Rarely entirely happy about noses
A dedicated man, Selby Grainger thought, would be starting to worry now about the possibility of delay in getting back to work. He stretched back in the chair, and gave a small grunt of satisfaction....
Category: Possessors
Extracts from The Possessors
Friday night we wash our hair
‘Do you have that – a place of your own?’ ‘I,’ she said, striking a histrionic attitude, ‘live with a friend in West Chelsea. Fulham, that is. Walk up three flights, and there we are....
Have they found something?
The Deeping boys, Selby saw, had got the toboggan out again, and were using it to slide down the steepest part of the hillside, just beyond the fall. They were going quite fast, probably not...
He didn’t look like a heart case
She stood aside and he carried the boy through into the salon. He put him down on the carpet, in front of the fire, and stripped off the upper garments. He massaged the still warm...
Abandoning hope
Elizabeth came in with the Deepings. She was at her best in situations such as this: quiet, sympathetic, serene. She put her arm, unobtrusively but firmly, round Ruth Deeping’s shoulders as she led her across...
Trick of the light?
‘What happened after the sledge tipped over? How did Andy look?’ ‘All right. He was laughing about it. And then …’ ‘Then?’ ‘He called to me that he’d found something in the snow.’ ‘What had...
There might be rats
It was surprising how often submissiveness in women concealed a potential domination, particularly with unpleasantly cocky men like Deeping. Domination, and that same indifference she had charged him with showing to the children. Even before...
Dodging the dog and making a pass at the scullery maid
‘My father was a butcher.’ He looked at the makeshift coffin, his face expressionless. ‘Mustn’t develop delusions of grandeur. A butcher’s assistant. Though he was given a shop to manage in the end. He died...
With only a child’s strength
Sight … Another stage required, the finding of the small muscles that would open the eyes, and then the directing. A strangeness here. Question and answer again. A heaviness, unknown before. Then, touch? Something that...
He can’t be in there
‘Doesn’t make sense,’ he said, ‘does it? A body doesn’t just disappear like that. It has to be somewhere.’ Douglas said: ‘He couldn’t have been dead, in that case. Catalepsy. Haven’t there been cases where...
