Ada Clark put her foot on the worn piece of carpet beside her bed in her cottage on the edge of Steeple Horley.
It had been the gammon steak at her sister-in-law's, which had been salted enough to preserve it until Judgement Day and which had dried her mouth until she could bear it no longer—it was a wonder to Mrs. Clark that Jim looked so well after so many years of bad cooking, of over-salted meat and under-salted vegetables, and altogether too much out of packets and tins.
And that line of well-used sauce bottles told its own tale too, of flavourless food that went begging for a taste of something real, no matter what.
Mrs. Clark searched irritably with her toes for her slippers in the darkness, looking out of the window as she did so. It had been clear earlier, but had clouded over now in preparation dummy2
for the further rain which the BBC weatherman had forecast, so that it was impossible to see where the dark sky began and the roll of the downs ended.
Suddenly the foot stopped searching, thirst was forgotten and Mrs. Clark was wide awake, staring breathlessly out of her window.
There it was again, only longer this time!
Decisively she reached across the bed and shook her husband by the shoulder.
'Charlie, wake up!'
Charlie Clark groaned unbelievingly.
Mrs. Clark shook the shoulder again. 'Charlie, there's someone up at the Old House—someone breaking in! Wake up!'
Charlie rolled on to his back, blinking in the darkness, grappling with the unpalatable sequence of information.
Finally he computed an answer, or at least a delaying question. ' 'Ow do you know? You can't see nothing, surely?'
'I can see a light, a flashing light—like a torch going on and off.'
'Car lights, that 'ud be.'
'That it's not!' Mrs. Clark insisted hotly. 'You don't get no reflections all that way, and there are those trees in the way.
And besides—' she overrode his murmur of disagreement triumphantly '—there aren't no cars on the road, or I'd 'uv dummy2
heard 'em. I tell you there's someone up at the Old House.
Someone as don't dare switch the lights on.'
Charlie grumbled under his breath and heaved himself out of bed, reaching for his pullover.
'I reckon it'll be some of those tearaways from the town,'
Mrs. Clark said to him over her shoulder, the outrage quavering in her voice. 'A gang of them broke into a big house down Midhurst way last week—it was in the paper.
They said there'd been seven robberies round there in the last month.'
Charlie felt his way round the bed until he was standing beside his wife. As he bent down to peer out of the little window she pointed quickly.
'There! You see where the flash came—'
'Yes, I see'd 'un.' Charlie was not given to believing half he was told or a tenth of what he read, but he always believed his own eyes. And there had been no doubt about that pale light. 'It'll be they young buggers right enough—young buggers they are.'
Mrs. Clark nodded at the vehemence in her husband's voice.
It frightened her to think of them loose in the beautiful house she had scrubbed and polished for a lifetime— scrubbed and polished so much that she almost felt it was partly hers and she was part of it.
But also it angered her, and the anger grew steadily, crowding out the fear.
dummy2
Charlie moved away from her.
'What you goin' to do?' She could hear him fumbling in the darkness. 'Don't you put the light on, Charlie!'
'I ain't a fool. I'm lookin' to put me trousers on, an' then I'll get on down to the police house. Let 'em sort it out.'
'What!' Mrs. Clark rounded on him fiercely, her sense of outrage now dominant. The police house was at Upper Horley, two long miles away, and half of that uphill. 'You'll not do that! You do that an' they'll be out an' gone by the time Tom Yates gets 'ere—out and gone.'
A terrible vision of destruction rose in her imagination, compounded of all she had heard and read. They weren't like the old-time burglars she had known in her youth, men who knew the value of things and were interested only in what they could sell—they were destroyers now who did unspeakable, senseless, wasteful things. They were the invaders from a world she could not comprehend, the city jungle spilling into the quiet, ordered countryside.
Charlie stared towards her in the blackness, one pyjama-clad leg half stuffed into his trousers.
'You don't mean for me to go up there—?'
