Thirteen Steps Down

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Book: Thirteen Steps Down Read Online Free PDF
Author: Ruth Rendell
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Psychological, Thrillers, Mystery & Detective, Crime
led but a safe one, as any life must be that is
    without fear or hope or passion or love or change or anxiety about
    money. The house was very large, on three floors, innumerable rooms
    opening out of square hallways or long passages, with a great grand
    staircase consisting of four flights. When it seemed certain Gwendolen
    would never marry, her father had three rooms on the top floor converted
    into a selfcontained flat for her, with its own hallway, two rooms, and
    akitchen. The lack of a bathroom had nothing to do with her
    disinclination to move in. "What was the point of being up there when
    her father was always down in the drawing room and always, it seemed,
    hungry for his meals or thirsty for a cup of tea? Her unwillingness to go
    up to the top floor started at that point. She only went up there if she
    had lost something and had exhausted all other places where it might be.
    Nothing had been painted in the rest of the house and no other rooms
    had been modernized. Electricity had been installed, but not everywhere,
    and the place had been rewired in the eighties because the existing
    wiring was dangerous. But where the old cables had been taken out and
    the new ones inserted, the walls had been plastered up over the holes
    but no redecoration had been done. Gwendolen said herself she wasn't
    much of a cleaner. Cleaning bored her. She was happiest when sitting
    about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in
    doing anything else unless you had to. When she shopped for food, she
    kept to the old shops as long as she could, and on the departure of the
    grocer and the butcher and the fishmonger, she went to the new
    supermarkets without registering that the change had affected her. She
    liked her food well enough and had made few changes to her diet since
    she was a young girl, except that with no one to cook for her she barely
    ate hot meals.
    Every afternoon, after lunch, she lay down and rested, reading herself
    to sleep. She had a radio but no television. The house was full of books,
    learned works and ancient novels, old bound copies of the National
    Geographic
    and
    Punch,
    encyclopediaslong
    obsolete,
    dictionaries
    published in 1906, such collections as The Bedside Esquire and The
    Mammoth Book of Thrillers,Ghosts and Mysteries. She had read most of
    them and some she had reread. She had acquaintances she had met
    through the St. Blaise and Latimer Residents' Association, and they
    called themselves her friends. Such relationships are difficult for an only
    child who has never been to school. She had been away on holidays with
    the professor, even to foreign countries, and thanks to him she spoke
    good French and Italian, though with no chance of using either except for
    reading Montaigne and D'Annunzio, but she had never had a boyfriend.
    While she had visited the theater and the cinema, she had never been to
    a smart restaurant or a club or a dance or a party. She sometimes said
    to herself that, like Wordsworth's Lucy, "she dwelt among the untrodden
    ways," but it was said rather with relief than unhappiness.
    The professor lived on into extreme old age, finally dying at the age of
    ninety-four. For the past few years of his life he had been incontinent
    and unable to walk, but his brain remained powerful and his demands
    undiminished. With the occasional assistance of a district nurse, even
    more occasionally that of a paid carer, Gwendolen looked after him. She
    never complained. She never showed signs of weariness. She changed his
    incontinence pads and stripped his bed, thinking only while she did so of
    getting through it as fast as possible so that she could get back to her
    book. His meals were brought and the tray later removed in the same
    spirit. He had brought her up apparently with no other purpose than
    that she should housekeepf or him while he was middle-aged, care for
    him when he was old, and read to keep herself out of mischief.
    There had been moments in his life
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