Read Online Skeleton-in-Waiting by Peter Dickinson - Free Book Online

Aunt Bea.
    She stopped and peered at the woman through her thick-lensed glasses. Her pale face seemed to float disembodied in the gloom, with her mouth opening and closing so that she looked like a fish in an aquarium tank. She pulled herself together and began to apologise in her usual near-whisper, softer than ever now that her increasing deafness had lost her control of it.
    â€œI’m so sorry. I imagined …”
    â€œHello, Aunt Bea,” said Louise. “Hordes of visitors.”
    The strange woman turned at the voice, acknowledging for the first time that there might be someone else in the lobby. Her movement and attitude, as much as the face that now came into view, revealed the cause of Aunt Bea’s behaviour, which Louise had taken for characteristic fluster at finding a different caller on her doormat from the one she’d been told to expect. There was more to it than that. In this dim light, and seen with Aunt Bea’s vague vision, the woman was Granny.
    The moment you looked at her properly, of course, she wasn’t. Granny wouldn’t have used a stick or worn a neat grey suit with a matching toque. The large brooch in the toque would have been more her line, if the diamonds were real. You couldn’t imagine this woman flinging an arm out in one of Granny’s whirling gestures, or calling you by absurd and largely invented Russian-sounding endearments, but she stood as straight and carried her head with the same challenge. Her face was from the same mould.
    She glanced at Carrie and Louise, apparently without recognition, then turned back to Aunt Bea.
    â€œLady Surbiton,” she said, “I am your neighbour, Mrs Walsh. It is time we made ourselves acquainted. May I come in?”
    â€œOh, but …” began Aunt Bea, but Mrs Walsh was already past her, hobbling with quick, imperious steps along the hallway. Louise stepped forward and kissed Aunt Bea.
    â€œIt’s all right,” she whispered. “Don’t send her away. We’re hardly staying. If she lives next door you’d better start off on the right foot with her.”
    Aunt Bea sighed with relief. The idea of her sending anyone anywhere—let alone as formidable an intruder as Mrs Walsh seemed to be—was absurd.
    They found Mrs Walsh standing in the middle of Aunt Bea’s living-room, looking systematically around. The decor and furniture were pure Aunt Bea, that is to say as dull as human lack of imagination could make them, with a forest-green carpet, cream walls, crackle-parchment lampshades, dozens of slightly out-of-focus snapshots which didn’t quite fit their frames, green self-stripe chair-covers with dull gold braid. But the room, with its low ceiling and leaded casement windows and lack of straight edges or square corners, imposed a character of its own, giving a sense of being a cell in this huge old complex, surrounded by scores of similar cells, all of them carrying the imprint of quiet and secretive generations living out their lives there. Beyond the windows, under a dismal December sky, canvas-covered scaffolding veiled the opposite side of the courtyard where the work was still going on to repair the damage caused by an old lady living just such a life, including a preference for reading in bed with a candle on her chest.
    Mrs Walsh seemed now to have recognised who Louise was. She dipped into a centimetre of curtsey but made no effort to leave. Louise, partly to give Aunt Bea as much ammunition as she could for coping with such a neighbour, also out of straight curiosity, stepped forward and shook hands.
    â€œDon’t go,” she said. “I’ve only come to give Aunt Bea her Christmas present. Do you know Lady Caroline Crupper?”
    Mrs Walsh bowed her head towards Carrie and deliberately as a moving spotlight returned her gaze to Louise, using the convention that one waits for royalty to speak first to maintain herself at the centre of attention.