Keeping Bad Company Read Online Free Page B

league.
     
    I’d come this far and Alastair would be asking Miss Knowles whether I’d been in touch, so I climbed back up both flights of steps, and rang her doorbell.
     
    After a moment I heard a regular padding footfall. The door opened and there stood a tall, very thin woman with wiry grey hair. She was wearing jogging pants and a sweat-shirt. On her feet were brightly patterned Fair Isle socks with soft leather soles attached. I was prepared for her to say, ‘Go away, I don’t give at the door!’ But she didn’t.
     
    ‘Hullo,’ she said cheerfully.
     
    ‘I’m Fran Varady,’ I introduced myself. ‘Alastair sent me.’
     
    ‘Of course you are,’ she replied. ‘Do come in.’
     
    She shut the front door behind us and set off ahead of me down the hall at a brisk pace. I scurried along behind her, trying to get a look at the place as I went.
     
    What I saw only convinced me more that I had no chance. The house oozed respectability. The furniture was old but polished and probably valuable. We were talking antiques here. Narrow stairs with carved wooden balusters ran up to unseen regions. The stair wall was lined with early French fashion prints. There was a lingering smell of coffee brewed fresh at breakfast time, lavender wax and fresh flowers.
     
    We arrived in a large, airy sitting room overlooking a scrap of garden. The sun beamed in and lit up the spines of rows and rows of books. This was a librarian’s home, all right. There was a table by the window and on it, a cumbersome old-fashioned manual typewriter. A sheet of paper was sticking out of the top and a pile of other paper was stacked beside it. It seemed I’d interrupted her at work. That would probably also count against me.
     
    Daphne Knowles seated herself in a cane-framed rocking chair upholstered with bright green and pink flowered cretonne, and indicated I should take a seat on the sofa. I sank down into feather cushions and sprawled there, trapped, and feeling at a considerable disadvantage. Daphne, beaming at me, began to tip back and forth in her cane rocker, which groaned a teeth-grinding protest.
     
    ‘So you’re Alastair’s girl!’ she observed.
     
    For one dreadful moment I thought there had been a mix-up, and she imagined I was Alastair’s granddaughter, who was dead. I tried to lean forward as I hastened to explain, ‘No, I’m only Fran who – ’
     
    ‘Yes, yes, I know that.’
     
    She waved a hand at me and I sank back again. Getting out of this kind of sofa was always more difficult than collapsing down on it. I couldn’t get leverage from my legs and it was a question of grabbing the arms and hauling oneself up and out.
     
    ‘It was such a sad business, but life does go on. I’m a firm believer in reincarnation.’ The rocker creaked and I could see why she preferred it to this sofa or either of the matching armchairs.
     
    ‘I’ve a friend who believes in that,’ I told her.
     
    She leaned forward, serious. ‘It isn’t the dead, you see, who have the problem. The problem is for the living who have to go on, well, living when they’ve lost a dear one. I’ve told Alastair he mustn’t worry about Theresa but he took it all very hard.’ She sighed, then perked up. ‘He tells me you want to be an actress.’
     
    ‘It’s what I dream about.’ I added apologetically, ‘We all dream about something. I did start a drama course, but I had to drop out.’
     
    ‘Ah, yes,’ she said and her eyes drifted towards the typewriter. I wondered whether it was in order to ask what she was working on. Before I had a chance, she asked, ‘Would you like to see the flat?’
     
    Jangling a bunch of keys she led me out of the house and down to the basement steps.
     
    ‘As you see,’ she said. ‘It’s completely separate down here, quite self-contained. There’s no longer any communication through from my place. It’s been bricked up.’ She unlocked the front door and we went in.
     
    She seemed to think