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

appeared to be lacking their upper sixty feet. The stables
     too—they should have housed bale-hoppers, not traps and horses. In the early years of her marriage Rachel couldn’t have imagined
     that she could bear to live here. Now she could hardly remember having wanted to live anywhere else.
    Dilys turned the page. Ah. Rachel had forgotten how beautiful. Almost pure abstract. The near-dead lighting of a cloudy noon.
     Course after course of dark unweatherable bricks, and the lower corner of a window. She and Jocelyn had once come round the
     corner of the house and found an old builder, there to repair one of the greenhouses, actually caressing a stretch of wall.
     At their footsteps he had looked up, unashamed. “Lovely work that,” he’d said. “You wouldn’t find a brickie to touch it, these
     days. Stand a thousand years, that will, and a thousand after.”
    Another page. The fire escape. Anne had told the story opposite, how Eli as a young man had worked in a factory that had been
     gutted by fire, and workers, some of them as young as eight, had died, trapped on the upper floors. All his mills had fire
     escapes, and so of course did his house, good solid cast iron, painted dark industrial green, zigzagging brazenly up the west
     facade to the nursery floor. Jocelyn’s parents had buried it in Virginia creeper, whose autumn blaze clashed hideously with
     the purple bricks of the house, but this had got honey fungus and died during the war. On taking over the house Jocelyn had
     had the ironwork scraped down and repainted, and Rachel had realised that she actually liked the fire escape for the same
     reason that she had learnt to like the whole building, that it was, emphatically and uniquely, itself.
    More pages. Views and details. The stable clock; the bell in its little turret; the boiler shed for the greenhouses. Not many
     interiors. The main staircase, of course, but few of the actual rooms, as they fitted in less well with Anne’s thesis, being
     surprisingly light and lively, though often oddly proportioned. Jocelyn’s parents, on moving in in the nineteen twenties,
     had redecorated in a nondescript but not unpleasing way; too late for arts and crafts, too early for art deco. Jocelyn, often
     radical in practical matters, was deeply conservative in his tastes. If a room needed to be done up, he didn’t see that it
     needed to be done differently.
    Tucked in at the end of the folder was a large plain envelope.
    “More photos,” said Dilys, peeking in. “Want to look, dearie? Here you are, then.”
    Spares. Other interiors. The greenhouses. The laundry. The fire escape again, looking dizzingly down from above. The old nursery—this
     very room. Last of all, Jocelyn at his desk in the study.
    “You’re supposed to be taking pictures of the house, aren’t you? You don’t want people in them.”
    “I need a focal point.”
    (Liar. She wanted a picture of him at his desk. It would be her fee for taking all this trouble for his Anne.)
    “Oh, if you must.”
    “You’re going to have to sit still when I tell you. It’ll be a long exposure because I don’t want to bring a lot of lights
     in. That’s why the sitters in some of those old photographs look as if they’d been stuffed.”
    “I can look stuffed as well as any man I know.”
    And, of course, he’d stayed as still as a tree stump while she counted the thirty seconds. You could see every wisp of his
     sparse, sandy hair. His hand, poised above the letter he was writing, had not quivered. His head was bent into the soft glow
     of the lamp, the rest of his body in shadow. Glow and shadow patterned the room. She had waited till the evening, because
     this was the hour she had wished to celebrate. Though there were more obviously comfortable rooms in the house, this was where
     they always sat when alone, a habit begun in the feebleness and chill of his homecoming, because coal had still been rationed
     and the study was simpler to make