leaving the children alone. She hastened her steps. She must deal with Miss Yaxley quickly, and get back.
She went round the back way into Miss Yaxley’s. There was no sign of the old lady in the back garden; though the garden kneeler still lay there, with a trug of weeds and a knife beside it. The weeds were old and withered; the blade of the knife was rusted with overnight dew. It made her more uneasy; Miss Yaxley was not one to forget, and leave a good knife out to rust.
She knocked on the back door. No answer, though it swung open under her knocking. She put her head round the door, and shouted ‘Yoohoo’ as she had done so long ago, at her granny’s. Then jumped with shock.
Against the dim light of the lace-curtained window, Miss Yaxley was sitting in her chair, as still as a stone. Her head did not turn; her body did not move.
Oh God, thought Rose, a stroke, a heart attack. She moved across trembling and took hold of Miss Yaxley’s hand as it lay in her lap. It was very cold. The certainty of the presence of death closed in on Rose like a cold shroud; a still agony inside a shroud of calm.
So it came as an even more dreadful shock when Miss Yaxley did move her head; when she opened her eyes. When she opened her old wrinkled lips feebly and no sound came out.
‘Are you all right?’ squeaked Rose. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Cold,’ said Miss Yaxley. ‘Cold.’
Rose looked wildly round. There was a heavy velvet cloth on the table. She whipped it off, and tucked it round Miss Yaxley’s shoulders and across her knees, lifting the cold hands one after the other and laying them on top.
The fire in the grate was cold white ash, long beyond reviving. But there was a worn greasy fan-heater lying in the corner. Rose pulled it out to Miss Yaxley’s feet, and pressed the switch. To her relief, it came on with an ancient chirruping whirr. Real heat came out, dry and oppressive, but welcome to her hand.
‘Cup of tea,’ she said to Miss Yaxley loudly. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ She found the kettle and blundered about, looking for tea, sugar, milk in the strange kitchen and eventually finding them, slowed up by the constant glances in Miss Yaxley’s direction. The kettle boiled, she made the tea, and took it across to Miss Yaxley. Put it on the table beside her, and took and chafed old cold hands.
‘What happened, Miss Yaxley?’
The old bleary eyes looked at her emptily. The old lips moved, with their pathetic fringe of stray hairs.
‘They broke my winders,’ she said. And began to cry silently, the tears coursing down the wrinkled cheeks.
Rose whirled. The windows of the kitchen looked intact. But the room was cold, full of draughts coming under the door. She went and opened the door into the sitting-room, and gasped in disbelief.
Every pane in the windows had been systematically broken, from top to bottom. All Miss Yaxley’s polished precious things lay under a blizzard of broken glass. From room to room she went. Every room was the same. It was more horrible than a death.
She swept back to Miss Yaxley, full of rage.
‘Who’s done this? We must ring the police!’
Miss Yaxley shook her head, her old eyes wide with terror.
‘Not police! Make it worse!’
‘It’s those bloody villagers, isn’t it?’
Miss Yaxley nodded. ‘Don’t ring the police,’ she whispered again.
‘Why ever not?’ Indignation and disbelief boiled up in Rose.
‘I have to live with them. In the village.’ The old voice was stronger now. The old hand reached for the mug of tea at her elbow, feebly. Rose picked it up and helped her drink, as if she were a child.
‘They’ll just say . . . it was motorbike vandals. I didn’t see who did it. I was dozing in the chair. They stick together . . .’
‘You can’t stay here now,’ said Rose, firmly but tenderly.
The old lady nodded her head in agreement.
‘You should be in hospital . . .’
‘No, not hospital.’ The fear of hospital was as vivid in the old eyes as the fear of the glass-breakers.
‘Where, then?’
‘Sister . . . Sheringham. Go there.’
‘Is she on the phone?’
Nod.
‘What’s her number?’
The phone, an old-fashioned black model, lay on a tiny table in the corner. Rose seized it, and was glad to hear the dialling tone. And to get Miss Yaxley’s sister, who sounded at least as old as