The setting is the old family home to which Cousin Laura came as a June bride sixty years ago. Today, history repeats itself, for Ellen is about to marry Cousin Laura's step-son, Leonard, after a seven-year engagement. But Ellen is uneasy about the approaching wedding. While smoothing the familiar friction among the tenants who now inhabit most of the old house, Ellen tries to attribute her qualms to a spinsterish imagination. But at night, awakened by sounds that remind her of childhood terror, her fears become more and more interwoven with Cousin Laura's unhappy memories of her first marriage. The old woman's outworn bitterness seems to have some mysterious relevance to Leonard's odd behaviour as the marriage preparations go forward. The forebodings of the two women—the very old and the very young—become spine-tingling reality on the night of the wedding.
Author
Celia was born in Kingsbury, now part of London, England. She was the daughter of Heaver Fremlin and Margaret Addiscott. Her older brother, John H. Fremlin, later became a nuclear physicist. Celia studied at Somerville College, Oxford University. From 1942 to 2000 she lived in Hampstead, London. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, with whom she had three children; he died in 1968. In 1985, Celia married Leslie Minchin, who died in 1999. Her many crime novels and stories helped modernize the sensation novel tradition by introducing criminal and (rarely) supernatural elements into domestic settings. Her 1958 novel The Hours Before Dawn won the Edgar Award in 1960. With Jeffrey Barnard, she was co-presenter of a BBC2 documentary “Night and Day” describing diurnal and nocturnal London, broadcast 23 January 1987. Fremlin was an advocate of assisted suicide and euthanasia. In a newspaper interview she admitted to assisting four people to die.[1] In 1983 civil proceedings were brought against her as one of the five members of the EXIT Executive committee which had published “A Guide to Self Deliverance”, but the court refused to declare the booklet unlawful. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celia...]
