Wish Her Safe at Home Read Online Free Page B

I’d seen the house it hadn’t occurred to me that I might want to keep it. My roots were in London; my friends too, such as they were, my work and my interests. The familiar might be tedious and unsatisfying. But it was comfortable; it was secure.
    “You mean then,” said Mr. Wymark, “you see it as a letting proposition?”
    “Good heavens, no. I mean that I intend to live here. Yes, really! There’s something about its atmosphere that’s... ” I fumbled for the right word. “Well, that’s practically
seductive
! Don’t say you haven’t felt it?”
    But he only answered dryly: “I’m afraid you haven’t seen the ground floor yet. Not properly.”
    I ignored this.
    “It’s odd: I’ve never regarded myself as being susceptible to atmosphere. But I think my great-aunt must have been more welcoming than I remember.”
    He said nothing.
    “Or perhaps it’s an impression that was left here earlier. Prior to 1944?”
    For in truth “welcoming” wasn’t an adjective I should have associated with Alicia. Those that sprang to mind were more like “long-suffering” or “melancholy”—except of course when she’d grown animated by thoughts of
Bitter Sweet
. Bridget had been the welcoming one.
    But at least nothing that Mrs. Pimm was later to tell me of screaming and cursing could radically alter my remembrance of powdered softness; of wistful gazing into dark corners; the fact that in the kitchen my life might once have been saved, the cake mixture had tasted good, there were stories of films to enthral me and of strapping young men impatient to marry me.
    No, it was merciful: the old ladies’ feudings weren’t going to leave any greater imprint on myself than they appeared to have left on the house. It was a shame it couldn’t invariably be like that; that last impressions were so often the ones which endured. How many of us would want to be remembered for what we finally became?
    It occurred to me suddenly that Bridget—on arriving in Bristol—would have been forty-seven: my own age at present. A sobering reflection.
    Plainly the pair had lived, slept and washed—
and
cooked—in one of the rooms on the ground floor. There was a grease-encrusted Primus between two camp beds; there was a ewer in a basin (the basin ringed with scum); there were long velvet curtains, originally wine-coloured, hanging at the windows. The nets were grey—almost
dark
grey—so rotten that at the merest touch they might disintegrate.
    I noticed that the Primus stove was called “The Good Companion.”
    And this was where the vegetation was, too: all those overgrown pot plants—or their successors—which had been such a feature of St. John’s Wood. Nearly a dozen. One of them, incredibly, showed signs of life.
    In contrast the other room was bare. Here, I was pointedly informed, had the refuse of many years amassed into something to rival the town tip; in the centre it had even touched the ceiling. And although the council had fumigated, although the rodent inspector had laid his poisons, still the air was fetid, the walls damp, discoloured—the paper hanging in places like the peeling skin of mushrooms.
    The solicitor smiled at me, affably. “Does any of this shed a different light?”
    “Not at all.”
    In the narrow back garden, little more than a wasteland with concrete by the door, there was a very nasty WC (they couldn’t have used
that
, surely?) and a couple of coal bunkers.
    Mr. Wymark was observing my reaction. It struck me quite abruptly that I didn’t like him—not only that I didn’t like
him
but that these days I didn’t appear to like anybody very much. Everywhere, it seemed, I sensed ulterior motives.
    I gave myself a little shake. When I was an old lady I should clearly have the most terrible persecution complex. I’d lock every door, window, drawer and cupboard, see double meanings in everything that people said, wonder why so-called friends didn’t write—or else wonder why they did;