Read Online The Doll’s House by Evelyn Anthony - Free Book Online Page B

meeting. He’ll be the co-ordinator. He’ll keep in touch with all of you. But I’ll expect you to join me in England exactly three months from today. Now, why don’t we have a drink to celebrate? Champagne?’
    â€˜Why not?’ Werner threw the pencil ends aside. He smiled at Harry. ‘I stay where I am and feed you information when you need it. When they do throw me out I’ll be a rich man. I’ll drink to that.’
    Bottles were brought up and opened. There was an air of excitement; old enemies found themselves on the same side. Zarubin downed his drink. Oakham leaned over and filled it up again.
    â€˜Here’s to the future,’ he said. ‘From now on, it’s going to be rich with promise. Especially rich. I give you all a toast. To Doll’s House Manor Hotel!’
    Harry Oakham stopped the car at the pub just off the main Ipswich road at Higham. He looked up at the sign; it brought back memories. The Swan. Swans used to process majestically down the river at Dedham when he was a boy. The village children threw bits of bread, scared to come too close to the fierce, hissing creatures. Harry fed them by hand. They didn’t frighten him.
    The pub was gloomy, with a low ceiling and black painted beams. There was the familiar smell of beer and tobacco smoke and a faint whiff of frying coming from the back.
    The Lounge Bar was full of locals, eating chicken and chips or shovelling down plates of a revolting mess calling itself chilli con carne. Harry had eaten the real dish in Mexico. He ordered a simple Ploughman’s lunch: a hunk of fresh white bread, Cheddar cheese, butter and pickled onions. He shoved the limp lettuce leaf and tasteless tomato wedge to one side. The real ale was very good and strong. He let the taste lie on his tongue. There was a group of tourists perched at the bar. They’d be on their way to his old village, to see the place immortalized by Constable. It had changed dramatically in the last ten years, he knew. It was peppered with antique shops and tea rooms, crammed with cars. It had been a quiet place when he was a boy, growing up in the old rectory. His grandfather had been the vicar of Dedham, the younger son who had followed the tradition that consigned the second born to the Army or the Church as a career. Harry remembered him vaguely. He was very old and inclined to wander round the village at odd hours. Someone always gently guided him home. Harry’s father had bought the rectory when the Church Commissioners sold it just before the last war.
    His widowed mother had offered it to him before she put it on the open market. But Peggy had refused to move from Woking.
    I ’ m not going to be buried alive in the country! What would I do all day? He could hear her saying it. Judith had been brought up in Devonshire; she was a country girl who loved to ride and walk the dogs. He’d given her Labrador away after she died. He couldn’t look after it properly and it needed someone to love it and make up for losing Judith. No, he’d agreed, Peggy wouldn’t fit into village life, he hadn’t bothered to argue. It was all part of that terrible initial mistake. So the rectory was sold. Times had changed and now only his cousins were left. They had turned the big house into flats and lived on the top floor. He hadn’t seen them for years. Sometimes a Christmas card arrived, and he sent one back if he remembered. That side of his life ended effectively when Judith died. She would have been the link with his past.
    He’d taken her to see the family tombs in Dedham churchyard one hot summer day after they’d been to Morning Service. His mother liked to go to church. And he’d pointed out where his father and grandparents were buried, and the older gravestones, weather-worn with time. It had been a scorching August that year. She was bare-legged and bronzed, her blonde hair bleached to silver gold. He remembered