The Third Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories [antikvár]

GREEN FINGERS R. a Cook Widow Bowen was getting old. She was seventy-five, perhaps, or eighty. No one in Breth Common really knew. But then, it didn't really matter. She looked the same trim little person that she had always been, even while her husband, Ernest, had been alive, and he had died ten years ago. The little grey stone cottage on the hill lane up to the common was half hidden by damson trees from the road, and wrapped snugly, as if in a woollen comforter, by the flowering creeper which grew up beside the door. The round hawthorn hedge at the bottom of the garden by the road was neatly trimmed and looked like a long green sponge roll. At times, the villagers expressed surprise and a little pride in the old lady when they saw how well kept the garden still was. It was a lot of work for an old woman, and a houseproud woman at that. Widow Bowen would just smile when the baker remarked on how strong and green her shallots were growing, or when Nurse Foley called up from the road with her laughing red face, to say that the broad beans looked a picture. Widow Bowen would say, and her blue eyes would twinkle, " I think I must have green fingers. Everything grows well here." And she thought she was being rather modest at that, for she could not remember anything that had not grown for her when she planted it. She would say the same thing to Mrs. Beddoe at the farm when, in summer, she took down a basketful of long runner beans to help pay for the milk she fetched. " I must have green fingers," she would say and smile into Mrs. Beddoe's sceptical face. Mrs. Beddoe didn't quite know what to think. She didn't really want the vegetables that Widow Bowen brought in her basket, and yet, neither did she want to show the old lady how mercenary she was by asking for money instead, so she just looked down at the white bobbed hair and placed the jug of milk carefully into the thin hands.