Wish Her Safe at Home Read Online Free

spoke; you can often come close to hating someone for the most shamingly trivial of reasons.
    I confirmed that it had indeed been Aunt Alicia.
    “And
was
she filthy rich?”
    “No. It seems she left a pile of debts.”
    Yet the debts weren’t really so large and a sale of some of the furniture, Mr. Wymark had suggested, would more than cover them. Although he wasn’t an expert, he had said, he believed there might be a few good pieces beneath the cobwebs and the dust.
    “And was
this
the something to your advantage?” exclaimed Sylvia. Yet, notwithstanding her disgust, I thought I detected a faint note of relief. “So you’re telling me you
haven’t
come into millions?”
    “Not quite.”
    “Well, damn and blast! Bang goes that whopping great present I was hoping for!”
    So I might have been mistaken.
    Then common sense reasserted itself. “But there must have been something?”
    “Yes, something,” I conceded.
    “Well, out with it, for Pete’s sake!”
    “Her house.”
    “Her house? Her
house
! Rachel Waring—my, my—aren’t
you
the wicked tease!” She gave a whistle, then a laugh. “Did they say it’s in a decent area?”
    “In a decent area; but far from in a decent state. Well, two old women on their own—and I gather they were senile. You can imagine.”
    “Christ. That does sound like a cosy setup. But never mind. When are you going to see it?”
    She added, almost immediately, “Next weekend? And that’ll give me a valid excuse to miss that do of Sonia’s.”
    But I had planned against this moment; and in spite of feeling apprehensive, had planned against it with some satisfaction.
    “Well, actually I was thinking of going tomorrow. Taking the day off.”
    Several seconds elapsed.
    “Are you still there, Sylvia?”
    “Yes, just as you like, my dear. It’s your house, of course.” Her tone suggested funeral.
    “Saturday, you see, wouldn’t be quite so convenient for Mr. Wymark.”
    Oh, weak, weak!
    And Mr. Danby wasn’t much happier about it than Sylvia. Well, Miss Waring, my congratulations! This could hardly have happened to anyone more deserving. I couldn’t be better pleased.
    But why such a rush? I assume that—with any luck—your house won’t have fallen down by Saturday?
    In all the eleven years I’d worked in Mail Order, in all the seven that I had been his second-in-command, I hadn’t once asked for more time off than it took to have a tooth filled or a symptom diagnosed.
    All right then, Mr. Danby, so this is where you’ll have to learn. Learn about every dog having its day and every worm its turning point.
    Therefore I went in as usual on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday I telephoned to say I was unwell.
    Then ordered my taxi for the station.
    Not much difference, you might say, between a Friday and the Saturday. But you’d be wrong.
    In the first place it expressed a newfound sense of independence; I was a person of property. It also meant I could travel alone. It meant I could read a novel during the journey; go to any type of restaurant I fancied; have a silly little sense of adventure.
    It meant I could be me.
    And the hitherto dull, diffident, middle-aged woman who said to the taxi driver, “Paddington, please,” felt in some respects more like a girl of seventeen setting out for exotic climes. At seventeen I might have gone to Paris. This would have been in a party of five other girls and could have been momentous: leading to the kind of opportunity that only comes from getting to know the right sort of people. The girl whose parents had placed the ad was certainly one of the right sort of people. During the hour or so I spent with her at Richoux she was self-assured and kind and charming. It was impossible not to imagine all her friends being very much the same.
    Yet I had never been away from home—not without my mother—except once when she was ill and our upstairs neighbours had volunteered to look after me. Irrationally (and I knew it