Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

Elysian marshmallow.
    â€œIt’s funny to think of Rue working in a place like this,” said Pibble with a gesture as they passed the grove of pillars. “You know, it took me several weeks to discover he was a doctor. Before that I thought he sold things.”
    â€œHe’s got very strict rules against talking about doctoring to laymen. Or laywomen. What sort of things did you think he sold?”
    â€œFast cars, probably.”
    She laughed. She seemed to have the secret of perpetual animation. Moses had struck the rock and high spirits welled out unstinted.
    â€œHe never told me you were an honourable, either,” he said. “Are you, in fact?”
    â€œLast of the line,” she said smugly. “Rue says I’m England’s most dishonourable hon. My grandfather bought the barony from Maundy Gregory, and my father died of drink when I was twelve, and that was the lot of us, not counting Granny.”
    â€œLady Sospice?” guessed Pibble, extrapolating from the scandal of the drunkard son.
    â€œShe’s nicer than she looks.”
    â€œI’m sure she is. I haven’t met her, but my wife has once or twice.”
    â€œOh, she hates women. So do I.”
    Pibble laughed.
    â€œOh, yes,” she said. “When I get old I’m going to buy a house on Capri or somewhere and fill it with gigolos. Granny can’t, poor old cat, because she was brought up wrong to enjoy that sort of thing.”
    â€œBut I expect this Preservation Society has some dashing young architects in it.”
    â€œNo such luck. I think they’re a lot of ignorant stuffpots who don’t like things for what they are but because they want to keep the world just as it always was. Granny brought them in to tease poor Posey, but now they’ve run amok. She hates Posey more than anyone. This was our house, you see, and now Posey runs it. If you like I’ll show you the room I would have been born in if we’d still been living here.”
    She stopped at the far end of the gallery and gestured to the right.
    â€œRather a remote sort of fame,” said Pibble.
    â€œNonsense. I can get much remoter than that. The room above Posey’s is called King Charles’s Room because it once contained a bed in which King Charles was said to have slept in a different house. But I’ll take you to Rue. He uses what we called the Picture Saloon, but it never had any pictures in it because Alma-Tadema refused to give Great-Granddad a reduction for quantity. Isn’t it funny to think of all this once smelling of potpourri and furniture polish and eau de cologne?”
    It smelled of hospitals now. She had stopped to finish her sentence outside a big pair of doors, mightily carved with swags of fruit, which stood where there should have been a long passage running to the back of the building if the plan had been totally symmetrical. The doors had been painted cream, and somebody had nailed a piece of packing case to one of the panels and stencilled it with the words KELLY’S KINGDOM . Mr. Costain would have cause to hoot if he came up here, Pibble thought.
    One of the doors opened and a uniformed nurse glided out, weeping quietly. Doll made a face and bit her lip, then led the way in.
    â€œI’ve brought a friend to see you, Rue,” she said.
    Of course it had been built as a picture gallery, once you knew, but it would have needed several regiments of odalisques and vestal virgins to fill the vacant walls. It was a vast room, stretching the full width of this wing and nearly half its length, and here, too, nails had been driven callously into the panelling; from each dangled graphs and records, below which stood a white iron bedstead. There must have been over twenty beds in all, but a few were empty. Rue Kelly was bending over one of the patients. He had lifted the child’s eyelid and was peering into the pupil through an ophthalmoscope. At length he stood up, rubbing