‘A mere trifle,’ said Mr Sims, his husky voice indulgent and reassuring. Gwenda looked more doubtful than ever. It was Mr Sims’s trifles that she had learnt to distrust. His straightforward estimates were studiously moderate.
‘I’ll tell you what, Mrs Reed,’ said Mr Sims coaxingly, ‘I’ll get Taylor to have a look when he’s finished with the dressing-room this afternoon, and then I can give you an exact idea. Depends what the wall’s like.’
I hope, thought Gwenda uneasily, that I’m notclairvoyant or anything…
***
Gwenda stood there staring a long time, then she went shakily over to the bed and sat down on it.
Here she was in a house she had never been in before, in a country she had never visited-and only two days ago she had lain in bed imagining a paper for this very room-and the paper she had imagined corresponded exactly with the paper that had once hung on the walls.
Wild fragments of explanation whirled round in her head. Dunne, Experiment with Time-seeing forward instead of back…
She could explain the garden path and the connecting door as coincidence-but there couldn’t be coincidence about this. You couldn’t conceivably imagine a wallpaper of such a distinctive design and then find one exactly as you had imagined it…No, there was some explanation that eluded her and that-yes, frightened her. Every now and then she was seeing, not forward, but back-back to some former state of the house. Any moment she might see something more-something she didn’t want to see…The house frightened her…But was it the house orherself? She didn’t want to be one of those people whosaw things…
She drew a long breath, put on her hat and coat and slipped quickly out of the house. At the post office she sent the following telegram:
West, 19 Addway Square Chelsea London. May I change my mind and come to you tomorrow Gwenda.
She sent it reply paid.