What a Carve Up! Read Online Free PDF Page B

issuing from within: not until he knocked and, after a substantial pause, heard Tabitha’s cracked, expressionless cry of ‘Enter’.
    ‘I just came to say goodbye,’ he explained, finding that she was alone after all.
    ‘Goodbye,’ said Tabitha. She was knitting something large, purple and shapeless, and a copy of Spitfire! magazine was propped open on the desk beside her.
    ‘We must see more of each other in future,’ he went on, nervously. ‘You’ll come to visit us in London, perhaps?’
    ‘I doubt it,’ said Tabitha. ‘The doctor was here again this morning, and I know what that means. They’re going to try to blame me for what happened last night, and have me put away again.’ She laughed, and shrugged her bony shoulders. ‘Well, what if they do. I’ve missed my chance, now.’
    ‘Missed your …?’ Mortimer began, but checked himself. Instead he walked to the window, and tried to adopt a casual tone as he said: ‘Well, of course, there are some … circumstances which take some accounting for. The library window, for instance. Pyles swears that he locked it as usual, and yet this man, this burglar, whoever he was, doesn’t seem to have forced it in any way. I don’t suppose you’d happen to know anything …’
    He tailed off.
    ‘Now look what you’ve made me do with your chatter,’ said Tabitha. ‘I’ve dropped a stitch.’
    Mortimer could see that he was wasting his time.
    ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ he said.
    ‘Have a nice journey,’ Tabitha answered, without looking up.
    Mortimer paused in the doorway.
    ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘who was your visitor?’
    She stared at him blankly.
    ‘Visitor?’
    ‘Pyles said that someone had called on you a few minutes ago.’
    ‘No, he was mistaken. Quite mistaken.’
    ‘I see.’ Mortimer took a deep breath and was about to leave, when something detained him; he turned back with a frown. ‘Am I just imagining this,’ he said, ‘or is there a peculiar smell in here?’
    ‘It’s jasmine,’ said Tabitha, beaming at him for the first time. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’
    3
    Yuri was my one and only hero at this time. My parents would save every photograph from the magazines and newspapers, and I fixed them to the wall of my bedroom with drawing-pins. That wall has been re-papered now, but for many years after the pictures came down you could still see the pin marks, dotted into a random and fantastic pattern like so many stars. I knew that he had visited London recently: I had watched the scenes on television as he drove through streets lined with welcoming crowds. I had heard of his appearance at the Earl’s Court exhibition, and the knowledge that he had shaken hands with hundreds of lucky children turned me hot with envy. Yet it had never occurred to me to ask my parents to take me there. A trip to London for my family would have been as bold and far-fetched a proposition as a trip to the moon itself.
    For my ninth birthday, however, my father proposed, if not a trip to the moon, then at least a tentative shot into the stratosphere in the form of a day’s outing to Weston-super-Mare. I was promised a visit to the newly opened model railway and aquarium, and, if the weather was fine, a swim in the open-air pool. It was mid September: September 17th 1961, to be precise. My grandparents were invited on this trip, as well – by which I mean my mother’s parents, because we had nothing to do with my father’s; had not even heard from them, in fact, for as long as I could remember, although I knew they were still alive. Perhaps my father himself secretly kept in contact; but I doubt it. It was never easy to know what he was feeling, and I couldn’t say, even now, whether or not he missed them very much. He got on passably well with Grandma and Grandpa, in any case, and over the years had built up a quiet defensive wall against Grandpa’s genial but consistent teasing. I think it was my mother who invited them along with us that day, probably