A Lovely Day to Die by Celia Fremlin Page B

was like a flower herself, so straight and slim, her red-gold hair aflame in the midsummer sun. Only her expression was less than flower-like; that, and the arrogant, possessive way she swung the heavy iron door-key from the middle finger of her right hand.
    “ I was here first!” she addressed me belligerently—though in fact I had made no attempt, as yet, to question her prior rights; questioning the rights of beautiful girls is not something that I’ve ever gone in for much—“ I was at the Estate Agent’s before nine this morning … I spoke to Miss Fry herself …”
    I, I, I. Here was a girl who was going to get her own way. A girl with whom it would be pointless to argue.
    But since when has anyone—particularly anyone with a University education—refrained from argument simply because he knows it to be pointless?
    “ I spoke to Miss Fry, too,” I lied glibly (actually Miss Fry was as yet only a name to me, from the Estate Agent’s lists); and I added, for good measure, “She told me I was just the sort of tenant she—”
    “No!” The girl was outraged, tossing her blazing head like a flame-thrower: “That’s what she said to me !She said I was just the sort of tenant she—”
    “She didn’t!”
    “She did!”
    The playground idiocy of the dialogue struck us both simultaneously; together we burst out laughing; and within minutes we were inside the cottage, exploring.
    *
    I don’t know what Theresa (for this I learned was the girl’s name) was thinking as she looked around; but for myself, I could see at once that this was the ideal setting for an aspiring writer. You know: the nitty-gritty, and all that, starting with a stone-flagged kitchen where nothing worked except, intermittently, and with terrible gurglings, a single cold-water tap. On the other side of the passageway was what I suppose you would call a “parlour”—a cavern of green darkness from vegetation overgrowing the cobwebby window and blotting out the midsummer sun. Upstairs —up, that is, a narrow flight of creaking wooden steps—there was a long, low attic bedroom, with one tiny grimy window and a sloping ceiling. For anyone planning to starve in a garret, this was the garret par excellence: only ten minutes away from the village pub, and everything inches thick in dust—no one had done any cleaning here in years, and so why should I be expected to start?
    All this was wasted on a woman: a woman’s first instinct would be to get at the place with a bucket and broom.
    I began trying to explain this to Theresa; but when I saw that all too familiar Women’s Lib look coming over her face, I hastily changed my tactics. There were other forms of dissuasion.
    “You do know, don’t you,” I said (and I’ll swear that at that moment I honestly had no idea that I was telling anything more than a light-hearted lie) “You do know, don’t you, that this place is supposed to be haunted?”
    Looking back, I can’t think what reaction I expected to evoke by this bit of invention. I can hardly have expected a girl like Theresa to go all pale and trembly at the idea, and to say that in that casenothing would induce her to rent the cottage, I could have it all for my own; but all the same I was a bit deflated when she merely laughed.
    “Well, of course I know!” she retorted. “That’s why I’m so anxious to live in it for a bit. I’m doing a thesis, you see, on Rural Superstitions, and so …”
    And so the afternoon shadows were reaching far across the tangled, overgrown garden, and the scent of the flowers was almost gone, by the time she’d finished telling me about her thesis, and her Sociology degree, and about her boy-friend who might, or who on the other hand might not, be coming to join her in the cottage, sooner, or maybe later.
    And after that it was my turn. I told her about my ambitions, and about the awfulness of having an English degree and already being twenty-two: but when it came to the question of how I