A Commonplace Killing Read Online Free

around the drop-leaf table in the kitchen with the wireless in the middle, getting on one another’s nerves, until Douglas and Evelyn went to their own rooms, leaving her alone with Walter and their accumulation of weariness, regret and resentment. She threw a couple of pieces of coke and some rubbish from the scraps pail into the boiler and fanned the fire by opening and closing the door. The boiler took a while to get going, and Wally insisted on its being turned off by ten o’clock every morning in order to conserve fuel. How fortunate it was for the rest of them that she was always up in time to ensure that there would be enough hot water. She stabbed at the fire for a few moments, then banged the poker on the grate and went to look inside the bread crock. There was almost half a loaf, enough to do for breakfast. She ran it under the tap until it was almost saturated, crossed to the range, lit the gas and popped the sodden loaf in the oven. Then she filled the kettle and waited for it to boil.
    Mother’s tray consisted of a cup of milky tea and one or two digestive biscuits, and laying it and taking it up to the old lady was the sort of task which Evelyn could easily have offered to take care of each day; but Evelyn hardly ever did anything without being asked, and most of the time it was easier to do it yourself. She had only herself to blame for allowing this situation to develop, and perhaps because of this, it played badly on her nerves.
    Evelyn was a nice kid, if a bit common; and although there were plenty of things about her that drove her potty, in the main they got along pretty well. They had met at a dance in the last year of the war. She had felt sorry for the girl. Both her parents had been killed in the same incident, leaving the kid on her own and only seventeen. When Evelyn had been bombed out of her lodgings, she hadn’t thought twice about asking her if she wanted to rent the attic room; the extra money had come in useful, and they had been company for one another, sharing ups and downs, confidences. It was better to go out on the town with another woman, even if people did assume that Evelyn was her daughter. When the war ended, Evelyn lost her job in the factory and had been living in the attic–rent-free!–ever since. Lately it had seemed that liberties were being taken. Rooms were hard to come by and they could easily have asked fifteen bob a week for the attic: the exact sum on numerous “To Let” postcards in the tobacconist’s window. If the kid had ever once offered to help out around the house instead of paying rent the situation would have been a little more acceptable, but the offer was never made. Perhaps this was just as well: she could clean the whole house from top to bottom in the time it took Evelyn to put on her stockings; and once the kid had put the best part of a cabbage in the pig-bin. It got on her nerves, but she could never have put Evelyn out on the streets. The kid was flighty and none too bright: left to her own devices she would almost certainly end up in trouble or in Holloway prison, or both.
    She swallowed a few mouthfuls of tea and ate half of one of Mother’s digestives before taking the tray upstairs. There was no point depending on other people. Only the selfish, like Walter and Evelyn and Mavis, seemed to be able to do that. Her problem was, she was not selfish, which meant she was put upon. She had stayed out of pity for them all. It felt better to think about it that way; better than acknowledging that you stayed because you were afraid to leave.
    Mother’s room was curtain-heavy, thick with dust and chamber-pot odours. Apart from during air-raids, when they used to shove her underneath it, the only time Mother had ever left her bed in the past couple of years was to be sat on the commode. She leaned over the tiny white head that was poking out from the top of the candlewick bedspread and checked it for signs of life, and when she was sure that Mother had