Aunt Maxine, with big bright eyes reflecting the brilliant electric lights at the cinema’s entrance, went in to see ‘It Happened One Night’.

CHAPTER V

At three o’clock on the following Sunday afternoon, Sophia was sitting on the stairs by the surgery front door, waiting for Harry and engaged in her favourite occupation of doing nothing.

A pane of clear glass was let into the woodwork over the front door, and through this she could see part of the slate roof of a house opposite. It looked like a narrow dark road, going up a hill into the white sky, and she was staring up at it with much pleasure and imagining exciting places to which it might lead. She had discovered this piece of roof when she was six years old, and never grew tired of watching the imaginary road and thinking about it.

The house was quiet, for once, because it was Sunday afternoon. It was a tall, narrow dark house with creaking stairs and a basement kitchen in which lived rats, which Sophia used to feed in defiance of her father’s orders, and black beetles of which she had an almost mystic horror, as though they were symbols of everything evil in the world.

At the back there was a tiny square of bare earth, in which grew one tree of dark lilac; and there was a crumbling and dirty old wall round it, over which the Garden children used to hang on their stomachs, gossiping with the children of the caretaker who looked after Pusey’s Piano Factory. The gossiping, like feeding the rats, was strictly against Dr Garden’s orders, because Sophia, Francis and Harry were supposed to be a young lady and young gentlemen, and the little Motts were not.

The Surgery was an unhappy house. So many miserable and violently ugly events had happened in it that they had soaked the walls and staircases in an atmosphere of oppression and terror. Even unimaginative people felt this atmosphere, though they sensibly explained their sensations by pointing out that the house was dark, old, and overlooked by Pusey’s Piano Factory, which was ninety feet high and built round three sides of a long stone courtyard, and they added that the noise was shocking.

There were the trams and motor buses which ran past the little cul-de-sac in which the Surgery stood, and there was the sawmill in Pusey’s Piano Factory which began screaming at seven in the morning and did not stop screaming until six at night; and there was the endless subterranean humming of hidden machines inside the factory, which made an unchanging background for the shriller sounds.

It need scarcely be said that the young Gardens found the factory a delightful and romantic place and liked nothing better than to escape over the spider-haunted, boot-scuffed wall into the stone yard for a game with the young Motts. The rooms were covered with dents and scratchings which were scars of family rows.

There were two banisters missing from the hall staircase, near the bottom; Dr Garden had torn these out in a fit of fury one night. On a cupboard door in the basement dining room there was a long, glancing scar; that was made when he had thrown a table knife at their mother; and a small hole in the cloudy glass window between the dining room and the kitchen, marked where he had hurled a plate at the housemaid – the same girl who now sat in the kitchen, red-eyed and silent because he was dead.