large expression of righteous misery.
    â€œPenance,” Cart said as Sally hovered by the kitchen table, wondering where to look for a letter. “Utter boredom. I do think the rest of you might help sometimes.”
    Now you know how I feel , Sally said. I always do it. Letters were more likely to be in the sitting room. She was on her way there when she realized that the only other being in the kitchen was Oliver. Oliver was asleep in his favorite place—vastly heaped in the middle of the floor—with three feet stretched out and the fourth—the one with only three toes—laid alongside his boar’s muzzle. Oliver was snoring like a small motorbike, jerking and twitching all over. That means Cart was speaking to me! Sally said, and hovered to a halt in the doorway. Cart? she said.
    Cart plunged a pile of thick plates under the water and broke into song. “I leaned my back up against an oak, thinking he was a trusty tree—” It sounded as if there was a cow in the kitchen, in considerable pain.
    CART! said Sally.
    â€œFirst he bended and then he broke !” howled Cart. Oliver began to stir.
    Sally realized it was no good and went on into the sitting room just as Fenella shut its door to keep out the sound of Cart singing. She brushed right by Fenella, feeling again the tingle of the field of life round a human body. But Fenella seemed to feel nothing. She turned away from Sally and went to crouch like a gnome in an old armchair. Imogen was still lying on the sofa. The room was hot and fuggy and dusty.
    You both ought to go outside , Sally said disgustedly. Or at least open a window.
    There was a desk and a coffee table and a bookcase in the room, each covered and crowded with papers. There were rings from coffee cups on all the papers and dust on top of that. Sally could tell simply by hovering near that it was several months since any of the papers had been moved. That meant there was no point looking at them. The notion was very firm—though dim—in Sally’s mind that if there was a letter, it had not been written very long ago. She went over to try the papers on the piano.
    It was the same story there. Dust lay, even and undisturbed, over each magazine and each old letter, and only slightly less thickly over a school report. This last term’s, Sally saw from the date. “Name of pupil: Imogen Melford.” A for English—A’s for almost everything except maths. Imogen was disgustingly brilliant, Sally thought resentfully. A for art, too, which made a change. Only B for music—which made a change also,