'Why me?'
'Because... well, no reason really, perhaps, except I'd like you to be there, with me mum. It'd make me... I'd be pleased, that's all.'
'When is it the wedding?
''Wedding'? Sounds a bit posh, doesn't it? We're just getting married: no bridesmaids, no bouquets--and not too much bloody confetti, I hope.'
An avuncular Morse nodded, like an understanding se-nior citizen.
'Not like all the razzmatazz you probably had at your wedding,' she said.
Morse looked down at the carpet, as she had done earlier; then looked up again. For a second or two it was as though an electric current had shot across his forehead, and for some strange reason he found himself wanting to reach out across the table and just for a moment touch the hand of the young woman seated opposite.
'How are you getting home, Ellie?'
In the taxi ('Iffley Road then the top of the Banbury Road,' Morse had instructed), Ellie had interlaced her fin- gers into his; and Morse felt moved and confused and more than a little loving.
'Did you see that watercolour?' she asked. 'The one just by our table? Our table T'
'No.'
'It was lovely--with fields and sheep and clouds. And the clouds...'
'What about them?' asked Morse quietly.
'Well, they were white at the top and then a sort of middling, muddy grey, and then a darker grey at the bot- tom. Clouds are like that, aren't they.'?'
'Are they?' Morse, the non-Nephologist, had never con-sciously contemplated a cloud in his life, and he felt unable to comment further.
'It's just that--well, all I'm tryin' to say is that I enjoyed bein' with you, that's all. For a little while I felt I was on the top o' one o' them clouds, OKT'
After the taxi had dropped her off, and was making its way from East Oxford to North Oxford, Morse realised that he, too, had almost been on top of one of 'them clouds' that evening.
Back in his flat, he looked with some care at the only watercolour he had. The clouds there had been painted ex-actly as Ellie Smith had said. And he nodded to himself, just a little sadly.
Chapter Fifty-one
Needles and pins, needles and pins When a man marries his trouble begins (Old nursery rhyme)
In the waiting area of the Churchill Hospital, immediately Mrs. Stevens had been called in to see her specialist, at 10:35 n.M. on Tuesday, September 20, Brenda Brooks picked up a surprisingly recent issue of Good Housekeeping, and flicked through its glossy pages. But she found it difficult to concentrate on any particular article.
Brenda was a person who took much pleasure in the sim* pie things of life. Others, she knew, had their yearnings for power or wealth or knowledge, but two of her own greatest delights were cleanliness and tidiness. What a joy she felt each week, for example, when she watched the dustmen ca-sually hud her black bags into the back of the yellow rubbish-cart--then seeing them no more. It seemed like Pil-grim finally ridding himself of his burden of sin.
For her own part, she had seldom made any mess at in her life. But there was always an accumulation of thin to be thrown away: bits of cabbage-leaves, and empty and cigarette stubs from her husband's ashtrays.... Yes. was always good to see the black bags, well, disappear r ally. You could put almost anything in them: bloodstaim items like shirts, shoes, trousers--anything.
There were the green bags, ttx)---the bags labelled 'Ga den Waste,' issued by Oxford City Council, at 50p apiec Householders were permitted to put out two such hags e cry week; but the Brookses' garden was small, and Brem seldom made use of more than one a fortnight.
Then there were those strong, transparent bags which T had brought home a couple of years ago, a heavy stack them piled in the garden shed, just to the left of the law mower. Precisely what purpose her husband had envisag for such receptacles had been unclear, but they had occ sionally proved useful for twigs and small branches, b cause the material from which they were manufactured w. stout, heavy-duty stuff, not easily tom.
But the real joy of Brenda's life had ever centred on manual skills--knitting, needlework, embroidery for hands had always worked confidently and easily with ne dles and crochet-hooks and bodkins and such things. late, too, she had begun to extend the area of her manu. competence by joining a cake-icing class, although (as have seen) it had been only with considerable and increa ing pain that she had been able to continue the course, fore finally being compelled to pack it up altogether.
She was still able, however, to indulge in some of former skills; had, in fact, so very recently indulged in the] when, wearing a leather glove instead of the uncornfortab Tubigrip, she had stitched the 'body-bag' (a word she heard on the radio) in which her late and unlamented hm band was destined to be wrapped. Never could she hay imagined, of course, that the disposal of a body woul cause a problem in her gently undemanding life. But it hat and she had seen to it. Not that the task had been a labo[ of love. Far from it It had been a labour of hate.
She had watched, a few months earlier, some men wh had come along and cut down a branch overarching the road there, about twelve feet long and about nine inches across. (Wasn't a human head about nine inches across?)
The men had got rid of that pretty easily: just put it in that quite extraordinary machine they had--from which, after a scream of whirring, the thick wood had come out the other end... sawdust.
Then there was the furnace up at the Proctor Memorial School that would have left even less physical trace per-haps.
But (as Mrs. Stevens had said) there was a pretty big problem of 'logistics' associated with such waste- disposal.
