The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood

Author:Caroline Blackwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McNally Editions
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

2

Dearest…

This is the last time I shall ever write to you. I have written to you so often in these last wretched weeks, and if all my letters had not been imaginary I would now like to ask you to burn them. They all seem hectic and irrelevant. Everything is changed. Everything is over.

I see no point in writing to you any more, for I no longer have any need to clarify my own dilemma. Now I have no dilemma. I feel much calmer. At least I am no longer in the state of near-dementia which for me always seems to be produced by any state of agonising indecision. I have talked to Renata. Everything for me is over.

I went in to see Renata in her bedroom when she got back from school. She was sitting in an old wicker chair and watching a local news programme on the TV She never looked up when I came in.

‘Renata,’ I said in my carefully rehearsed voice. ‘There is something I want to talk to you about.’

Renata went on staring at the TV I have been so enclosed in the last weeks, that I found it quite surprising to realise that there was still so much outside news—that it all seemed to be such bad news.

Renata was watching the most appalling fire which had just broken out in the Bronx. Glad to put off the moment when I would have to speak to her, I started watching it too. We both silently watched a house as it was stripped and gutted by flames. We watched the great, inky billows of smoke as they came belching from all its windows, and the firemen spluttered and choked as they battled to get their hoses near enough to souse the terrible blaze.

‘How really ghastly,’ I said. ‘Do you know if anyone was hurt?’

‘I expect they were,’ Renata murmured. ‘They haven’t really said.’

The news programme went on to show an interview with a shifty pear-faced minor city official who had been accused of bribery and fiddling with the city funds.

‘I wonder if you would mind turning off the TV for a moment. There is something quite important that I would like us both to discuss.’

Renata got up with an awkward flounce and pressed the button on the set so that the minor city official started to fade on the screen until his dishonest, protesting, pear-shaped face shrank to nothing more than a gleaming white dot.

‘Why don’t you come in the front room?’ I said to Renata. Unless I sat on her bed there was nowhere for me to sit in Renata’s room, and I found there was something distasteful about sitting on this weird girl’s bed. ‘It’s so much more pleasant in the front room. Why don’t we both go in there where it’s really comfortable. It will be so much easier there for us to talk.’

Renata got up and followed me with what seemed like a very unwilling grace. I realised with a shock that Renata had hardly ever set foot in the front room before.

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