The Translation of the Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

Stella worried a little, and knew she was quite mad for doing so, about its laundering. To wash it before Camilla came home safely would be to court disaster. But if she waited, Camilla would know, and think her mother sentimental.
    Rufus was at the front door of the house when she got there, leaning against the jamb, listening to an elderly man in tweed whom Stella did not recognize. You know my wife, of course? said Rufus, and the man said that he did. Won’t you come in for a cup of tea? Stella asked him, and then caught Rufus’s warning look. Luckily the visitor said he must get home, he still had to wash the dogs.
    Thank God for that, Rufus said, when the man had finally taken his leave. He’s got to be the biggest bore in Christendom. What were you doing, asking him in for tea? Anyway, I still have calls to make—what time are we on parade?
    Seven for 7:30, Stella said, wondering if there was enough time for her to prune the ceanothus that grew along one wall of the garden. Toward the end of spring its fallen flowers would drift like flakes of dark blue paint, of lapis lazuli, across the paving stones. If she were not there at the right time, Stella would miss them—their intense blue against the gray stone, the white clouds of bridal wreath still flowering about them. Too often she missedthe ephemeral events of this garden which she saw only at weekends, and felt that she neglected. There was a climbing rose for instance, so briefly in bloom that it was like Bishop Berkeley’s tree: if it flowered unseen, could it be said to flower at all?
    This was the house that Rufus had bought when he knew he had been selected to stand for the safe seat of Central Dorset. Nothing ostentatious, he had stipulated beforehand. Something comfortable, in a village, something that would put him at the heart of the community.
    And so this rather beautiful old house with its walled garden and a mulberry tree. A passage led straight from the front door to the back; when both doors were open on a bright day it became a corridor of light. The roof beams were hundreds of years old. In one room, now converted to a kitchen, were the remains of an ancient anvil; when Rufus bought it the house was called Ye Olde Forge. He had officially renamed it 32 Middle Street, but the children still called it the Forgery. Their possession of it was a little fraudulent, Stella sometimes felt. For the generations who had lived there it had represented permanence, a place of work, a settled place in life. The house next door had been a bakery, the one beyond, built a little later, was still called the Old Bank. Now there was nowhere in the village where a person could earn a living except as a cleaner or an odd-job man. Or, of course, as an MP. Rufus’s office was in the house; during surgery hours on Saturdays his constituents straggled up the path with their anxieties and complaints, their health and housing problems. Or simply because they needed proof that he was there in person. Rufus was good at what he did.
    Darkness was falling too fast to allow for any pruning, Stella realized. Tomorrow the clocks would go forward and there would be a precious extra hour of light that evening, the start of a gentle progress toward nights when it would not be necessary to draw the curtains and light the lamps against the dark. Today, though, Stella could still feel the touch of winter in the damp stone walls and in the silence of the birds that were also waiting for renewed light, and the morning.
    An unsettling aspect of life in this old house was that there was seldom anything in it for Stella to do, except the gardening. That, she had chosen—it was not a difficult garden to look after, being small and stone-flagged and containing nothing delicate or rare. But Linda from the other end of the village came in twice a week to keep things clean, and any other routine jobs were dealt with by Rufus’s constituency secretary, who summoned plumbers and electricians as