Sheltering Rain by Jojo Moyes Page B

gadgets that no longer worked. Here they had piles of moldering white embroidered linen, tablecloths and the like, a broken lamp shade, and some books, with titles like A Girl’s Guide to Horsemanship and Bunty Annual 1967 .
    Emboldened by the complicit, silent house, Sabine set off to explore some of the other rooms. Her grandfather’s door was closed, but between his and the bathroom was another room that she had not yet been into. Pulling the handle down slowly so that she didn’t make a noise, she opened the door and slid in.
    It was a man’s room, a study of sorts, but without the air of recent activity that characterized the yard office downstairs. That had tables full of letters, and ledgers, and color catalogs full of “stud” horses with names like “Filigree Jumping Jake III—by Filigree Flancake out of Jumping Jemimah,” all of whom looked pretty much the same to her, although Thom had said you could count their differences in tens of thousands of guineas. This study held the dusty air of neglect, its half-opened curtains hanging perfectly still, as if they had not been disturbed in years. It smelled of mildewed paper, and unbeaten carpets, and tiny particles of dust glinted, suspended in the air, as she moved. Sabine closed the door softly behind her, and walked into the center of the room, so that Bella paused hopefully and then dropped, groaning, onto the rug.
    There were no pictures of horses on the walls in here, apart from a framed cartoon of a shouting huntsman; just a yellowed, framed map of the Far East and a few black-and-white photographs of people in 1950s gear to cover the vast expanse of William Morris–style wallpaper. On built-in shelves by the window sat various-sized boxes, some of which had rolled-up manuscripts on the top, while on the center of the desk stood a large model of a gray battleship, presumably to scale. On a dark wood bookshelf to her right stood lots of hardbacked books, mainly about war and Southeast Asia, punctuated by a couple of humorous cartoon compilations and a paperback on after-dinner speaking. On the top shelf sat a series of decrepit leather-bound books, the gilt almost entirely rubbed off their spines.
    It was the other side of the room that caught her eye. Two leather-bound photograph albums, resting on a large box. Judging by their generous icing of dust, they had not been moved for some years.
    Sabine crouched down and gently pulled out one of the albums. It was labeled: 1955–. Sitting cross-legged, she pulled it into her lap and opened it, fingering the fine tissue between each of its stiff leaves.
    The pictures sat one to a page, and the first was of her grandmother. At least she thought it was her grandmother. It was a posed, studio shot of a young woman on a window seat, wearing a dark, slightly severe suit with a tiny collar, a matching dress, and a string of pearls. Her hair, which was dark brown instead of gray, had been set into waves, and she was wearing the makeup of the age: heavy brows and lashes, and dark, carefully outlined lips. She looked, for all her posing, slightly embarrassed, as if she had been caught doing something suspect. The next photograph was of her with a tall, young man. They stood next to a stand with a plant on it, he beaming with pride; her arm posted uncertainly through his, barely acknowledging him. She looked less embarrassed this time, more sure of herself, curiously dignified. It was something about her bearing, or her tall, slender frame. She didn’t slouch over her breasts, looking faintly apologetic, in the way that her own mother did.
    Sabine, now engrossed, flicked through the entire album. Toward the end of it, as well as pictures of her grandmother, looking at her most relaxed in a snapshot with another young, incredibly glamorous woman, were pictures of a baby in the kind of elaborate christening robe that you never saw now: all intricate crochet, and tiny, silk-covered