Louise found the two exercise books after lunch, as she swept up the crumbs, the bits of chalk and the remains of Bimbo the Boxer. There seemed to be a certain lack of finesse about Harriet’s and Margery’s methods of guarding their deadly secret, and Louise could not but be touched by Tony’s apparent faith in his two colleagues. She shook the crumbs off the books and carried them guiltily upstairs to her bedroom – though whether the guilt was due to her intention of extracting the secrets from another woman’s diary, or to the fact that she ought at this moment be washing the bathroom floor, she could not tell. A housewife’s sense of moral values is often blurred by this sort of thing. In Louise’s case, it was blurred even more by the fact that she could make almost no sense at all of Margery’s careful transcription – failure to achieve dishonesty often seems the next best thing to honesty itself. Although the writing itself was careful and neat, the meaning of what she was copying had clearly been far beyond Margery’s comprehension.
What do You think about The Hours Before Dawn (2014)?
