Some Deaths Before Dying by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

a muddle to sort out what she’s saying. She’s always flying off at an angle and going on to something else, and
     then, no warning, you’re back where you were before only you’ve forgotten where that was. Anyway, like I was telling you,
     I’d sent her this snap of the house and now she’s wanting to know all about it and how old it is, and everything. Victorian,
     I was going to tell her, and didn’t Mrs. Thomas say it was Colonel Matson’s grandfather that built it, him having done well
     out of his cotton mills, and with all these children to house, like families used to be those days—getting on a dozen, wasn’t
     it? Poor women, you can’t help thinking. I remember my mum telling me about some old aunt of hers who was a farmer’s wife,
     and her saying how she always loved the springtime, when the evenings were longer and the fields greener and there was milk
     in the cows and the baby was born. Almost done, dearie. There now, that’s better, isn’t it?”
    “Thank you. Albums.”
    “Out in the passage? Right you are. Which one? Look in the card index, shall I?”
    “No. Different from others. Top left. Blue ring binder. Show me. Something I want to see.”
    “Righty-oh, I’ll just get rid of this wet stuff and put a kettle on for our cup of tea, and then we’ll settle down and have
     a good look.”
    The folder was one Anne had put together for a Social History project. She was in the Sixth at the time, so it would have
     been 1952—a good year, Flora in her first job, in a tiny flat just behind Harrods; Anne in her last school year, intelligent,
     pretty, already a little tending to detach herself from the family, but not yet into the desperate withdrawal that came later;
     Dick at Eton, and according to his tutor showing signs of pulling himself together.
    “Would you like me to take a few photographs?” Rachel had suggested.
    “That would be super, Ma. Only if you want to, you know? You don’t have to go to town.”
    “Nonsense. It’ll give me a chance to play with the half-plate.”
    Not the least of Dilys’s virtues was her enjoyment of looking at photograph albums. She slid the reading desk across the bed,
     laid the folder in place and opened it at the beginning.
    “My, what a big picture! And doesn’t it look handsome like that.”
    Yes, the clear summer light and the motionless subject had suited the half-plate very well. There, on the first spread, opposite
     a page of Anne’s neat italic handwriting (still then showing the self-consciousness of a newly acquired skill) was the view
     of Forde Place from the main gate, with the monkey puzzle to the right and the stable block to the left. Almost nothing had
     changed since the afternoon when Rachel had first seen it.
    Jocelyn had stopped the car at the top of the drive.
    “Oh dear,” she had said.
    “I told you it was an eyesore,” he’d answered, and driven her on down to meet his parents.
    Anne’s researchers had tended to confirm the family legend that old Eli Matson hadn’t employed an architect, but had told
     his mill foreman to build him a house. The man, after all, was responsible for a couple of perfectly adequate mills. Certainly
     the house had that look. There was a vernacular style, still to be seen along these valleys: severe facades of brickwork,
     undecorated apart from a change of colour for the surrounds of the ranked, flat-arched windows; sweeps of narrow-eaved slate
     roof, soaring stacks; proportions, achieved by eye and instinct rather than theory, that were often strongly satisfying. When
     Rachel had realised how many demolitions were likely to come she had spent eighteen months systematically recording what still
     stood, and years later had given her collection to the local record office.
    These virtues didn’t tame easily to domesticity. Forde Place hadn’t the look of a mill in miniature, but of one somehow compacted—drop
     it in water and it would then expand into a mill. Even the chimneys