The Insect Rosary by Sarah Armstrong Page A

white.
    â€˜There’s no inside handle,’ Nancy said.
    The doorframe was slightly lower and narrower than the other doors because it matched the cupboard door on the other side of the fireplace. It was a pretend door in a way that she’d liked as a child. It looked like a cupboard but wasn’t. It was like the bell pushes in each room that looked as if they would ring like a bell, but they’d all been disconnected and didn’t make any sound anywhere. She still liked to push them.
    She thought her way into the room. About eight foot long by six foot across, a tiny window near the top of the far wall, no fireplace. Apart from the new little kitchen and the lobby it must be the only room without a fireplace downstairs.
    â€˜There were always boxes of crisps in there and it smelled of apples, even when they’d all been eaten. Sacks of potatoes. I think there’d been meat in there once. Did it get used as a cold store for meat?’
    Bernie had looked away now, her mouth covered by a hand. She was blinking a lot, as if there was a light shining into her eyes, but the sun had even left the rooftops now.
    â€˜Are you crying?’
    â€˜Go in the room.’
    Nancy scraped her chair back, opened the door and walked into the room. It still smelled of apples.
    â€˜You don’t remember anything do you?’ said Bernie.
    Nancy shook her head, ‘Nothing else. I really don’t, except it was kept locked a lot.’ She didn’t think that she’d ever looked out of the window. She’d never been tall enough. She walked across now and saw the vegetable bed, overgrown with tassels of fennel, in front of the hedge. A sparrow flew out, tweeting. In Michigan she’d been astonished by scarlet blackbirds, black squirrels and actual chipmunks which ran across the ground in front of you. She’d forgotten how pretty a sparrow was.
    She turned back to the table. Bernie had gone, but that didn’t surprise her. She became overwhelmed by the fear that Bernie was standing on the other side of the door, ready to close it on her. There was no door handle after all. She lunged for the doorway and stepped through with a sense of relief but, as she shut the door on the icy room, she realised that she must have forgotten something about that room. Something had made her not want to get shut in.
    She sat back at the table. She would ask Bernie but knew that she had failed the test. Elian had gone on at length about how normal Bernie had been, how he’d never have suspected, how she hid or coped with her ‘mental health problems’ well. Nancy wasn’t so sure. There were glimpses of that other Bernie, asking the unanswerable, disappearing from the room. She wasn’t going to chase Bernie around the house.
    She realised with a start that she didn’t know where Hurley was. She checked the front room and the best room, then the bedrooms. From Hurley’s back bedroom she saw them coming back through the archway. Hurley sat on the back door step watching Donn fill the peat basket outside the back door. Nancy exhaled and tried to relax her shoulders. She went back to the parlour trying to think about the last time she’d not consciously thought of him or been brought back to the thought of him somehow.
    Nancy boiled the kettle in the kitchen and was about to offer Donn a cup of tea when she realised that Hurley and Donn were talking. Neither of them had said more than half a dozen words a day to her, or to Elian, unless they were absolutely forced to. What on earth could two such silent people have to say to each other?
    She gazed out at them in surprise before finishing her own cup of tea. At the table she pulled the chair up by the window so it didn’t squeak on the tiles and sat down as slowly as she could. And then she listened.
    â€˜I was younger than you. The warts covered my knees, dozens and dozens of them. You know we had to wear short pants then, I