A Dark Dividing by Sarah Rayne

weeks, and they were getting to know some of the places and some of the people. Mother had made one or two friends, mostly other parents at Simone’s school. ‘It’s quite a prominent local landmark,’ Mother said. ‘I read about it in the library—they’ve got some quite good books on local history there. I’ll take you to see them one Saturday.’ Mother liked things like local history and local legends; she liked Simone to know about them as well.
    ‘But what was it really? I mean years ago—when it wasn’t all broken up?’
    ‘A workhouse. That’s a place where people in the past had to go if they hadn’t got any money. Workhouses were dreadful places, not much better than prisons, and it was regarded as very shameful if you were taken into the workhouse; it meant you couldn’t pay your way in life. And then I think that later on Mortmain was used by the army in the war. For the soldiers to live.’
    ‘World War Two.’ They had learned about this a bit at school; Simone had always hated the sound of it, because it must be pretty horrid to have the whole world at war all round you, and bombs being dropped all the time. Simone had made some drawings of soldiers and air-raid shelters, and then Mother had found some old photographs that had been her mother’s—that was Simone’s grandmother, whom Simone had never met because she had died when Mother was quite small.
    But the photos were great; they showed young men in 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?
    ‘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?’
    ‘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?
    ‘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.’
    ‘Oh, I see. Um—would we have to ask someone first?’
    ‘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