The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Read Online Free

because Alice had loved it at first sight and Pearmain always trusted her instincts as a blind man trusts a sighted person to guide him across the road. However, in their newly straitened circumstances, a large sacrifice was necessary, and selling Lime House was the obvious one to make.
    Of course, it was the wrong time to sell, or so the estate agent told them, and Alice spent long, dispiriting afternoons that Spring showing indifferent couples around those high-ceilinged well-proportioned rooms. The couples looked at all that space and remarked that it must cost an awful lot to heat, mustn’t it? Alice, whose honesty was, in its own way, as scrupulous as her husband’s, admitted that it did. But never had she loved the house more than in those dismal days: its comfortable bay windows in which you could sit and look out onto the world, the big unpretentious entrance hall where bicycles and boots could be kept without there being any danger of tripping over them, its intricately moulded plaster cornices and ceiling roses, its plain marble fireplaces and the long-lawned garden shaded by a great lime which gave the house its name. Lime House was a place where you had room to think.
    One day Alice opened the door to another prospective buyer, a tall, ginger-haired woman in her late thirties. She was wearing a very smart purple tracksuit and looked slim and fit. She announced herself as Heather Billing. Alice, who had a habit of forming instant likes and dislikes to people, took against Heather Billing at once, not violently, but enough to make her constantly ill-at-ease in Heather’s presence. The unease was compounded when she discovered that Heather’s husband worked for the very firm that Mr Pearmain had just left, Stolz International.
    In her favour, Heather was the first of the would-be buyers to express unqualified enthusiasm for the house. She just loved it. She thought that the spaces were ‘amazingly energising’; then she said that she thought the house had ‘great possibilities’. Alice stiffened at this: to her the house was a place of actualities not possibilities. She asked Heather politely what she meant.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Heather, ‘you must think that’s awfully rude, Alice.’ Her accent and the speed with which she had progressed to Christian name terms betrayed transatlantic origins. ‘You see I was talking from my own personal viewpoint. My chart told me it was favourable to move into this area. We’re coming from Winchcombe so we’d be moving towards the horse, which happens to be my sign.’ Alice raised her eyebrows in enquiry. ‘Chinese astrology,’ Heather explained.
    ‘How interesting,’ said Alice whose attendance at the local parish church every Sunday was the limit of her spiritual voyaging.
    ‘There’s lots of Chi energy in this house. It could flow really well.’
    ‘Really?’Alice had adopted that condescending would-be-interested manner which members of royalty assume when talking to ballet dancers. Heather, who detected the hauteur in Alice’s voice, decided to demonstrate her own brand of superiority.
    ‘I expect you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, have you?’ she said. ‘Feng Shui. It’s the traditional ancient Chinese art of geomancy. I’ve made quite a study of it. As a matter of fact, I’m a qualified Feng Shui consultant.’
    ‘Ah, yes, I know!’ said Alice. ‘You go into people’s houses and rearrange their furniture.’
    ‘There’s a little more to it than that—Oh, isn’t this the neatest little room!’
    It was fortunate that the tour of the house had brought them just then to this particular room on the ground floor because the discussion might otherwise have become acrimonious. The charm of their surroundings, however, distracted them both.
    It was a square parlour off the main drawing room with a window overlooking the garden. Alice had adopted it as her private sanctum. Thinking the word ‘study’ too grandiose, she called it