Free A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell Page B

that for you. I tell you what, I’ll leave doing they old bits of silver till Friday and give him a ring.”
    A long dialogue ensued with someone called Rodge in which Eva enquired after Doris and Mum and “the boy” and “the girl” (young married people, these last, with children of their own) and finally got a promise of assistance.
    “He says he’ll pop in when he knocks off.”
    “Hope he doesn’t have to take it away,” said Eunice.
    “Never know with they old sets, do you? You’ll have to have a look at the paper instead.”
    Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur.
    Rodge Meadows came and he did have to take the set away.
    “Could be a couple of days, could be a week. Give me a ring if you don’t hear nothing from Auntie Eva. I’m in the book.”
    Two days later, in the solitude and silence and boredom of Lowfield Hall, a compulsion came over Eunice. Without any idea of where to go or why she was going, she found herself changing the blue and white check dress for the Crimplene suit, and then making her first unescorted assay into the outside world. She closed all the windows, bolted the front door, locked the door of the gun room, and started off down the drive. It was August 14. If the television set hadn’t broken down she would never have gone. Sooner or later one of her own urges or the efforts of the Coverdales would have got her out of that house, but she would have gone in the evening or on a Sunday afternoon when Greeving Post Office and Village Store, Prop. N. Smith, would have been closed. If, if, if … If she had been able to read, the television might still have held charms for her, but she would have looked the engineer’s number up in the phonebook on Saturday morning, and by Tuesday or Wednesday she would have had that set back. On Saturday, the fifteenth, Rodge did, in fact, return it, but by then it was too late and the damage was done.
    She didn’t know where she was going. Even then, it was touch and go whether she went to Greeving at all, for she took the first turn off the lane, and two miles and three quarters of an hour later she was in Cocklefield St. Jude. Not much more than a hamlet is Cocklefield St. Jude, with an enormous church but no shop. Eunice came to a crossroads. The signpost was useless to her but she wasn’t afraid of getting lost. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and as compensation perhaps for her singular misfortune she had been endowed with a sense of direction and a “nose” for where she was almost as good as an animal’s. Accordingly, she took the narrowest exit from the cross, which led her down a sequestered defile, a lane no more than eight feet wide and overhung with the dark late summer foliage of ash and oak, and where one car could not pass another without drawing deep into the hedge.
    Eunice had never been in such a place in her life. A cow with a face like a great white ghost stuck its head over the hedge and lowed at her. In a sunny patch, where there was a gap in the trees, a cock pheasant with clattering feathers lolloped across in front of her, all gilded chestnut and fiery green. She marched on, head up, alarmed but resolute, knowing she was going the right way.
    And so, at last, to Greeving. Into the heart of the village itself, for the lane came out opposite the Blue Boar. She turned right, and having passed the terrace of cottages inhabited by various Higgses and Newsteads and Carters, the small Georgian mansion of Mrs. Cairne, and the discreet, soberly decorated neonless petrol station kept by Jim Meadows, she found herself on the triangle of turf outside the village store.
    The shop was double-fronted, being a conversion of the ground floor of a largish, very old cottage,