Free The Darkening Hour by Penny Hancock Page A

you something. We are lucky I have found this
     work. It means things will get better for all of us! Look after your grandmother for me, and keep smiling until we’re together again. I think of you all the time and send you all my
     love.
    When I have charged my mobile and put credit on it, I promise I will call.
    Your loving
    Ummu.
    How to explain that while her daddy vanished without trace, I will come home? How can I make her understand that not everyone disappears?
    I hear the key in the lock and realise Dora has come home. I see myself through her eyes. The quiet housemaid, having completed her chores, taking a few minutes to herself to write home, because
she cannot even afford credit on her phone.
    I cover the paper with my arm because I don’t want her to know I took it from the old man or that in order to send it, I needed to take her money to buy stamps.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Daddy’s in his chair, a little sleepy, when I get back from work. I’m eager to see how his first full day with Mona went.
    ‘Daddy.’ I sit down close to him, speak into his ear. His eyes flash open.
    ‘Hello, Daddy. How are you?’
    He stares at me, waiting to surface from his dreams.
    ‘Theodora, God’s precious gift,’ he says, smiling. My heart warms.
    ‘Yes – hi, Daddy. I just came down to see if you wanted anything.’
    ‘I have everything a man could wish for. I don’t want for anything, my dear. Though you might like to be a darling and bring me a whisky.’
    ‘You had a good day with Mona?’ I ask as I pour him his ‘two fingers’ and add a little soda, the way he likes it.
    ‘She’s a lovely girl, you know,’ he says. ‘An excellent cook. Generous too. She bought me clementines. And chocolate. And we bought something else . . . oh, I don’t
remember now . . .’
    I squeeze his hand. Tell myself it’s fine that he should believe she bought the fruit with her own money; it’ll help them to establish a good relationship. I’ll let his mistake
pass this time.
    I leave Daddy with his whisky and go up to the house.
    It smells fresher than it’s ever been when I get in. Of lemon and bleach and polish.
    Even the air feels cleaner, as if it’s been allowed to flow again after being shut in for a long time. I push open the door of the drawing room. There’s still the faint smell in here
of stale cigarette smoke, and Leo’s on the sofa, but the debris that surrounds him after a day of TV gazing has been cleared away.
    Goodness! I don’t know how I stood it before! Mona has done an excellent – an amazing – job. I go over to the mantelpiece and run my finger along it. Yes, she’s dusted. I
didn’t expect, when I employed her to look after Daddy, that I’d have the cleaning thrown in.
    I peer into the kitchen. Clean and tidy. Even the quarry-tiled floor – one of the things Roger and I loved about the house when we bought it, but that had got grimy over the years –
gleams. It’s a beautiful kitchen. It attracted us straight away, with its built-in dresser along one wall, and its window out onto the garden at one end, onto the street and the church
opposite, at the other, its Rayburn and the large table I like to sit at in the mornings. But I’d lost interest in its aesthetics recently, since Leo didn’t seem to care. Mona’s
arranged the crockery on the dresser, placed lemons on a dish, even put some of the Chinese lanterns from the garden in a vase. It looks like something out of a magazine.
    There’s a light shining beneath Mona’s door. She must have retreated to her room in time for my arrival, and this discretion is something I approve of too. Something Zidana was very
bad at, knowing when to make herself inconspicuous.
    I put the kettle on, take a piece of sliced white bread and a cheese triangle, fold the bread over it and bite. This is a secret pleasure. One I would never admit to my friends who are obsessed
with the latest organic ingredients, all glued to cookery programmes in the