He must have supposed she haunted the attic floor like a ghost or a lunatic. Kay guessed it wasn't Mr Leonard's lurid Edwardian angels that frightened him, but the thought of encountering her. 'Good heavens, they're only pictures! A great boy like you!' 'Is it them angels on the door?' she had heard his mother say. Once, recently, he'd looked up and seen Kay watching and she'd heard him making a fuss on the stairs, then, about going on his own to the lavatory. The little lame boy would sometimes stand scuffing up moss and dirt from the broken path to the house with his great boot, while his mother spoke with Mr Leonard in the hall.

She liked to see them making their slow way up the street: the man neat and dark-suited as an undertaker, the boy patient, serious, handsome - like an allegory of youth and age, she thought, as done by Stanley Spencer or some finicky modern painter like that.Īfter them there came a woman with her son, a little lame boy in spectacles after that, an elderly Indian lady with rheumatics. On Tuesdays at one an elderly man came, with a fey-looking boy to help him: Kay enjoyed watching for them. Punctually, they came - so punctually, she really could tell the time by them: the woman with the crooked back, on Mondays at ten the wounded soldier, on Thursdays at eleven. So this, said Kay to herself, is the sort of person you've become: a person whose clocks and wrist-watches have stopped, and who tells the time, instead, by the particular kind of cripple arriving at her landlord's door.įor she was standing at her open window, in a collarless shirt and a pair of greyish underpants, smoking a cigarette and watching the coming and going of Mr Leonard's patients. Sarah Waters' novel is set in 1940s London.

1998 novel by sarah waters