Free Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns Page A

kitchen.
    The baker’s wife lay on the kitchen table, still and dead. She would no longer prance down the village street in transparent blouses, or lie beneath the willow trees on the river bank on summer afternoons. Doctor Hatt came and made arrangements for the body to be taken to hospital for a post mortem; and now they were waiting for the horse-drawn ambulance to arrive. The red kitchen curtains were drawn across the windows, and the corpse was covered by a sheet—which Grandmother Willoweed pulled down now and then to have another look at the dead face.
    “Did you know her hair was dyed, Norah?” she asked the terrified maid, whose trembling hands were plucking a chicken. The girl kept her back turned towards the table and envied Eunice, safe in her bedroom on the doctor’s orders—but why had he told her to call at the surgery the following day for an examination? “And bring your sister with you,” he had said. Did he think she was suffering from the madness? she wondered, but it was enough to make a girl faint seeing a mad woman going on like that. He had given her something to make her sleep; but perhaps that was to keep the madness at bay. Norah could bear it no longer and left the half-plucked chicken to creep upstairs and look at her sleeping sister. She felt her brow, and it was cool; and she looked so pretty and peaceful lying there in her deep sleep. Norah was reassured and returned to the kitchen. Grandmother Willoweed was there again hovering about the dead woman.
    “Foolish girl,” she grumbled, “leaving the chicken like that, the cat might have got it.”
    “There isn’t a cat any more,” said Norah sadly. She had been fond of that little white cat.
    “No more there is,” the old woman replied thoughtfully. “The baker will have to take something off his bill. It was quite a valuable cat, and now his wife has killed it. I must speak to him about it when he comes to collect her.”

- CHAPTER XI -
    N ORAH AND Eunice sat in Doctor Hatt’s waiting room. They wore their white cotton gloves and felt ill at ease. Eunice said nothing and gazed out of the window with unseeing eyes; but Norah talked to a fat woman who was worried by flatulence and to a small boy on his own who was obviously suffering from mumps. Someone had left a copy of The Daily Courier on the table, and on the front page there was an article headed, ‘Baker’s Wife Runs Amok.’ Norah turned her eyes away; but the woman next to her seized the newspaper and tried to read bits out loud.
    “It says here she was a pitiful sight. I’ll say she was. And her husband is a very respected man in the village. That is more than his wife was, so he’s well rid of her, I say—”
    The woman went on and on and Norah tried to give her attention to the little boy. The madness, the madness, you couldn’t get away from it. She glanced at Eunice; but there was no sign of any madness there, although she was strangely quiet and sulky and had been so for days.
    “There’s the funeral bells,” the woman exclaimed, “I’d have dearly loved to have gone to that funeral if it hadn’t been for my wind,” and she listened enraptured to the sad tolling of the bells.
    Doctor Hatt was standing at the surgery door saying, “I can see you now, Eunice,” and he smiled at the girls kindly. They followed him into the ether-smelling surgery and stood close together by the door.
    “Now, Eunice,” he said, “I shall have to give you a thorough examination. You must take your clothes off behind that screen, and then I shall want you to lie on the couch.” They looked at the black, shiny couch with a strip of white running down the centre.
    Twenty minutes later the girls were walking down the village street, and they could still hear the funeral bell tolling in their ears although it had ceased some time ago. Eunice held on to her sister’s arm; but they did not speak to each other.
    They did not speak until they had reached the privacy of their