Dot. Araminta Hall
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Dot - Araminta Hall страница

Название: Dot

Автор: Araminta Hall

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Приключения: прочее

Серия:

isbn: 9780007487820

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ >

      DOT

      Araminta Hall

      To Lindy & David, my Mum and Dad

      ‘Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zig-zags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.’

      George Eliot, Middlemarch

       Join-the-dots puzzle

      noun (British): a puzzle requiring you to connect a series of dots by drawing lines between them. If the dots are correctly connected, the result is a picture.

      Collins English Dictionary

      Table of Contents

       Title Page

       Dedication

       Epigraph

       1 … Discovery

       2 … Concealment

       3 … Redemption

       4 … Trying

       5 … Fear

       6 … Consumption

       7 … Friendship

       8 … Confession

       9 … Nothing

       10 … Bewilderment

       11 … Acting

       12 … Speech

       13 … Revelation

       14 … Arrival

       15 … Recklessness

       16 … Waiting

       17 … Leaving

       18 … Tragedy

       19 … Despair

       20 … Writing

       21 … Kindness

       Acknowledgements

       A Q&A with Araminta Hall

       About the Author

       By the Same Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

      1 … Discovery

      They were playing a game of hide and seek, as they so often did. Some people might have seen it as a lack of imagination, but as both Dot and Mavis displayed so much imagination in later life, it seems more likely a fact of circumstance. Druith is after all miles from anywhere, sunk in a low, damp Welsh valley, and Dot’s house suggested itself to hide and seek in a multitude of ways. Not that two ten-year-old girls were aware of any of this. They didn’t even find Dot’s house strange: it was still nothing more than a marker in their childhood landscape, and the fact that the floors tipped, cupboard doors opened into secret passages and a concealed turret sprouted out of the side of the house washed over them. The only thing they were beginning to find amusing were the plates which Dot’s grandmother inexplicably chose to hang on the walls. ‘What next?’ they’d whisper to each other. ‘Will we be eating off paintings?’ Although one glance at the heavy oils of permanently displeased relatives and windswept landscapes made this seem very unlikely.

      They never played hide and seek when they were at Mavis’s house, not just because she lived in a perfectly proportioned box with no nooks and crannies, but also because her mother looked as if she might cry if you so much as walked on her permanently hoovered floors or breathed on her dustless possessions. Which was in direct contrast to Dot’s mother, who seemed to float through life without noticing anything, and her grandmother, who unfathomably didn’t care about dirt but about most other things. Out of two peculiar options, however, Dot’s house always seemed the most appealing.

      Mavis had annoyed Dot that day. She was a fastidious girl, given to huffing and puffing and slapping logic all over Dot’s daydreams. Games of beautiful princesses or magic carpets were never allowed and sometimes Dot was bored by the shops where prices had to be accurate and bills added up precisely. That was usually when she suggested a game of hide and seek.

      She left Mavis counting in her attic bedroom, nasally intoning the numbers up to one hundred, and raced down the stairs to the second-floor landing. Once there she weighed up her options and realised she’d used all her best places a dozen times already. Mavis would go straight to the bottom of the laundry basket, the jutting shelves in the larder, even behind the basement door which they both found so scary. The door to her mother’s bedroom was open and the space below her mother’s bed beckoned as invitingly as a pair of outstretched arms. Dot hesitated on the threshold, knowing that Mavis would never enter this room without permission and wondering if this meant she would be cheating. Mavis had already reached sixty-five; СКАЧАТЬ