The Woman at the Window Read Online Free Page B

cat has been. She spends most of the time in the churchyard.’
    Through the skeletal row of leafless trees he could glimpse the crumbling stone wall that separated the rectory garden from a churchyard on a lower elevation. An easy wall to climb over. The old parish church looked far smaller than the forbidding grey stone rectory. They were both isolated buildings at the centre of a rambling rural parish.
    â€˜Huw used to call me El Al. Does that ring a bell I wonder?’
    It did not. A nickname seemed a poor proof of identity. He looked flustered as though he were rummaging through his mind for more convincing credentials. She was the widow, clearly on home ground. He was no more than a strange man calling at the front door.
    â€˜If you come in I could put some TCP on your hand.’ 
    He breathed deeply with the relief of gratitude. 
    The  interior, as much as he could see of it, was dim and sparsely furnished. The kitchen on the other hand, when they reached it, was surprisingly new. It gleamed in the slanting light like an illustration from a brochure.
    â€˜What a marvellous kitchen.’
    He spoke with polite enthusiasm.
    â€˜Well appointed and virtually unused,’ she said, ‘and still to be paid for. You’ve come a long way?’
    â€˜Well yes. I have. From Ravenna. So shocked when I read the obit. The newspaper from home is a week old when I get it. And you could call me computer illiterate. And as I said I’d been in Sicily. Not just shock. Remorse. Regret. We’d been close you see, all those years ago. He was always so fit and so full of life. I had no idea he was ill.’
    â€˜Neither had I,’ she said. ‘A massive stroke. They could do nothing. One minute he was here. The next he was gone.’
    â€˜Here.’
    Elwyn Anwyl repeated the word as though to make it echo in the space the friend of his younger days had vacated.
    â€˜For so long I’d been meaning to get in touch, I wanted him to know how much our friendship had meant to me, in spite of everything. And now it’s too late.’
    He became absorbed in regretful silence. She stood with her arms folded contemplating a complete stranger replete with a chapter of her husband’s life of which she apparently knew nothing.
    â€˜I saw him first at the Debates Union. Reddish-yellow hair. He had a radiance about him. A figure of envy. A brilliant speaker with a wonderful self-effacing style that made you envy him even more. I admired him from a distance. We didn’t actually connect up until a comic incident in the BBC Club in Langham Place. I don’t know whether it’s still there. A fine day outside and for some reason everyone inside slightly drunk. Huw was engaged in a furious argument with a beanpole of a man with a small head and a permanent sneer who maintained there was nothing worth knowing in Welsh literature otherwise the whole world would know about it. I joined in and we floored him to our own satisfaction. After that we were friends for life. Or at least we were until we fell out.’
    She listened with detached interest, until she heard the cat meowing outside the door.
    â€˜I must feed that beastly cat. Otherwise who knows what she’ll get up to.’
    He was left in the glow of his own recollections. She was more concerned with the cat than a stranger’s memories of her husband. Bereavement had left her in shock perhaps: an arrested state, certainly aware of the surface of existence but not able to react to her own awareness. She had been listening closely enough. The passage of years left such yawning gaps. No accumulation of the past could relieve the exigencies of the present; feeding the cat could loom as a major operation. That seemed true enough. She had fed the cat and now she could attend to him.
    â€˜Would you like a coffee? I’m afraid I’ve only got Nescafe.’ She gave him further information as she discovered some biscuits