Angel Cake by Helen Harris Read Free Book Online

expense. She went back into the kitchen. With her arthriticky hands, it took her ten minutes to open a tin of sardines. She had with a terrible wrenching effort, uncovered the first silver tail when the bell rang.
    She was convinced that, for a full minute, her heart and her breathing both stopped. She was standing right in the line of the doorway, of course, and with the light on she had probably already been seen. Steadying herself against the draining-board, she swallowed her panic and looked round. The short shadow had come back.
    Still holding the tin-opener, she began to tiptoe silently down the hall. She had not yet decided if she would actually answer the door, but she wasn’t going to let him get away without her seeing him this time. She still hadn’t decided if she would answer the door when she was less than a yard away from it, and his second ring made her jump out of her skin. Dreadfully conscious of the stupidity of what she was doing, but desperate that he might lose patience before she had a chance to get round to the front-room window, Alicia unlocked the door. He heard the rattle, of course, and now he knew that she was there. Violent death, Alicia thought to her surprise, would not be worse than not knowing and she opened the door an inch. It was a girl. Alicia was so astonished that her grip on the door-handle, braced to slam the door in self-defence, relaxed of its own accord and the door opened an inch further. It was a girl.
    ‘Oh, hello,’ said the girl. ‘You must be Mrs Queripel.’
    Not even an especially rough-looking girl, Alicia thought, in fact quite a tidy, well-spoken polite sort of girl.
    ‘I’m Alison Woodgate,’ she said. ‘You know, from Age Concern.’
    ‘Age Concern?’ snapped Alicia. ‘Whatever do you mean, Age Concern?’
    The girl looked distressed. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you asked for a visitor.’
    Alicia retorted, ‘I never did anything of the sort.’
    ‘Oh,’ said the girl a bit stupidly. ‘Oh, I thought you had. They told me your social worker had passed on a request.’
    Miss Midgley! Alicia thought. That interfering cow! Maybe Miss Midgley had said something about a visitor, come to think of it, a long time ago. But Alicia had assumed that nothing had come of it; she had forgotten all about it. Relief was flooding through her at such a rate that she grew quite haughty. ‘Maybe something of the sort was once suggested,’ she answered loftily, ‘but I don’t know what gave you the idea that you could just turn up. I’m quite a busy person, you know. You should have written or telephoned first to let me know when you were coming. I can’t have people just turning up.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ the girl said again. ‘I did call last week at about this time too, actually, but you were out.’
    ‘I know you did,’ Alicia said triumphantly. ‘I wasn’t out. I was here. But I don’t answer the door to unexpected callers who just turn up … usually.’
    ‘You were here?’ the girl repeated. ‘But couldn’t you have taken a look at me from a window or something? Just think,’ she smiled, ‘I might have given up and not come back.’
    ‘You scarcely gave me a chance,’ Alicia said scornfully. ‘Ring, ring, ring and then gone in a twinkling before I could get to the window. I thought you were a … mischief maker.’
    ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ the girl said again. ‘The last thing I wanted was to give you a fright.’ And then she just stood rather awkwardly on the doorstep, obviously expecting to be asked in.
    Alicia hesitated. It was so many years since she had invited anyone into her home that it seemed to her a most hazardous thing to do. How could she let someone – and someone she had never seen before – into her own front room? And there was her tea, waiting for her on the kitchen table.
    ‘Well, now you’ll know for another time,’ Alicia said crisply. She wanted to close the door, she was cold, but shefelt she couldn’t chase the girl