Read The Time of the Ghost for Free Online Page A

back of her hand. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t got a back to my hand at the moment , she thought, trying to make a joke out of it.
    The bedroom was airless and hot, from being up in the roof. It was the size of the kitchen and sitting room downstairs, with a bite out for the bathroom, but that space did not seem very big with four beds in it. Three of the beds were unmade, of course, with covers trailing over the floor. The fourth bed, Sally supposed, must be hers. It had a square, white, unfamiliar look. There was no personality about it at all.
    Another reason why the room looked so small was that it was as high as it was long. Three black bending beams ran overhead. You could see they had all been cut from the same tree. The twists in them matched. Above them was a complex of dusty rafters, reaching into the peak of the roof, which was lined with grayish hardboard. Sally found herself knowing that this part, where they lived, was the oldest part of School House. It had been stables, long before the red buildings went up beside it. She also knew it was very cold in winter.
    She turned her attention from the roof and found that the walls were covered with pictures. By this time, from under the floor, through the rumbles from Oliver, she could hear Cart in the sitting room. Cart was beginning on another unsuccessful attempt to stop Imogen grieving. “Now look, Imogen, it’s not your fault you keep being turned out of the music rooms. You ought to explain to Miss Bailley.”
    Sally paid no attention because she was so astonished by the number of pictures. There were pen-and-ink sketches, pencil drawings, crayoned scenes, watercolors, poster paintings, stencils, prints—bad and wobbly, obviously done with potatoes—and even one or two oil paintings. The oil paints and the canvases, Sally knew guiltily, had been stolen from the school art room. Most of the rest were on typing paper pinched from the school office. But there were one or two paintings on good cartridge paper. That brought a dim memory to her of the row there had been about the typing paper and the oil paints. She remembered Himself roaring, “I shall have to pay for every hair of every paintbrush you little bitches have thieved!” Then afterward came a memory of Phyllis, desperately tired and terribly sensible, saying, “Look, I shall give you a pound between you to buy some paper.” A pound did not seem to buy much paper, by the look of it.
    This was supposed to be an exhibition. Sally discovered, round the bathroom corner, first a bell push, labeled “ FOR EMERGENCY ONLY, ” and then a notice, “ THIS WAY TO THE EXHIBITION. ” The notice was signed “Sally.” But Sally had not the slightest recollection of writing it. Why was that? After staring at it in perturbation for a minute, she thought that it must have been written very recently, perhaps just after the end of term, and it was always the things in the past few days she seemed to have the greatest difficulty in remembering.
    She followed her own arrows round the walls, drifting through beds and a chair in order to look closely at the pictures. Cart had signed all hers with a flourishing “Charlotte.” Imogen had signed some of hers neatly “I. Melford,” but not all. Sally could not tell which of the rest were Imogen’s or which were her own—if any. Then there were three signed “WH,” including one of the oil paintings, and several labeled simply “N.” N’s pictures leaped off the page at you, even though N could not draw. There was a drawing of Oliver N had done, which was a bad drawing of a bad drawing. But it was Oliver to the life, in spite of it.
    I simply don’t remember any of these! Sally said. A view of the shop cottage, unsigned. The dead elms, with blodgy rooks, also unsigned. A splendidly dismal dream landscape by Cart. Cart went in for funereal fantasies: a coffin carried