The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories by Unknown Author Page A

of settlement, a tribal ceremony involving food and certain actions which helped them to possess more and more of the house. Using the kitchen, which was the warmest room, made it their own; and the living room where they read and unpacked was theirs. But the extra bedrooms, the passages, the box room, the chilly stairs—so much of the house did not belong to them.
    Then there were no more cases to unpack and their days were empty; Munday was restless and Emma worked with her dishmop and broom. They tried new routines, fumbling like people newly idle, to justify the passing of days. One afternoon, on an impulse, Munday bought a second-hand Mini; it was fire-engine red, and when Munday drove it back to the house to show Emma he said, “I’ve always wanted a car that color.” That night they drove to Lyme Regis, but on the way back Emma said, “You can wash it on Sunday mornings,” and Munday lost his temper. For several days they did not use the car. They stayed in, taking longer and longer to prepare the food*,' they ate it swiftly, in silence, and did the dishes meticulously, putting every plate and fork away. Munday made coffee after lunch and dinner, grinding the beans he bought from Pines, warming the milk, setting out the Demerara sugar. When the weather improved they went for walks, to force exhaustion on themselves and work up an appetite. They went to bed early and always got up in the dark and made breakfast in front of the black windows. But still the house was not theirs and they were like people on vacation, or visitors, or—but only Munday felt this—retired people trying to be busy in a secluded comer of the country. They spoke distractedly, their voices sounding older and fussier, reporting their thoughts and not expecting replies.
    “We eat too much,” Emma said. And: “I must see about getting some new curtains.”
    Munday said, “I can’t work in this light.”
    Emma said, “There goes our friend,” speaking of a man in gaiters and a tweed cap who always passed the window at noon, walking his dog.
    They both said, “Why am I so tired?”
    Munday said, “I should do something about that talk at the church.”
    Emma said, “We must have the vicar back.”
    They discussed the vicar, and with the perspective of a week, that evening visit which at the time had seemed such an intrusion took on the character of an important event. Believing it might be typical, they prepared themselves for something similar to occur, but nothing did, no one dropped in, and so the vicar’s call came to be special, a way of measuring time, four days since the visit, then five and six, like a historical date in a nonliterate culture. They began conversations, “He said—,” and didn’t need to name him. Munday spoke in a low voice. He believed they had a listener, that third presence whose traces were everywhere but impossible to name. He looked for it and he turned on lights in dark rooms (reaching around the doorway into the darkness for the light switch) expecting to see it seated, perhaps leaning in an accusatory posture, to scare him and make him sorry. He bit his lips with that expectation, and when he was alone he made faces.
    “I think I’ll do a little work,” he said. He didn’t say write. He-didn’t write. He sat in his study, turning over the artifacts and sketching them and feeling a great pressure on the front of his head.
    One day, just at sundown, he went for a walk alone. On the way back he stopped in at The Yew Tree and bought the bottle of amontillado. He spent more than he planned because he refused the cheaper South African variety Mr. Flack recommended. The refusal, the mention of South Africa, gave Mr. Flack an opportunity to add more detail to his Capetown story, how he had stayed drunk on brandy for a week and how he had seen (he explained this closely to
    Munday) a black woman, “black as Newgy’s knocker,’* with a load of wood on her head walking along a road suckling her