A Dark Dividing by Sarah Rayne Page A

uniforms, and girls with their hair pinned up in rolly shapes on top of their heads. Simone loved photographs better than anything, even better than drawings. She loved seeing how people looked against different backgrounds—trees or houses or the sky—and how the trees and the sky could look different according to what time of day it was, or whether it was raining or sunny, and whether the people themselves looked different because they had a storm-sky behind them, or sunshine, or black wintry trees. She pored over the photographs for hours, until Mother said if she was as keen as all that perhaps she would like a camera of her own, what did she think?
    â€˜I’d like that a huge lot,’ said Simone. She added, ‘I’d extra-specially like it,’ then wished she had not said ‘extra-special’, because that was one of the little girl’s expressions. Mostly she tried not to use them, but sometimes they seemed to sneak out by themselves. She said, ‘I’d really like it. When could we do it?’
    â€˜Next birthday? It’ll be quite expensive, so it can’t be like buying just an ordinary thing. But we’ll go into some shops beforehand—it’d probably have to be somewhere like Oswestry, or maybe we could drive further into England to Chester. You’ve never been to Chester, have you? It’s nice. We could get some brochures to look at and you can think about what sort of camera you’d like.’
    This was one of the really good things about Mother. She understood that if there was going to be a particularly exciting treat you wanted to think about it and discuss it before it happened. Simone would like to have a camera of her own very much. She said carefully that she would quite like to take photographs of Mortmain House. Would that be possible?
    â€˜What a funny little horror-comic you are,’ said Mother. ‘Yes, of course we’ll go out there if you want to, although we’d better make it a Saturday afternoon when there’s lots of people around. I think tramps sometimes doss down in the ruins, and gypsies. Real gypsies, I mean, not us.’
    â€˜Oh, I see. Um—would we have to ask someone first?’
    â€˜I don’t think so. I don’t know who owns it—I don’t think anyone does know. That’s why it’s been let go so badly, I suppose. But I can’t imagine why you want to photograph it. It’s a gloomy old place.’
    The little girl did not think that Mortmain was especially a gloomy old place; but Simone supposed that if you had never known anywhere else—if you had never known about huge, sun-filled rooms, and schoolrooms where people talked a bit noisily about lessons, or places like cinemas or swimming pools where everyone shrieked and laughed, you might think that Mortmain was pretty good.
    But gloomy old places could be splendid for games, and one of the games that the little girl told Simone about was a game called the dance of the hanged man. There was a song that went with it: Simone was not sure if she had understood it properly, but it was something about, ‘The morning clocks will ring/And a neck God made for other use/Than strangling in a string.’ Then came the chorus that everybody had to join in, which was about the gallows-maker building the frame and then the hangman leading the dance, and everyone had to do all the movements about building the gallows and hammering in the nails and fashioning the gibbet. Then they had to jig round the yard in a line for the dance. Simone thought she understood that that by ‘the yard’, the little girl meant a sort of playground.
    She did not properly understand about the hanging game and she did not properly understand about the other children who seemed to be part of the game, but she thought it sounded hateful, and the little girl sounded hateful as well when she talked about it. Sly and giggly and as if somebody was