Blood Lines by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub

Her worst misgivings were realised. Beatrix yelled for Gwenda. She wasn’t much hurt but she was frightened. Her fears had been real and yet they had not been real, they were of the kind that wake the sufferer with vague apprehensions during the night but are not much more than an eccentricity by day, superstitious injunctions that if not obeyed may result in disaster, so why not obey them? But this had proved them right, proved her right. Gwenda offered to call the doctor. ‘I don’t want him,’ said Beatrix. At their last encounter she had overheard him telling Gwenda her troubles were ‘in the old soul’s imagination.’ ‘Well, shall I have a look at your back, Mrs C-G?’ ‘No, leave me alone. Now this has happened I shan’t sleep a wink. Or if I do I shall re-live the nightmare of that picture falling on me.’ The picture, a portrait of Beatrix’s grandfather in a morning coat with some sort of chain of office hanging round his neck, was examined by Clive who found its cord badly frayed. There must have been thirty or forty pictures of equal size and weight – if not all of such unattractive subjects – in the house, and Beatrix said she would be unable to sleep ever again until she knew all the cords had been replaced. Clive set about it straight away, although it was half-past nine in the evening.

Beatrix said, ‘I may be doing a very imprudent thing, Gwenda, but I am going to take a sleeping pill.’

‘Quite right,’ said Gwenda. ‘After all, the odds against your caps coming off and sticking in your throat must be about ten thousand to one.’ ‘I wouldn’t know about that. I’m not a bookmaker. As a matter of fact I would normally consider the chances quite high, as you know, only not now the picture has fallen on me.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Lightning isn’t going to strike twice, is it? It’s not in the nature of things for a picture to fall on me and then for my teeth to get stuck in my throat. You might as well say that tonight I’m just as much in danger as ever of being burnt to death by faulty electricity when obviously I’m not.’

‘If you say so,’ said Gwenda doubtfully and she found the sleeping pills and brought one to Beatrix with her hot drink.

By eleven-fifteen Clive had renewed the cords on twenty-two pictures. ‘I shall call it a day,’ he said to his wife. ‘Enough is enough.’ ‘You’ll check up on the electric plugs, won’t you?’ Clive did. He went into his own flat and to bed just before midnight. Gwenda put her arms round him in her sleep. On the floor below, at the front of the house, in the big master bedroom newly fitted in shell-pink shag, Beatrix lay perilously near the edge of the bed. The drug had a powerful effect on her because in all her life she had only taken a soporific twice before. Still and totally relaxed, she lay as one dead.

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