The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

further, as if wondering, now, whether something of me, personally, was anywhere superimposed on the room’s characterless ugliness. But there were no photographs, and what books I had had with me were packed. The questing look came to rest, defeated, on the clothes untidily hanging from the drawer I had been emptying, on the handbag I had pulled open to get my cigarettes, from which had spilled a lipstick, a pocket-comb, and a small gold cigarette lighter whose convoluted initials caught the light quite clearly: M.G .
    Her eyes came back to my face. I suppressed a desire to say tartly: ‘Satisfied?’ and said instead: ‘Are you sure you won’t smoke?’ I was already lighting another for myself.
    â€˜I think I might, after all.’ She took cigarette and light with the slight awkwardness that betrayed it as an unaccustomed action.
    I sat down on the table again and said, uncompromisingly: ‘Well?’
    She hesitated, looking for the first time not quite at ease, but it wasn’t discomfort that touched the heavy face; it looked, incongruously, like excitement. It was gone immediately. She took a rapid puff at the cigarette, looked down at it as if she wondered what it was there for, then said in that flat voice of hers:
    â€˜I’ll come to the main point first, and explain afterwards. You were right in saying that our interest in you was more than the normal curiosity you’d expect the likeness to arouse. You were even right – terribly right – when you said we had “something at stake”.’
    She paused. She seemed to be waiting for comment.
    I moved again, restlessly. ‘Fair enough. You want something from me. Your brother hinted as much. Well, what? I’m listening.’
    She laid her cigarette carefully down in the ashtray I had placed near her on the table. She put her hands flat down on her thighs and leaned forward slightly. ‘What we want,’ she said, ‘is Annabel, back at Whitescar. It’s important. I can’t tell you how important. She must come back.’
    The voice was undramatic: the words, in their impact, absurdly sensational. I felt my heart give a little painful twist of nervous excitement. Though I had suspected some nonsense of this kind – and of course it was nonsense – all along, the knowledge did nothing to prevent my blood jerking unevenly through my veins as if driven by a faulty pump. I said nothing.
    The brown eyes held mine. She seemed to think everything had been said. I wondered, with a spasm of genuine anger, why people with some obsessive trouble of their own always thought that others should be nerve-end conscious of it, too. A cruel impulse made me say, obtusely: ‘But Annabel’s dead.’
    Something flickered behind the woman’s eyes. ‘Yes, she’s dead. She can’t come back, Miss Grey, she can’t come back . . . to spoil anything for you . . . or for us.’
    I watched the ash from my cigarette float and fall towards the waste-basket. I didn’t look at her. I said at length, with no expression at all: ‘You want me to go to Whitescar. As Annabel Winslow.’
    She leaned back. The basket chair gave a long, gasping creak like a gigantic breath of relief. It was obvious that she had taken my apparent calmness for compliance.
    â€˜Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s it. We want you to come to Whitescar . . . Annabel.’
    I laughed then. I couldn’t help it. Possibly the laughter was as much the result of taut nerves as of the obvious absurdity of her proposal, but if there was a suggestion of hysteria in it, she took no notice. She sat quite still, watching me with that expression which, suddenly, I recognised. It was the look of someone who, themselves uninvolved, coolly assesses a theatrical performance. She had all this time been weighing my looks, my voice, my movements, my reactions, against those of the Annabel