Dark Star

BOOK ONE

Nancy was glad when her grandmother died. Glad, but a little afraid, like some wild thing, long caged, suddenly let loose. She cried a little because the neighbours seemed to expect it and because it gave them pleasure to tell her that it was "all for the best and you must be brave." There was also a secret elation in being suddenly the object of their sympathy, surrounded by their jars of calf's-foot jelly and healing potions, after having been a nobody all the fourteen years of her life.  

Grandma Pringle had "slipped away in her sleep. This was characteristic of her contrary nature. Her heart attacks, attendant upon eating hot bread or cabbage, had brought her to the point of death fifty times in the preceding two years, and only Nancy's quick administration of the prescribed hypodermic had snatched her back. At such times Nancy would act with a sportsmanlike determination to give her every chance, but with a grim dispassionate speculation whether this was the time. But Grandma Pringle, with her usual contrariness, had not died after a supper of cabbage, but had gone peacefully over the border after eating a bowl of toasted bread and milk.  

When Nancy took in her morning cup of tea, she found her, her thin  withered hand under her cheek, its fingers curled over her hawklike nose,  Granny was convinced that the night air was poisonous, and would  exclude it with the quilt held firmly against her nose on those occasions  when Nancy insisted that she must have the window open a few inches  There had never been any exchange of "Good morning between them.  Nancy would come in with the tea and say, "All right," and Granny would sit up alert, and almost before her eyes were open would voice her incessant complaint that the cup was barely half full. And Nancy would say:  "I can't carry it without spilling if it is brimming full--and anyway the doctor says you're not to have tea at all."  

Or Granny would lie playing dead, watching her through scrubby grey lashes until Nancy would impatiently exclaim:  

"If you' re going to lie there and squint at me until your tea's cold, don’t expect me to make fresh!"