Free Last Act of All by Aline Templeton Page A

still loomed by the window – Chris Dyer.
    Her recoil must have been obvious, for he gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘The welcome guest! Did Neville forget to tell you I was staying?’
    ‘ No, of course not. You just gave me a start as I came in.’
    ‘ That’s a weight off my mind. I would simply hate to think you didn’t want me.’
    He was moving towards her as Neville came in. His eyes travelled from one to the other with speculative, malicious amusement.
    ‘ Don’t let me interrupt anything,’ he drawled, but Helena ignored him.
    ‘ If you’ll both excuse me, I’ve got a bit of a headache, so I’m just going up to bed.’
    It was Chris who expressed polite concern. Neville’s face, she thought as she closed the door, displayed the thwarted annoyance of a spoiled child when the grown-ups have ruined his fun by taking away the sparrow before he could really settle to pulling off its wings.
    Her steps dragged as she climbed the stairs. She was papering over the cracks. It was what she had done all her life; now the paper was peeling and the cracks gaping wider and wider, yet she still lacked the resolution to pull the whole rotten edifice down. She made a timid prayer that something would happen to sort it out, and despised herself.
    The only thing worse, they say, than unanswered prayer, is being given what you thought you wanted.

 
    Chapter Four
     
    The mirror in the old hallstand lent Martha Bateman’s face a drowned, greenish tinge as she peered at it, but she had long ago ceased to notice that. It had been here in the hallway of this house when it belonged to Joe’s parents, and Joe’s father’s parents before that.
    In any case, it was a long time since looking in the glass had given her pleasure — not that she hadn’t once been well enough. But now her interest was strictly practical, to ensure that the grey wool hat was set decently straight, covering the rigidity of the iron-grey perm.
    This morning, she barely saw her image, though her fingers automatically twitched the collar of her Sunday coat into place. There was trouble on its way; she read the signs as surely as she would have deduced the otter’s presence from the arrowhead of spreading ripples on Markham’s Fen. It might be no more than the follies of strangers, as unthreatening as the posturings on the television screen. But some instinct was telling her it was not so, and there was wariness already in her hooded eyes.
    With handbag and gloves in her hand, she opened the door of the front room. Joe Bateman was sitting in vest and trousers, with his tabloid Sunday newspaper in his calloused joiner’s hands, in the nearest approach to squalor he could achieve in any house that Martha Bateman cleaned.
    Her mouth, grim-set already, tightened further. He could be managed only so far — stubborn as Eardley’s pigs, the Batemans were, in the village phrase.
    ‘ You see you remember to put on them potatoes, like I said.’
    He took in her church-going outfit, and a slow, knowing smile crossed his face. ‘Well, vicar’ll think it’s Christmas, with all the old hens coming in to cackle.’
    ‘ You’re one to talk, Joe Bateman. When did you ever set foot over the threshold, except for your own wedding?’
    His manner might be ponderous, but the reply was pointed enough. ‘And the christening. Don’t forget the christening. You set a lot of store by that, seems to me.’
    Her eyes travelled involuntarily to the photograph on the mantelpiece in its brass frame: a boy, smiling, but with features which somehow testified to the fact that he was not quite as other boys are. Her mouth softened as she looked at it, but only for a moment.
    ‘ And for the funeral,’ she said harshly. ‘Well, three visits won’t get you to heaven, not to my way of thinking.’
    ‘ I’ll have good company where I’m going, then.’ Unruffled, he chuckled coarsely as he waved the newspaper at her. ‘Takes something out of the ordinary to get you there,