Free The Fallen Curtain by Ruth Rendell Page A

her clothes flung about on the coverlet. Della picked them up and folded them. She was coming back from the yard, having fastened those bolts, when Rosamund sat up and said, “What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep?”
    “Mrs Swanson,” said Della with a light indulgent laugh, “wouldn’t be able to sleep if she knew you’d left that side gate unbolted.”
    “Did I? Honestly, Della, I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. I can’t think of anyone but Chris. He’s the most marvellous person and I do think he’s just as mad about me as I am about him. I feel as if he’s changed my whole life.”
    Della let her spend nearly all the following evening describing the marvellous Chris, how brilliant he was—though at present unable to get a job fitting his talents—how amusing, how highly educated—though so poor as to be reduced to borrowing a friend’s room while that friend was away. She listened and smiled and made appropriate remarks, but she wondered when she had last been so bored. Every time she got up to try and play one of her Spanish records, Rosamund was off again on another facet of Chris’s dazzling personality, until at lastDella had to say she had a headache and would Rosamund mind leaving her on her own for a bit?
    “Anyway, you’ll see him tomorrow. I’ve asked him for a meal.”
    Unluckily, this happened to be the evening Della was going to supper with her aunt on the other side of London. They had evidently enjoyed themselves, judging by the mess in the kitchen, Della thought when she got home. There were few things she disliked more than wet dishes left to drain. Rosamund was asleep. Della crept out into the yard and checked that the bolts were fastened.
    “I heard you wandering about ever so late,” said Rosamund in the morning. “Were you upset about anything?”
    “Certainly not. I simply found it rather hard to get to sleep because it was past my normal time.”
    “Aren’t you funny?” said Rosamund, and she giggled.
    The next night she missed the last bus.
    Della had passed a pleasant evening, studying firstly the firm’s annual report, then doing a Spanish exercise. By eleven she was in bed, reading the memoirs of a woman company chairman. Her bedside light went off at half-past and she lay in the dark waiting for the sound of the side gate.
    Her clock had luminous hands, and when they passed ten to twelve she began to feel a nasty, tingly, jumping sensation all over her body. She put on the light, switched it off immediately. She didn’t want Rosamund bursting in with all her silly questions and comments. But Rosamund didn’t burst in, and the hands of the clock closed together on midnight. There was no doubt about it. The last bus had gone and Rosamund hadn’t been on it.
    Well, the silly girl needn’t think she was going to stand this sort of thing. She’d bolt that side gate herself and Rosamund could stay out in the street all night. Of course she might ring the front-door bell, she was silly and inconsiderate enough to do that, but it couldn’t be helped. Della would far rather be awakened at one or two o’clock than lie there knowing that side gate was open for anyone to come in. She put on herdressing gown and made her way through the spotless kitchen to the garden room. Rosamund had hung a silly sort of curtain over the back door, not a curtain really but a rather dirty Indian bedspread. Della lifted it distastefully—and then she realised. She couldn’t bolt the side gate because the back door into the yard was locked and Rosamund had the key.
    A practical person like herself wasn’t going to be done that way. She’d go out by the front door, walk round to the side entrance and—but, no, that wouldn’t work either. If she opened the gate and bolted it on the inside, she’d simply find herself bolted inside the yard. The only thing was to climb out of the window. She tried desperately to undo the window screws, but they had seized up from years of