Free Cold to the Touch by Frances Fyfield Page A

endless, revealing nothing but sea and sky and unutterably tedious for revealing nothing more until a crowd of menacing seagulls appeared to hover and scream, filling the space and blocking out the sky. They came so close to the glass, they made her shield her eyes and yell, but once they were gone, wheeling away as suddenly as they had appeared and leaving the clouds intact, she wanted their noise. Nothing was left but the muted sound of the sea, and the lack of noise from the letterbox downstairs.
    The wooden frame of the sash window had the effect offraming and dividing the view. From her bed, she could see the sea through the bottom half, the sky tapering into the horizon through the top and even when she snuggled further down into her bed the damned horizon would never quite coincide with the middle of the window so that sometimes she thought she was looking at it through prison bars.
    Damn the seagulls and that silly fool who threw out stale bread for them most days. You could set your clock by her and yet, each time, Celia Hurly was shaken into angry surprise.
    She had been sitting on the side of the bed and now she reached for her stick to wave at the last departing seagull before falling back with the effort. The horizon rose above the central bar of the window. She did not have the energy to open the window and shout at dotty Mrs Smith, because if that stupid woman did not know by now that seagulls had no need of her bread there was no point in telling her. She had been cooing and throwing bread for these scavengers all year, always choosing to do so outside someone else’s house so that the crap went onto their roofs and windows, not hers. It wasn’t a personal vendetta, so Celia vowed to continue to smile at her should they meet in the hairdresser’s, because that was the right thing to do. And then, maybe, rub guano into her hair.
    Bloody seagulls. Bloody endless sky seen through too small a window and prison bars.
    The room was Spartan. The painted floorboards were rough on her feet once she left the safety of a small sheepskin rug at the bedside and moved towards the door. Everything in here was white, or off-white, depending on its age. White sheets, pillows, a yellowed bedspread and curtains best described as parchment and never closed since she hated thedark. White walls. The metal of the iron bedstead, also painted white, but chipped, was cold against her palm. She pulled on a white towel dressing gown over a cream nightdress, thinking how she had never liked white, not even for a wedding dress. It was only as a deterrent to her own worst impulses that this room was so plain and ill-designed for comfort. She kept it that way to put herself off spending too much time in it, but the strategy had failed because bed was still the best place in the world.
    There were times when she thought of herself as a lizard that had lost its legs by a process of evolution and had turned into a snake. A year or three of burrowing underground, sliding rather than walking, had made the legs redundant until all she was fit for was hiding under a rock. Still equipped with muscles and fangs, as well as with some capacity for the lightning strike, she had perhaps taken to the undergrowth of her own mattress a little too soon. It was not as if she could not walk, but she could scarcely see the point. There was nowhere she wanted to walk towards, and nowhere from which to run.
    Celia Hurly, widow of the parish, had moved several times in the same village, descending from the biggest house to the smallest, and with each move going further downhill, geographically. She retained ownership of four properties, including this hovel, and she planned to go back to any one of the others sometime. Maybe. Owning three properties subject to rental arrangements was a way of keeping her options open, but the last move had been a mistake. She had thought she wanted closeness to the sea, but she didn’t. She had lived at the top of the hill and