[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.”“Why would he be after anything?”“He has to be.”“Are we stopping or are we going on?” She examined Catherine’s face.“Shall I just whisk through the rest? So when Mrs.Kent comes I will ask her what she recommends for the drive, whether to replant rhodies or to try some other shrubs.Aware of my responsibilities to Morne, I am determined to go cautiously and to obtain advice from every possible quarter.Of course I would dispense with all such opinions if I thought there was a chance of you coming and advising us on how to restore the gardens to their proper glory.I know that you must be thinking only of recovery at present, but once you see your way clear you would only have to give the smallest indication that you might consider it and I would keep all other ideas on hold.There is nothing more precious to me than the thought of restoring Morne to its former glory, as your mamma would have wished it to be, for as you know I hold her memory most dear.”“Really!”“The idea doesn’t appeal?”“What idea?”“The garden.”“I’d rather die.”“Sounds a nice job.”“That’s my home he’s talking about.He stole it after my mother died.Got hold of the mortgage.Forced my father out.Everything’s a deal.Everything’s an opportunity to make a killing.” She remembered the expression her father used.“He’d as soon sell his grandmother.”“Ah,” Kate said heavily.“I see.It couldn’t be that he’s got a conscience about it? Trying to make amends.”“I doubt it.”“A guilty conscience can strike us all,” Kate offered solemnly before returning once again to the letter.“I am safer with trees or should I say that trees are safer with me? I have been doing serious homework in the last couple of years and have discovered what you will know already, that there are some remarkable trees at Morne the Irish yews around the hollow, surely older than the house itself, the oak on the south lawn, which Old Patrick from the village estimates to be 300 years old (do you think this is possible?), and the beeches, which seem to reach beyond the sky, but which I am told may go any day in a storm because they have shallow roots.It is a terrible thought, that they may go, so I have had some new beeches planted, ones of good size, already some twenty feet high, so that there will be some equally majestic trees in fifty years or so:“That’s enough, thanks.”“There’s only a few more lines.Just’ she scanned the page ‘news ofMaeve, who’s been unwell but is now recovering ‘“Chuck it in the bin.”“Why don’t I just put it on the side here?”“I want it in the bin.If I could move from this bloody bed I would put it in the bin.”“The bin it is, then.”Despite the brandy, it took Catherine a long time to get to sleep, and then it was to dream all night, or so it seemed.She revisited the scenes she had described to Wilson, re-enacting them time and again, but with variations and additions that might or might not have been borrowed from other times and other dreams.In the morning two images remained intact.In one, which was recognisably a nightmare, she was in a dark place, making her way towards a series of rooms with half-open doors that radiated brilliant light.The floor was littered with what she took to be debris, but which turned out to be the heavy glutinous leaves of some vigorous plant whose tendrils wrapped themselves tighter and tighter around her legs, pulling her slowly to the floor.When she was completely immobilised something soft brushed against her face and clung to her nose and mouth and eyes, threatening to rob her of air.She would have fought the soft thing off but she couldn’t move her arms.Someone who was Alice and then not Alice was somewhere close by, weeping and wailing softly.In the other scene she replayed her arrival from France.She ran upstairs as before but, instead of stopping on the landing as she had described to Wilson, she ran on into the room where Ben and the man were fighting and found herself caught up in the struggle, though mysteriously unaffected by it.It was dark, but this didn’t prevent her from seeing a weapon in the man’s hand, a long baton that she identified as a baseball bat.In the instant she saw it, she realised that the man had finished with Ben, or perhaps Ben wasn’t there any more, and was coming for her so fast that she didn’t have time to raise her arms and ward off the blows.In the next instant she was back on the landing and the man was looming over her.As she cowered before him she saw the bat raised above his head, ready to strike
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]