Read Online A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online Page A

chocolate éclair, which made a nice change from cassoulets and vine leaves and all those made-up dishes she got at Lowfield Hall. The picture of respectability was Eunice on that Saturday morning, sitting upright at her table in her navy-blue Crimplene suit, nylon stockings, Annie Cole’s mother’s court shoes, an “invisible” net on her hair. No one would have supposed her mindwas racing on lines of deception—deception that comes so easily to those who can read and write and have I.Q.s of 120. But at last a plan was formed. She crossed the road to Boots’ and bought two pairs of sunglasses, not dark ones but faintly tinted, one pair with a crystal blue frame, the other of mock tortoise shell. Into her handbag with them, not to be produced for a week.
    The Coverdales seemed surprised they would be ready so quickly. She was taken to Stantwich the second time by Jacqueline, who luckily didn’t go with her into the optician’s because of the impossibility of parking on a double yellow line. It was bad enough having to pay the fines incurred by Giles. Eunice bought more chocolate and consumed more cake. She showed the glasses to Jacqueline and went so far as to put the crystal blue pair on. In them she felt a fool. Must she wear them all the time now, she who could see the feathers on a sparrow’s wing in the orchard a hundred feet away? And would they expect her to
read?
    Nobody really lives in the present. But Eunice did so more than most people. For her, five minutes’ delay in dinner now was more important than a great sorrow ten years gone, and to the future she had never given much thought. But now, with the glasses in her possession, occasionally even on her nose, she became very aware of the printed word which surrounded her and to which, at some future time, she might be expected to react.
    Lowfield Hall was full of books. It seemed to Eunice that there were as many books here as in Tooting Public Library where once, and once only, she had been to return an overdue novel of Mrs. Samson’s. As small flattish boxes, she saw them, packed with mystery and threat. One entire wall of the morning room was filled with bookshelves, in the drawing room great glass-fronted bookcases stood on either side of the fireplace, and more shelves filled the twin alcoves. There were books on bedside tables, magazines and newspapers in racks. And they read books all the time. It seemed to her that they must read to provoke her, for no one, not even schoolteachers, could read that much for pleasure. Giles was never without a book in his hand.He even brought his reading matter into her kitchen and sat absorbed in it, his elbows on the table. Jacqueline read every novel of note, and she and George re-read their way through Victorian novels, their closeness emphasised by their often reading some work of Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot at the same time, so as later to discuss a character or a scene together. Incongruously, it was the student of English literature who read the least, but even so Melinda was often to be found in the garden or lying on the morning-room floor with one of Mr. Sweet’s grammars before her. This was not from inclination but because of a menace from her tutor—“If we’re going to make the grade we shall have to come to grips with those Anglo-Saxon pronouns before next term, shan’t we?” But how was Eunice to know that?
    She had been happy, but the glasses had destroyed her happiness. She had been content with the house and the lovely things in the house, and the Coverdales had hardly existed for her, so little notice had she taken of them. Now she could hardly wait for them to go away on that summer holiday they were always talking about and planning for.
    But before they went, and they were not going until the beginning of August, before their departure set her free to expand, to explore, and to meet Joan Smith, three unpleasant things happened.
    The first was nothing in itself. It was what it