The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin

and largest, was still a lumber-room, as it had been for years.
    This attic was Imogen’s room only temporarily, of course. When all this turmoil of comings and goings had subsided (Imogen was still enough of a novice at widowhood to believe that it might), then she would choose one of the rooms down on the first floor for her own. Really her own, furnished according to her own taste, and not to the taste of Ivor’s ghost. She would buy cheap, bright rugs that hadn’t come from Persia or Benares or anywhere. She would fill the shelves with paperback novels and pots of trailing ivy, and hang on the walls pictures which hadn’t been presented by the artist in grateful recognition of this, that or the other.
    Her pictures, not Ivor’s. It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn’t fair to be dead and yet to stay around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house…. There ought to be something like a fly-spray, a fly-spray for ghosts, a ghost-spray….
    Ivor would have laughed at that, if he’d been in one of hisgood moods. No, he wouldn’t, he’d have called it whimsy, with that impatient twist of the mouth that he kept for fools….
    *
    Oh, shut up, you’re dead, who cares what you think? You have no business telling me what’s whimsy and what isn’t, not any longer.
    Get out! Get out! Get out!
    *
    The dispute outside seemed to be escalating. In one of the childish voices she could hear the beginning of tears.
    But still she lay there, doing absolutely nothing. Hell, they were Dot’s children, let her sort it out. And Robin—yes, that male voice now rising beyond irritation and into anger was certainly his—Robin was Dot’s brother, not Imogen’s. Nothing to do with Imogen really, none of them. No blood-tie at all. At intervals over the years, whenever Ivor’s family life became more than she could cope with, she had attempted to console herself with these sort of reflections, but it never worked for long. Blood may be thicker than water, but when it comes to family quarrels, it’s being there that puts you in the wrong. It is one’s presence, not one’s genes, that lands one with all the responsibility.
    And that was why she was lying so very quietly right now. Let her so much as put her head out of the window into the biting December dusk, and call out “What’s going on?” and she would at once be to blame for the whole thing, and responsible for putting it right. She would be called upon to decide whether something was fair or not; whether Dot was or wasn’t spoiling her brats rotten….
    *
    It was unusual, though, to hear Robin yelling at the kids like this. He didn’t like children, admittedly, and of course children are very intuitive about this sort of thing, and gather round the child-hater like flies round a honey-pot. Luckily, as well as disliking them, Robin was also very good at not noticing they existed, and so normally there was very little trouble, except when Dotcaused it by complaining to her brother that he treated the children as things , not people .
    But they were things, Robin would retort, wide-eyed: to think of children as people was sheer anthropomorphism—and a brother-and- sister slanging-match would ensue, to which the boys would listen with the greatest of interest. What sort of complexes it was giving them was hard to tell. They were happy children, and correspondingly difficult to fathom.
    They didn’t sound very happy at the moment, though. Not Vernon, anyway.
    “We didn’t!” he was shrieking. “We didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t …!”
    “And if you say we’re liars”—Timmie took up the grievance even more shrilly—“If you say we’re liars, then you’re just a …”
    But before he had selected from his fairly extensive vocabulary exactly the word that would best describe his uncle, a sharp crunching on the gravel told Imogen that Robin was getting out.
    Worsted? Triumphant? Bored with the whole thing? Robin was the only man Imogen had