Free Prisoner's Base by Celia Fremlin Page A

must have crept down and bolted the front door after all! And now, supposing Helen wasn’t in—now what? Sleepily, irritably, Claudia fumbled with the problem in her mind. She would have to go down, of course, and unbolt the door again … what a pest … what abore … why must Mavis be such a fool? … the thoughts churned over in her brain, over and over, jumbled together, appearing and reappearing like garments through the window of a washing-machine … and in less than five minutes Claudia was asleep, her last, muddled thought being: I do hope Helen will remember not to disturb anyone!

CHAPTER VII
    C LAUDIA NEED NOT have worried; Helen was quite as anxious to get in unnoticed that evening as Claudia could have been on her behalf. She had, indeed, gone to the trouble of avoiding the front of the house altogether, coming instead across the field at the back, slipping along under cover of the hedge, as wary, as purposeful, as any other of the creatures of the summer night. The long grass was already soaked with dew, and the wet, stiff roots felt squeaky against the crepe rubber soles of her sandals. But they did not actually squeak, and if they had they could hardly have given her away, amid the myriad other squeakings and tiny wailings of the night. No one but herself would hear them; indeed, no one, in all probability , could hear any of the night sounds as she heard them. At fifteen, she could still hear the squeaking of the bats as they darted and swooped above the hedge. “By the time you are grown up,” Granny had once told her, “you won’t hear them any more. Your ears will be less acute for the high sounds”—and ever since then, the sound of the bats on summer nights had held for Helen a beauty so magical, so agonising, that neither words nor tears could begin to touch it. Just sometimes, during the English lessons at school under Miss Landor, the answer seemed momentarily within reach:
    “She dwells with Beauty; Beauty that must die;…”
    Helen tiptoed on, through the long grass and the motionless, closed buttercups. The quietness of her movements seemed now to be less a precaution against being observed than a tribute to the loveliness of the summer night, and to the poem which swirled and throbbed in her mind—no, more in her throat, really, not her mind….
    But all the same, she did need to be careful. It would never do to be discovered coming in at this hour. Helen paused at the gate into the garden, and reviewed the back windows of her home.
    The whole of the ground floor was in darkness. Well, that was all right, then. She could just walk in through the back door, and slip up to her room, and no one need know anything at all about her outing this evening. No one would be able to ask her any questions—nothing.
    But as she approached the darkened house, Helen began to feel qualms of doubt. True, these back windows—the kitchen the dining-room, and Daddy’s study—were all dark—but what about the front? Suppose they were all in the drawing-room for some reason this evening—visitors or something—and had simply forgotten to put on any of the hall or passage lights yet? And supposing, just as she was slipping through the hall towards the stairs, the drawing-room door were to burst open, with a great surge of noise, and light, and fuss; and to the ordinary fuss would now be added the fuss about why she was creeping in so furtively; and the visitors would all gather round, bright and grinning, so that for their sakes the disapproval and the questions would all have to be couched in the form of banter and spiky little jokes; but the flashing eyes and the tight lips would tell her that the real reckoning was still to come.
    No. Some risks are not worth taking. And there were plenty of other ways, for one who had known the house all her life.
    The ladder had not been used since last autumn. Since then it had lain its full length, neglected, against the wall under the kitchen window. As she