A Sight for Sore Eyes by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

decisions he ever made. Flora was among those women who are an instant hit with children because, as well as being kind and patient and loving, they like children and enjoy their company and talking to them. Such people never talk down to children, they are too simple and too aware of their simplicity, to talk down to anyone, even supposing they knew how to condescend. They never patronise or exercise power or pull their rank. Flora would say, 'I like these new biscuits, don't you? And they're no dearer than the other lot. Go on, have another one, I'm going to.' Or, 'Let's have the telly on. I tell you what, if you'll watch EastEnders with me I'll watch your lion programme with you. She was a great one for deals. 'If you'll teach me to do jigsaws I'll teach you to knit. Jigsaws are something I've never got the hang of.' 'But they're easy!' 'So's knitting when you know how. I tell you what, if you'll sing me a song, one of your school songs, I'll make pancakes for our tea.' Julia Gregson was a very different kettle of fish. It was Flora who referred to her as a kettle of fish, a term Richard disliked. He said it was impertinent. But Julia looked like a fish, Francine said. Not a dead, slimy mackerel or cod of the kind you see on the supermarket counter, but a bright, healthy, swimming fish, a beautiful fish, a Shuhunkin perhaps, or a Koi carp. Julia had a high-browed face and a rather long nose, and she was all gold and white and red. Her skin was gleaming white and her hair gleaming yellow, her wide curved mouth painted scarlet and her nails varnished to match. It was David Stanark who recommended her. She was a child psychotherapist, or as she put it, a paedopsychiatrician. David suggested Francine see her because Richard sometimes confessed to his friends that his daughter was too quiet, too preoccupied, and that she needed to come out of herself. At first Richard was doubtful. A firm advocate of formal education and plenty of it, he wondered what mind-mending skills a woman could possibly have whose qualifications were a teacher-training certificate and a diploma from a counselling crash course. He had always been deeply disapproving of the legal loophole that allows anyone who wishes to call herself a psychotherapist and set up in practice to do so, without benefit of a medical degree or training in psychiatry. But all that changed when he met Julia. So confident was her manner, so calming her words and so excellent her timing, that you could scarcely be with her for five minutes without misting her utterly. Or so it seemed to Richard. Almost without reserve he put Francine into her hands. Julia had Francine playing with dolls. There was no escaping those dolls, Francine sometimes thought. Here, though, in the pleasant sitting-room overlooking Battersea Park, she was not apparently expected to reveal by her play any hidden knowledge of the crime against her mother, only perhaps show by the dolls' movements and interaction with each other the deep secrets of her childhood. Julia watched her and sometimes she wrote things down. She talked a lot to Francine, but not as Flora did, about the books she was reading and the television programmes she watched, about going shopping and what to cook for dinner, and whether Francine liked this friend more than that friend, and about Flora's own friends. Julia asked questions. 'Why do you like that, Francine?' 'I just do,' Francine would say. 'Why do you like ice-cream?' 'I don't know. I just like it.' 'What would you like to happen best in the world?' Francine knew but she wouldn't say. 'If you could have three wishes what would they be?' Francine's three wishes were for the man not to have come, for her mother not to have died and to live with her mother and her father in the cottage once more. And maybe have Flora living next door. She didn't want to tell Julia that. Julia ought to know it without being told, everyone ought to know it, for it was obvious. But Francine could read now,