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

led up to that bothered Eunice. She dropped one of Geoff Baalham’s eggs on the kitchen floor. Jacqueline, who was there, said only, “Oh dear, what a mess!” and Eunice had cleaned it up in a flash. But on the following morning she went up to turn out Giles’s bedroom, always a formidable task, and for the first time she allowed herself to look at his cork wall. Why? She could hardly have answered that herself, but perhaps it was because she was now equipped to read, made vulnerable, as it were, to reading, and because she had now become aware of the oppressive number of books in the house. There was a message on the wall beside that nasty poster. “Why” it began. She could read that word without much difficulty when it was printed. “One” she could also read and “eggs.” Giles evidently meant it for her andwas reproaching her for breaking that egg. She didn’t care for his reproaches, but suppose he broke his silence—he never spoke to her—to ask her why. Why hadn’t she obeyed his “why” message? He might tell his stepfather, and Eunice was on tenterhooks whenever George looked at her unbespectacled face.
    At last the message was taken down, but only to be replaced by another. Eunice was almost paralysed by it, and for a week she did no more in Giles’s room than pull up the bedclothes and open the window. She was as frightened of those pieces of paper as another woman would have been had Giles kept a snake in his room.
    But not so frightened as she was of Jacqueline’s note. This was left on the kitchen table one morning while Eunice was at the top of the house making her own bed. When she came downstairs, Jacqueline had driven off to London to see Paula, to have her hair cut, and to buy clothes for her holiday.
    Jacqueline had left notes for her before, and had wondered why the otherwise obedient Miss Parchman never obeyed the behests in them. All, however, was explained by her poor sight. But now Eunice had her glasses. Not that she was wearing them. They were upstairs, stuffed into the bottom of her knitting bag. She stared at the note, which meant as much to her as a note in Greek would have meant to Jacqueline—precisely as much, for Jacqueline could recognise an alpha, an omega, and a pi just as Eunice knew some capital letters and the odd monosyllabic word. But connecting those words, deciphering longer ones, making anything of it, that was beyond her. In London she would have had Annie Cole to help her. Here she had no one but Giles, who wandered through the kitchen to cadge a lift to Stantwich, to moon about the shops and spend the afternoon in a dark cinema. He didn’t so much as glance at her, and she would rather do anything than ask help from him.
    It wasn’t one of Eva Baalham’s days. Could she lose the note? Inventiveness was not among her gifts. It had taken all her puny powers to convince George that the optician’s bill hadn’t come because she had already paid it, liked to be independent, didn’t want to be “beholden.”
    And then Melinda came in.
    Eunice had forgotten she was in the house, she couldn’t get used to these bits of kids starting their summer holidays in June. Melinda danced in at midday, pretty healthy buxom Melinda in too tight jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, yellow hair in Dutch-girl pigtails, her feet bare. The sun was shining, a wind was blowing, the whole kitchen was radiated with fluttering dancing sunbeams, and Melinda was off to the seaside with two boys and another girl in an orange and purple painted van. She picked up the note and. read it aloud. “What’s this? ‘Please would you be awfully kind and if you have the time press my yellow silk, the one with the pleated skirt. I want to wear it tonight. It’s in my wardrobe somewhere up on the right. Thank you so much, J.C.’ It must be for you, Miss Parchman. D’you think you could do my red skirt at the same time?
Would
you?”
    “Oh yes, it’s no trouble,” said the much-relieved