The Power of the Dead Read Online Free Page B

‘Bosun’ Tinker, whom he had found to be a kind man under his rough exterior. Once again he determined to leave the village more often, and mix in the world outside. After three pints of ale he rode home, and was putting the bike away when he heard the sudden blaring music of the loudspeaker, followed a few moments later by silence.
    He stood in the sun, irresolute; then going through a side-door beside the neglected croquet lawn—both he and Lucy were waiting for a chance to restore and level the grown-out turf—he entered the parlour; and stopped abruptly.
    Hilary was sitting in the armchair, doing his cross-word puzzle; while, held between his legs, was Billy. The child was striving to crawl away, heaving with red face which, turned in his father’s direction, showed imminent tears of hopelessness. Phillip felt enervated; the sight recalled his own feelings of desperate weakness when his uncle used to hold him on the lawn at Epsom, chuckling at his puny efforts to escape.
    “No!”
    At the cry Hilary looked up. “What’s the matter?”
    “Shall I take Billy, if he’s annoying you, Uncle?”
    “Of course he’s not annoyin’ me. Billy and I are gettin’ along famously, aren’t we, you young rascal?”
    “I rather fancy he wants to go to the lavatory.”
    Hilary uncrossed his legs. Phillip held out his arms, but the child gave him a mournful look before hiding his face on an arm and lying still on the hearth rug. Rusty the spaniel looked up, wagging his tail-stump, then crept to lie beside the child.
    *
    After supper Hilary lit two joss-sticks and stood them in a pot upon the chimney shelf. The ends fumed slowly; a pleasant scent spread into the room; bringing to Hilary an almost poignant memory of his early life in the Far East; and particularly of hisfirst return home, just before the Old Queen’s Jubilee, with souvenirs of travel, including lotus flowers (in paper) from the Feast of Homeless Ghosts, during the Seventh Moon. The lotus lanterns, each holding a tiny lighted taper, were launched upon the moonlit waters to guide lost souls to heaven. He had brought home a boxful, meaning to sail them on the Longpond, in the company of his parents, brothers and sisters: but he had found the estate sold, his mother forsaken by his father, and the old home in disintegration.
    The shock of that homecoming was still active in memory. Hilary walked alone to the Longpond, to return and pour himself a stiff drink from one of the two bottles of the special malt whisky he had brought with him, and kept hidden in his portmanteau.
    *
    A beam, the trunk of a medium-sized oak shaped by the strokes of Elizabethan adzes, crossed the parlour of the farmhouse. On first seeing it, Phillip had spent a whole day in ‘feeding’ the wood with linseed oil. The beam gave a feeling of enduring strength, although its sap-wood was riddled by the death-watch beetle.
    The walls of the farmhouse were thick, the new plaster smooth; but it had been distempered too soon, and after a few weeks had flaked here and there. The stone floors were liable to sweat; and were cold, even in summer, to the feet. Other defects became apparent. The bathroom, put in by a local builder, was too small. It had been part of a bedroom. The walls were of asbestos sheeting, a mere box. The bath, a second-hand affair of heavy enamelled iron and mahogany, had been carted from a Victorian country house which had been occupied by the military authorities during the war. The house had been bought by Hilary’s agent and gutted for the panelling and fittings.
    The bath was deep and it took most of the contents of the hot-water boiler to bring the water-level one-third up the sides. The flue of the boiler had been led into one of the wide, wood-burning chimneys, wherein the fumes of coke now wandered, to drift erratically with the wind. In the south-west gale the coke burned yellow-hot, causing the copper tank to rumble, while steam from the safety pipe bubbled through