Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales by P. D. James

Author:P. D. James [James, P. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780525520733
Google: 4enWDgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0525520732
Goodreads: 35137916
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2017-11-14T06:00:00+00:00

The Girl Who Loved Graveyards

She couldn’t remember anything about that day in the hot August of 1956 when they took her to live with her Aunt Gladys and Uncle Gordon in the small house in East London, at 49 Alma Terrace. She knew that it was three days after her tenth birthday and that she was to be cared for by her only living relations now that her father and grandmother were dead, killed by influenza within a week of each other. But those were just facts someone, at some time, had told her briefly. She could remember nothing of her previous life. Those first ten years were a void, unsubstantial as a dream that had faded but that had left on her mind a scar of unarticulated childish anxiety and fear. For her, memory and childhood both began with that moment when, waking in the small, unfamiliar bedroom with the kitten, Blackie, still curled up asleep on a towel at the foot of her bed, she had walked barefoot to the window and drawn back the curtain. And there, stretched beneath her, lay the cemetery, luminous and mysterious in the early morning light, bounded by iron railings and separated from the rear of Alma Terrace only by a narrow path. It was to be another warm day, and over the serried rows of headstones lay a thin haze pierced by the occasional obelisk and by the wing tips of marble angels whose disembodied heads seemed to be floating on particles of shimmering light. And as she watched, motionless in an absorbed enchantment, the mist began to rise and the whole cemetery was revealed to her, a miracle of stone and marble, bright grass and summer-laden trees, flower-bedecked graves and intersecting paths stretching as far as the eye could see. In the distance she could just make out the spire of a Victorian chapel, gleaming like the spire of some magical castle in a long-forgotten fairy tale. In those moments of growing wonder she found herself shivering with delight, an emotion so rare that it stole through her thin body like a pain. And it was then, on the first morning of her new life, with the past a void and the future unknown and frightening, that she made the cemetery her own. Throughout her childhood and youth it was to remain a place of delight and mystery, her refuge and her solace.

It was a childhood without love, almost without affection. Her uncle Gordon was her father’s elder half-brother; that too she had been told. He and her aunt weren’t really her relations. Their small capacity for love was expended on each other, and even here it was less a positive emotion than a pact of mutual support and comfort against the threatening world that lay outside the trim curtains of their small, claustrophobic sitting room.

But they cared for her as dutifully as she cared for the cat Blackie. It was a fiction in the household that she adored Blackie,

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