Read Online The Four Last Things by Andrew Taylor - Free Book Online Page B

day. Looks like it’s going to last.’ He would beam even if it was raining, when his opening gambit was usually, ‘Well, at least this weather will be good for the garden.’
    At the office Stanley had a reputation for philanthropy. For many years he was secretary to the Paladin Dependants Committee, an organization which provided small luxuries for the widows and children of former employees of the company. It was he who organized the annual outing to Clacton-on-Sea, and the week’s camping holiday, also once a year, which involved him taking a party of children for what he called ‘a spot of fresh air under canvas’.
    Eddie never went on these outings. ‘You wouldn’t enjoy it,’ Thelma told him when he asked to go. ‘Some of the children come from very unfortunate backgrounds. Last year there was a case of nits. Do you know what they are? Head lice. Quite disgusting.’ As for his mother, Eddie found it impossible to imagine her in a tent. The very idea was essentially surreal, a yoking of incongruities like a goat in a sundress – or indeed like the marriage of Stanley and Thelma Grace.
    His parents shared a bedroom but to all intents and purposes there might have been a glass wall between them. Then why had they stayed together at night? There was a perfectly good spare bedroom. Thelma and Stanley must have impinged on each other in a dozen different ways: her snoring, his trips to the lavatory; her habit of reading into the early hours, his rising at six o’clock and treading ponderously across the room in search of his clothes and the contents of his pockets.
    Loneliness? Was that the reason? It seemed such an inadequate answer to such a complicated question.
    As it happened, Stanley enjoyed his own company. He spent much of his time in the basement.
    The stairs from the hall came down to a large room, originally the kitchen, at the back of the house. Two doors opened from it – one to the former coal cellar, and the other to a dank scullery with a quarry-tiled floor. Because of the lie of the land, the scullery and coal cellar were below ground level at the front of the house. A third door had once given access to the back garden, but Stanley screwed this to its frame in the interests of security.
    The basement smelled of enamel paint, turpentine, sawdust, photographic chemicals, cigarettes and damp. Always good with his hands, Stanley built a workbench across the rear wall under the window overlooking the garden. He glued cork tiles to the wall to make a notice board on which he pinned an ever-changing selection of photographs and also a plan of the dolls’ house he was working on. He kept freestanding furniture to a minimum – a stool for use at the workbench; a two-seater sofa where he relaxed; and a low Victorian armchair with a button back and ornately carved legs. (The latter appeared and reappeared in many of Stanley’s photographs, usually with one or more occupants.)
    Finally, there was the tall cupboard built into the alcove on the left of the chimney breast. It had deep, wide shelves and was probably as old as the house. Stanley secured it with an enormous padlock.
    In the early days, the basement was forbidden territory to Eddie (and even later he entered it only by invitation). Usually the door was closed but once, as he passed through the hall, Eddie noticed that it was half-open. He crouched and peered down the stairs. Stanley was standing at the workbench examining a photograph with a magnifying glass.
    His father turned and saw him. ‘Hello, Eddie. I think Mummy’s in the kitchen.’ With the magnifying glass still in his hand he came towards the stairs, smiling widely in a way that made his cheeks bunch up like a cat’s. ‘Run along, now. There’s a good boy.’
    Eddie must have been five or six. He was not usually a bold boy – quite the reverse – but this glimpse of the unknown room had stimulated his curiosity. In his mind he cast about for a delaying tactic. ‘That door,