“Hello? Albert?”
Susan pushed open the kitchen door. The huge room was empty.
“Albert?”
She tried upstairs. There was her own room, and there was a corridor of doors that didn’t open and possibly never could—the doors and frames had an all-in-one, molded-together look. Presumably Death had a bedroom, although proverbially Death never slept. Perhaps he just lay in bed reading.
She tried the handles until she found one that turned.
Death did have a bedroom.
He’d got many of the details right. Of course. After all, he saw quite a lot of bedrooms. In the middle of the acres of floor was a large four-poster bed, although when Susan gave it an experimental prod it turned out that the sheets were as solid as rock.
There was a full-length mirror, and a wardrobe. She had a look inside, just in case there was a selection of robes, but there was nothing in there except a few old shoes in the bottom. [27]
A dressing table held a jug-and-basin set with a motif of skulls and omegas, and a variety of bottles and other items.
She picked them up, one by one. After-shave lotion. Pomade. Breath freshener. A pair of silverbacked hairbrushes.
It was all rather sad. Death clearly had picked up an idea of what a gentleman should have on his dressing table, without confronting one or two fundamental questions.
Eventually she found a smaller, narrower staircase.
“Albert?”
There was a door at the top.
“Albert? Anyone?”
It’s not actually barging in if I call out first, she told herself. She pushed open the door.
It was a very small room. Really small. It contained a few small sticks of bedroom furniture and a small narrow bed. A small bookcase contained a handful of small, uninteresting-looking books. There was a piece of ancient paper on the floor which, when Susan picked it up, turned out to be covered with numbers, all crossed out except the last one, which was: 19.
One of the books was Gardening In Difficult Conditions.
She went back down to the study. She’d known that there was no one in the house. There was a dead feeling in the air.
There was the same feeling in the gardens. Death could create most things, except for plumbing. But he couldn’t create life itself. That had to be added, like yeast in bread. Without it, everything was beautifully neat and tidy and boring, boring, boring.
This is what it must have been like, she thought. And then, one day, he adopted my mother. He was curious.
She took the path through to the orchard again.
And when I was born mum and dad were so afraid that I felt at home here they brought me up to be…well…a Susan. What kind of name is that for Death’s granddaughter? A girl like that should have better cheekbones, straight hair, and a name with Vs and Xs in it.
And there, once again, was the thing he’d made for her. All by himself. Working it all out from first principles…
A swing. A simple swing.
