Silver Birches by Adrian Plass

Author:Adrian Plass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan

CHAPTER FOUR

Saturday Afternoon

Later that day I found myself involved in an activity as bizarre and unusual as anything I had ever done. And it nearly resulted in my death.

Never a particularly adventurous sort of person, I was generally incapable of resisting what one might call “leads.” Jessica rudely maintained that it was just a case of me not being able to keep my nose out of other people’s business, but it was more than that really. In my experience little things could easily lead to great things, and that was precisely what happened on Saturday afternoon.

It seems an inevitable feature of any kind of residential weekend, however congenial the residents, that there is one period — more often than not it tends to be the Saturday afternoon — when a certain bleak aimlessness descends, and the whole affair begins to look like a very bad idea indeed. It felt rather like that after Angela drove us back from the pub. Our meal had been so light and bright with chatter and laughter that it really did feel as though some ill-intentioned magician had cast a negative spell on the atmosphere of Headly Manor during our absence.

No agenda had been set for the second half of the afternoon. Angela disappeared into her office to attend to urgent business matters as soon as we returned, inviting us all to help ourselves from the kitchen to anything we wanted in the way of tea. By the time I came back in from a short stroll around the perimeter of the grounds at about four, it seemed that everyone else must have headed for their rooms to sleep or rest or read. Fires had been laid in readiness for the evening but were not yet lit, and the house was far too big and draughty to offer any real comfort or cosiness in the larger downstairs rooms. I knew, from all too frequent exposure to the joys and sorrows of conferences and church weekends in cold, echoing country houses, that these periods of bleakness were often deceptive. They were no more authentic and reliable as experiences than the sessions of sparkling fellowship and profound identification and togetherness that sometimes followed them. I reluctantly confessed to myself that it was very nearly refreshing to feel such a familiar sense of discomfort, one that was in no way connected with the desolation of loss. I could do something about this problem. The sensible thing for me on these occasions was to have a very deep, very hot bath and then either crouch over any heat source available in my room or simply get into bed for a while and read or doze until something else was due to happen.

Finding the house so chilly and cheerless on returning, my Plan A had been to locate an easily readable book in the library, take it upstairs, run gallons of hot water (please, God, let there be hot water!) into the huge, enameled Victorian bath with the claw legs

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