Fearful Symmetry
Chapter One
It was most inconvenient of all for Miss Bevan, of course. Monday was her Oxfam day.
Although the shop would be shut because of the bank holiday, she was expected down at the stockroom at ten o'clock to look over some new things. She wondered how many bags there would be, and who from. Often as she picked things over she would try to imagine the frenzied domestic blitzes that produced most of the things that came Oxfam's way, but she never could. She kept her cupboards tidy and their contents current and consequently never needed to update her life in that sudden way, discarding books on invalid cookery and unfashionable hobbies along with macrame plant holders and clothing with ludicrous lapels. It occurred to her that real absent-mindedness lay less in losing things than in keeping them, because woeful inattention could be the only explanation for people hanging on to things like that for so long. But sometimes, and she fancied she could always tell, the bags were handed in not by triumphant turners-out of cupboards but by the slightly guilty relatives of someone 'recently deceased', and she had never got used to the smell that came from those bags whose owners, she felt, must have simpl ... read full excerpt from Fearful Symmetry ebook
