Thorn Read Online Free PDF Page B

reason it out.
    If she had checked the serving dish before taking it in, it would not have been so dreadfully dramatic. But there had not been time: Aunt Thalia had come in and said to hurry with serving the ham, everyone was waiting. And so Imogen had hurried, and five minutes later everyone had seen what was under the dish’s lid.
    They had all been very kind afterwards, but they had all avoided looking directly at her. Even Great-Aunt Flora’s eyes had slid away as she had helped her into bed and drawn the curtains against the afternoon light, and switched on the electric blanket – ‘Just for a few minutes. Just to help the shock.’
    She thinks I’m suffering from shock, thought Imogen. I expect I am. But that’s no reason for them to avoid looking at me.
    The only one who had not done so was the unknown young man. He had looked at her very directly; in fact he had looked at her as soon as he came into the room. Imogen had been strongly aware of it, and she had wondered who he was. He was rather good-looking, in a dark, damn-your-eyes kind of way. If it was possible to imagine meeting Heathcliff or Mr Rochester at a family funeral, he would fit the part very well indeed. Only you would not meet either of those two at a family funeral; in fact if you lived in this house, you would not meet
anybody.
But he had been rather nice, the dark young man, and he ought to be thanked for coming to help her while the others had been standing about, staring in shocked horror. She would try to find out who he was – Aunt Flora might know – and send him a little note. Was writing polite thank yous to strangers acceptable? Imogen thought it would be more acceptable than telephoning. People at school had giggled over the sending of Valentine cards to boys, or the making of phone calls asking boys to parties or discos, but Imogen had never done it because she never met any boys to do it to. She had been invited to parties over the years, but Mother had a way of suffering migraines or vague nerve attacks on the afternoon of the party, and Father or Dr Shilling generally ended up asking Imogen to stay in – ‘Just this once,’ Father would say. ‘She likes to have you here.’ Dr Shilling would say that after all, there would be other parties. It was not asking so very much.
    It was not asking much at all, but the trouble was that it had not been ‘just this once’, and in the end there had not been other parties because people had stopped asking her. You could not blame them. You could not really argue against somebody’s illness either, not when the somebody was your own mother, not when she had a habit of clutching your hands and crying and asking you not to leave her while she felt so dreadfully ill, and saying awkward things about being grateful. Dr Shilling had hinted once that Mother’s delicate health might deteriorate and Imogen had instantly had visions of nightmare things like multiple sclerosis or cancer. You could not insist on going out to parties when your mother might be dying of cancer, even when it started to be obvious that she never got any worse. It was not something you could very well question, but Imogen had begun guiltily to wonder if she would end up like some ghastly Victorian spinster whom everyone whispered about rather pityingly – ‘Poor Gladys, such a waste of a life . . . Never married because of her mother, you know . . .’
    Dr Shilling’s sedative must have been stronger than she had realised; she was starting to slide down into sleep, which had better be resisted because of what might be waiting on the other side. Edmund might be waiting; what was worse, it might not be Edmund as he had been when he was alive but Edmund as he had looked after he died – squashed and bloody, grotesquely twisted . . . headless . . . grinning from the silver platter between the potato salad and the cheese board, his dead eyes glazed like