Grandma's Halloween Rules

a cottage — небольшой деревенский дом

a lane — узкая дорога, просёлок

a village — деревня

a marsh — болото, топь

a fen — заболоченная низина

damp — сырой

a chimney — дымоход, труба

a latch — щеколда, задвижка

a hedge — живая изгородь

to inherit — унаследовать

an estate agent — агент по недвижимости

a will — завещание

dusty — пыльный

unfamiliar — незнакомый

to belong to — принадлежать

The road to Wraycombe was flat for eleven miles and then it was flat for eleven more.

Kate Mercer sat in the passenger seat with her feet on the dashboard, which her mother normally hated, and watched the country go past. There were no hills. There were no woods. There were fields the colour of wet cardboard, and long straight ditches full of black water, and every few miles there was a farm building with no roof. Above all of it there was an enormous grey sky that started at one side of the windscreen and finished at the other.

—It’s very big, Kate said.

—What is?

—The sky. There’s too much of it.

Her mother did not answer. She had been driving for three hours and she had not said very much for the last one.

Kate was fifteen. She was tall and thin and she had her grandmother’s dark hair, which everybody in the family mentioned at least once a year, usually at Christmas, usually in a voice that suggested it was a compliment. She was in the middle of the October half term holiday, and instead of spending it at home with her friends, she was in a car in Norfolk, going to a house she had visited exactly twice in her life.

Her grandmother had died in August.

It had happened quickly and quietly, in hospital, on a Tuesday afternoon, and Kate had not been there. Her mother had been there. When she came home that evening she had put her bag down in the hall and said, in a completely normal voice, that Grandma Iris had gone, and then she had made dinner, and they had eaten it, and nobody had cried until much later and separately.

Since then Helen Mercer had organised a funeral, answered forty letters, cancelled a phone line, argued with a bank, and said the phrase “I’m fine, honestly” approximately two hundred times.

Now they were going to Wraycombe to empty the house.

—How long do we have? Kate asked.

—Nine days.

—And then what?

—And then an estate agent comes and takes photographs, and in the spring somebody buys it, and that’s that.

—Somebody will buy it?

Her mother laughed, and it was not a happy sound.

—Somebody always buys them, she said. People from London see a cottage and they see roses round the door. They don’t see the damp.

—Did you like living here? Kate asked.

—I liked leaving, her mother said.

—That’s not an answer either.

—No, her mother agreed. It isn’t.

Kate looked out of the window and decided to stop asking questions for at least twenty minutes. She had learned this technique at the age of about eleven. Her mother was not a person who could be pushed. Her mother was a person who eventually arrived somewhere on her own, three days later, at an inconvenient moment, usually while washing up.

Kate had looked it up on the way, in the twenty minutes before the signal died, and had learned that Wraycombe had a population of four hundred and ten, one listed building and no railway station since 1968.

The village appeared without any warning. There was no sign at first, just a bend in the road and then, suddenly, houses. There were perhaps sixty of them. There was a church with a square tower, a shop with a hand painted sign, a pub called the Drowned Man, a red telephone box that clearly did not work, and a green with a wooden bench on it.

Then the houses stopped again and the fields came back, and Helen turned left down a lane so narrow that the hedges touched both mirrors.

—Fen Lane, she said. Almost there.

The cottage stood on its own, about four hundred metres from the last house in the village.

It was low and long and made of pale brick, with small windows and a roof of dark red tiles. The chimney was crooked. There was a wooden gate, a path of grey stones, and a front door painted a colour that had once been green. Behind the house the land went down slightly and became something that was not quite a field and not quite water, and beyond that there was nothing at all until the horizon.

Kate got out of the car and stood in the lane and did not move for a moment.

The air smelled of mud and salt and cold.

It was the middle of the afternoon and it was already beginning to get dark, the way it does in the last week of October when the sky is low. Somewhere behind the house a bird made a long, thin, unhappy noise.

—Right, her mother said, taking a suitcase out of the boot. Let’s get the heating on before we do anything else.

The key was in an envelope in Helen’s handbag, with a label in her grandmother’s handwriting that said FRONT.

The lock was stiff. Helen turned it, pushed the door with her shoulder, and they went in.

Inside, the cottage was exactly as Kate remembered it, which surprised her, because she had only been there twice and the second time she had been seven years old.

There was a narrow hall with a stone floor. There was a coat hook with three coats still on it. There was a hall table with a bowl for keys, and above the table there was a mirror in a dark wooden frame, and the mirror had a cloth over it.

Kate stopped.

—Mum.

—Mm?

—Why is there a cloth on the mirror?

Helen came back and looked.

—Some people do that, she said. When somebody dies. It’s an old custom. Mrs. Pratt from the shop was here in August, she probably did it.

—It’s a bit creepy.

—It’s a bit Norfolk, her mother said, and carried the suitcase through to the kitchen.

The sitting room was on the left, and Kate put her head round the door and did not go in. It was a small square room with a fireplace, two armchairs, a bookcase and a carpet with a pattern of brown leaves. Everything in it was arranged carefully and nothing in it had been touched for two months. There was a pair of reading glasses on the arm of the chair by the window, folded, waiting.

Kate closed the door again quietly.

The kitchen was at the back. It was the biggest room in the house and it was clearly the room where Iris Mercer had actually lived. There was a wooden table with four chairs, though only one of them had a cushion. There was an old cooker, a deep white sink, and a dresser along one wall with plates standing up on it. There was a calendar from the previous year. There was a chair by the window with a blanket over the arm, positioned so that a person sitting in it could see the back garden, the fen, and about nine miles of nothing.

And there was a great deal of dust.

Helen stood in the middle of it with her car keys still in her hand.

—Right, she said.

—Mum.

—I’m fine.

—I didn’t say anything.

—You were going to.

—We’ll start with this room tomorrow, Helen said. Then the sitting room, then upstairs, then the shed. There’s a system.

—Is there?

—There’s going to be a system.

Helen found a notebook in her bag and wrote SYSTEM at the top of a page, underlined it twice, and then sat looking at the empty space underneath it for so long that Kate quietly took the pen out of her hand and put the kettle on instead.

They worked until seven o’clock. They opened windows and closed them again because it was too cold. They found the heating and it made a noise like a large animal waking up. They discovered that there was no hot water, and then that there was, but only if you hit a pipe under the stairs, which Helen knew about and Kate did not, and which upset her mother more than she wanted to show.

At half past seven they ate fish and chips out of paper on the kitchen table, because the shop in the village closed at four and the pub had stopped serving food in 2019.

—What was she like? Kate said.

—Who?

—Grandma.

Helen put down a chip.

—You knew her.

—I met her twice. She sent me a card every birthday with five pounds in it. That’s not the same as knowing somebody.

Her mother was quiet for a while.

—She was practical, she said finally. She could fix things. She grew almost all her own food. She read a lot, mostly local history. She wrote letters, actual letters, on paper, to about nine people.

—That’s what she did. What was she like?

—Kate.

—Sorry.

Helen picked up the chip again and then put it down a second time.

—She was hard to know, she said. She was kind, and she was funny sometimes, and there was a door in her that was shut, and I lived in this house for eighteen years and I never got through it. That’s what she was like.

Outside, the wind moved in the hedge and something in the roof made a small sound and then stopped.

They went to bed early because there was nothing else in the house to do and because both of them had run out of conversation at about the same moment.

Kate’s room was upstairs at the front, under the slope of the roof, with a window that looked out over the lane. It was cold in a way that central heating does not fix. There was a bed with three blankets, a chest of drawers, a small bookcase with about twenty books on local churches, and a framed picture of a boat on a river.

Kate sat on the edge of the bed and sent three messages to her friend Priya, and none of them delivered, because there was no signal in Fen Lane and there had never been any signal in Fen Lane and, according to a sign in the village shop window, there was not going to be any signal in Fen Lane until at least 2027.

She put the phone face down on the chest of drawers.

She lay in the dark and listened to a house she did not know.

It was not quiet at all. Old houses never are, and this one had a great deal to say. There was the wind. There was a pipe somewhere that clicked eleven times and then stopped. There was a sound from the back garden that was probably a fox, and once, from a long way off, there was a noise that might have been a bird and might have been a person.

At about eleven o’clock Kate got up and went to the window.

The lane was completely black. There were no street lights in Fen Lane, and there was no moon, and she could not see the hedge or the gate or the road, only her own face in the glass with the dark behind it.

But she could see the village, four hundred metres away, and she noticed something that seemed odd, although she was too tired to think about it properly.

In every single house that faced the lane, on the first floor, there was one small light burning in the window.

Not a lamp. Something smaller and yellower and less steady than a lamp.

She counted eleven of them before she got too cold and went back to bed, and in the morning she forgot about it completely for another six days.

1. Complete the sentences

1. Grandma Iris lived in a small brick ______ outside the village.

2. The house stood at the end of a narrow ______.

3. Behind the garden there was a wide, wet ______.

4. The rooms were cold and ______ because nobody had lived there since August.

5. The ______ on the roof was old and crooked.

6. An ______ was coming in nine days to photograph the house.

7. Everything in the kitchen was ______ after two months.

8. Helen and Kate ______ the cottage after Iris died.

2. Match the words

1. a latch 2. a hedge 3. a will 4. unfamiliar 5. to belong to 6. a fen

a. завещание b. щеколда c. заболоченная низина d. живая изгородь e. принадлежать f. незнакомый

3. Choose the correct answer

1. A cottage is: a) a large city building b) a small country house c) a farm animal

2. If a room is damp: a) there is water in the air and walls b) it is very hot c) it is very clean

3. A lane is: a) a wide motorway b) a narrow country road c) a river

4. To inherit something means to get it: a) from a shop b) from a person who has died c) from a friend

5. A marsh is: a) dry land b) soft wet ground c) a kind of tree

4. Answer the questions

1. Why are Kate and her mother going to Wraycombe?

2. When did Grandma Iris die?

3. What does Kate notice in the hall of the cottage?

4. What does Helen say about her own mother at dinner?

5. What does Kate see from her window at eleven o’clock?

5. True, false or not given

1. Kate has visited the cottage many times.

2. The village has a shop, a church and a pub.

3. Helen cried at the funeral.

4. There is no hot water in the house at all.

5. Kate counts eleven lights in the village windows.

Past Simple: правильные и неправильные глаголы

Past Simple используется для законченных действий в прошлом, когда известно или подразумевается, когда это произошло. Это основное время повествования: почти вся эта книга написана в Past Simple.

Правильные глаголы: окончание -ed

Инфинитив — Past Simple:

work — worked

open — opened

stop — stopped

carry — carried

Правила написания

Окончание: обычный глагол · Что происходит: + ed · Пример: walk → walked

Окончание: немая -e на конце · Что происходит: + d · Пример: live → lived

Окончание: согласная + y · Что происходит: y меняется на ied · Пример: carry → carried

Окончание: гласная + y · Что происходит: просто + ed · Пример: play → played

Окончание: короткий глагол, одна гласная + согласная · Что происходит: согласная удваивается · Пример: stop → stopped, plan → planned

Неправильные глаголы

Их около двухсот, но в живой речи постоянно используются примерно шестьдесят. Их нужно выучить наизусть, потому что правила для них нет. Вот самые частые, все они встречаются в этой главе:

Инфинитив: be · Past Simple: was / were · Русский: быть

Инфинитив: go · Past Simple: went · Русский: идти, ехать

Инфинитив: come · Past Simple: came · Русский: приходить

Инфинитив: have · Past Simple: had · Русский: иметь

Инфинитив: say · Past Simple: said · Русский: сказать

Инфинитив: see · Past Simple: saw · Русский: видеть

Инфинитив: take · Past Simple: took · Русский: брать

Инфинитив: get · Past Simple: got · Русский: получать

Инфинитив: make · Past Simple: made · Русский: делать

Инфинитив: know · Past Simple: knew · Русский: знать

Инфинитив: think · Past Simple: thought · Русский: думать

Инфинитив: find · Past Simple: found · Русский: находить

Инфинитив: sit · Past Simple: sat · Русский: сидеть

Инфинитив: stand · Past Simple: stood · Русский: стоять

Инфинитив: put · Past Simple: put · Русский: класть

Инфинитив: do · Past Simple: did · Русский: делать

Обрати внимание на форму be

Это единственный глагол, у которого в прошедшем времени две формы:

I / he / she / it was и you / we / they were

Слова-указатели

yesterday, last night, last week, in August, in 1963, two years ago, then, that morning

She died in August. · They arrived that afternoon.

1. Put the verb in Past Simple

1. The road (be) ______ flat for eleven miles.

2. Kate (sit) ______ in the passenger seat.

3. Her grandmother (die) ______ in August.

4. They (arrive) ______ in the afternoon.

5. Helen (take) ______ a suitcase out of the car.

6. Kate (see) ______ eleven lights in the village.

7. The lock (be) ______ very stiff.

8. They (eat) ______ fish and chips at the kitchen table.

2. Write the Past Simple form

1. go → ______

2. come → ______

3. think → ______

4. find → ______

5. stop → ______

6. carry → ______

7. put → ______

8. stand → ______

9. know → ______

10. live → ______

3. Complete the text

Kate and her mother (1. leave) ______ home at eleven o’clock. They (2. drive) ______ for three hours and they (3. not talk) very much. When they (4. arrive) ______ in Wraycombe, it (5. be) ______ already getting dark. Helen (6. open) ______ the front door and they (7. go) ______ inside. In the hall Kate (8. see) ______ a mirror with a cloth over it.

Vocabulary 1: 1. cottage 2. lane 3. marsh / fen 4. damp 5. chimney 6. estate agent 7. dusty 8. inherited

Vocabulary 2: 1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-f, 5-e, 6-c

Vocabulary 3: 1-b, 2-a, 3-b, 4-b, 5-b

Vocabulary 4: 1. To empty the house before it is sold. 2. In August, in hospital, on a Tuesday afternoon. 3. A mirror with a cloth over it. 4. That she was practical and kind but hard to know, and that there was a closed door in her. 5. One small yellow light in the first floor window of every house facing the lane.

Vocabulary 5: 1. False 2. True 3. Not given 4. False 5. True

Grammar 1: 1. was 2. sat 3. died 4. arrived 5. took 6. saw 7. was 8. ate

Grammar 2: 1. went 2. came 3. thought 4. found 5. stopped 6. carried 7. put 8. stood 9. knew 10. lived

Grammar 3: 1. left 2. drove 3. didn’t talk 4. arrived 5. was 6. opened 7. went 8. saw

a tin — жестяная коробка

a drawer — ящик (стола, комода)

a lid — крышка

handwriting — почерк

ink — чернила

a sheet of paper — лист бумаги

to fold — складывать

a crease — сгиб, складка

faded — выцветший

a rule — правило

a list — список

deliberate — обдуманный, намеренный

an instruction — указание, инструкция

a warning — предупреждение

ordinary — обычный

They started with the kitchen, because Helen had a system now and the system began at the back of the house.

It went badly for about an hour and then it went well for six.

The problem at the beginning was that everything had a story attached to it, and Helen did not want to tell any of the stories, and Kate could see her deciding not to tell them, which was worse than hearing them. A wooden spoon with a burnt handle. A tin of buttons. A blue jug with a crack in it that had clearly been mended a long time ago and mended badly.

—Right, said Helen at nine o’clock, with a marker pen and a roll of bin bags. Three piles. Keep, charity, bin. If we start discussing things we will still be here at Christmas.

—Understood.

—I mean it.

—I have understood, said Kate.

—Keep or go? Kate said, holding up the jug.

—Go.

—Are you sure?

—Kate, if I keep everything in this house that means something, we will need a lorry and a second house.

—Fine. Go.

Helen turned round.

—Actually, put it on the table.

—You just said.

—I know what I said.

By eleven o’clock they had a rhythm. Kate emptied cupboards onto the table, Helen made three piles, and every twenty minutes one of them carried a box out to the shed. The shed piles were called KEEP, CHARITY and BIN, and by lunchtime the BIN pile was enormous and the KEEP pile was one small cardboard box with a jug in it.

They stopped at one for sandwiches and ate them standing up, because both chairs were covered in saucepans.

—Nine days, Helen said, looking round the room. We’ve done a third of one room in five hours.

—We’ve done the hard third.

—Have we?

—Obviously not, Kate said. I was being encouraging.

Her mother laughed properly for the first time since they had arrived, which lasted about two seconds and was worth the whole morning.

At two o’clock they moved to the dresser.

The dresser was the oldest thing in the room, a great dark wooden object almost as tall as the ceiling, with shelves above and cupboards below and, between them, a row of four narrow drawers.

Helen opened them from the top, one at a time, in order, because that was the system.

The first drawer was full of string.

The second drawer was full of things that a house collects in fifty years: batteries, keys with no locks, a torch, seed packets, three pairs of scissors, a rubber band ball, a plastic thing that Kate could not identify at all.

The third drawer contained bills, all of them paid, all of them filed in date order going back to 1998.

—She was extremely organised, Kate said.

—She was frightening, Helen said. When I was seventeen I lost a library book and she found it in four minutes. It was under my bed. I had already looked under my bed.

—What’s in the bottom one? said Kate.

—No idea. It has never opened in my lifetime.

—Never?

—Never, said Helen. My father tried it once with a chisel in about 1988 and she told him to leave it alone, and he left it alone, and I have not thought about that sentence for thirty-seven years until precisely this second.

The fourth drawer was stuck.

Kate pulled it twice and it did not move. She put both hands on the handles and pulled harder and the whole dresser leaned forward slightly and Helen said something short from the other side of the kitchen.

—It’s stuck.

—It’s always been stuck. Lift it and pull at the same time.

Kate lifted and pulled at the same time and the drawer came out about ten centimetres and then stopped again, and inside, wedged sideways across the whole width of the drawer, was the reason.

It was a tin.

She got it out eventually, after five minutes of careful work with a wooden spoon, and the drawer came free so suddenly that a handful of drawing pins went across the floor in every direction. It was a biscuit tin, rectangular, about the size of a large book, with a picture on the lid of a mountain and a lake in colours that had faded to almost nothing. The corners were rusty. Somebody had put a rubber band round it, and the rubber band had gone hard and grey and broke as soon as Kate touched it.

—What is it? Helen said.

—I don’t know yet.

Kate put it on the kitchen table and took off the lid.

Inside there were four things.

The first was a small brown envelope with nothing written on it, and inside the envelope there was a hair ribbon, dark blue, about twenty centimetres long, quite badly damaged along one edge as if it had been in water.

The second was a photograph, face down.

The third was a folded sheet of paper.

The fourth was a second folded sheet of paper, much newer than the first, in a plastic wallet.

Kate reached for the photograph first, because that is what anybody would do, and because it was the only thing in the tin with a person in it. because that is what anybody would do, and Helen said:

—Wait.

Her mother sat down opposite her.

—Show me the tin first.

Kate turned the tin so her mother could see the inside of the lid.

There was writing on it, in black marker pen, quite large, in handwriting they both knew from birthday cards.

HALLOWEEN. READ BEFORE DARK.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

—Right, Helen said. Well. That’s not creepy at all.

Kate took out the first folded sheet.

It was old. The paper had gone soft along the creases, and it had been folded and unfolded so many times that it was beginning to come apart in the middle. The ink was not black any more. It was brown.