LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘But I have been in love with you, since the first week. Tell me, do you believe in it?’

      ‘I don’t think I believe in love at any sight,’ she said grimly.

      Colin’s face fell. ‘That’s a terrible shame. A terrible admission. For a young woman.’ He took thought. ‘Another gin?’

      ‘Please.’

      ‘With tonic?’

      ‘With tonic’

      ‘Look, you must feel my pulse,’ he said. ‘Go on, feel it. My pulse-rate’s sky-high.’

      ‘I don’t know.’ She ignored his hand. ‘I don’t know anything about pulse-rates.’

      ‘Am I embarrassing you?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘I thought I might be embarrassing you.’

      ‘Do I look embarrassed?’

      ‘No, I must admit, you look quite calm. I had to say all this, I hope you understand why. I couldn’t have lived with it for another week. To tell the truth, I can’t stand seeing you only once a week. Will you meet me some other night?’

      ‘Where?’

      He was aghast. ‘You will?’

      She gave him a level stare. ‘I didn’t say whether I would or not, I said “Where?”.’

      ‘Wherever you like. I’ll collect you. I’ll pick you up. Where do you live?’

      ‘I’ll write down my address.’

      ‘Have you got a pen?’

      ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I have a pen.’ She took a small pad out of her bag, scribbled her address, and handed him the leaf. He put it in his wallet. His face showed disbelief.

      ‘I live with my father,’ she said.

      ‘Do you? I didn’t think…’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘I imagined you having a flat somewhere. With other girls. You know. To be honest I’m glad. I couldn’t see myself calling at a flat for you. I wouldn’t like to, you know, present myself.’

      ‘You don’t think you’re presentable?’

      ‘What about your mother, is she…?’

      ‘Dead.’

      ‘Sorry. Will you introduce me to your father?’

      ‘I don’t think you’d have much in common. He’s old…he’s retired. He was a bank manager. He has hobbies.’

      ‘Oh yes?’

      ‘Early railways. Numismatics. Military history.’

      Colin smiled. ‘I’ll have to take some more evening classes.’

      ‘I’d rather you didn’t meet.’

      ‘Would he disapprove of you…going out with me?’

      ‘I don’t know. I can’t imagine what his opinion would be.’

      ‘Aren’t you close?’

      ‘We lead our own lives.’

      ‘Isn’t it a bit dull, living at home?’

      ‘No. It’s not dull.’ She leaned forward. ‘So, Colin, am I right? Are you discontented?’

      ‘Of course I am.’

      ‘And do you think you will ever leave them?’

      ‘Yes, I…’ He dropped his eyes, shifted his feet a little under the table. ‘Yes, I think it quite possible that one day soon I won’t find it possible to go on as I am.’

      Colin drained his half-pint. He took out a clean folded handkerchief and dabbed his top lip with it. Already he was making giant strides.

      Out in the conservatory. It is not really worthy of the name, just a glass lean-to at the back of the house, but Evelyn calls it the conservatory. There have never been plants in it. Clifford had not been much of a gardener. Get some flagstones down, had been Clifford’s idea. Muriel could not tell flagstones from gravestones. She referred to them as such. Her morbid fancy has by now taken a thorough grip on Evelyn, who often imagines she is walking on the dead.

      Out in the conservatory are Clifford’s collections. Newspapers: the local Reporter for all the years they had lived at Buckingham Avenue. There was no topic which had interested him, no local good work or sport or sewerage scheme. He had merely laid them aside in the spare room, week after week. After his death Evelyn had left them for a while, and then, sensing that the room was needed, had dashed them in great bales down the stairs and humped them along the hallway and out through the back door. It is absurd to say, she tells Muriel, that we do not have newspapers. They are all there, with stopped clocks and defunct lightbulbs and a mousetrap, postcards from relatives escaped to Bournemouth, Little Dorrit with the back off, a cakestand, a china duck, a railway timetable from 1954. They yellow and moulder. In a lesser neighbourhood, there would be rats. Perhaps there are.

      Muriel often comes to sit here. She thinks it as good and orderly as anywhere in the house. Sometimes she looks inside the decaying cardboard boxes which are piled almost to the roof. There is dust an inch thick in places, spiders’ webs like veils from long-postponed weddings.

      Isabel Field, standing on the Axons’ front path, was growing irritable. Why is it, she thought, that I am sure there is someone in there? There was no movement behind the curtains, nothing to hear, and in fact the house had less life about it than most properties standing empty; yet she was sure that someone was there. How many letters? Three or four. What do they do, throw them away or leave them on the mat in the hall? It’s their privilege, she supposes. Most of the mildly handicapped, people like Miss Axon, live in the world with no one pestering them. She has more urgent cases, wretched and worn women keeping house for incontinent parents who have ceased to recognise them; the paranoid and the dangerously deluded and the terminally ill, the children in institutional cots staring without comprehension at the bars. With the very old and the very young, Isabel feels afraid. At the two poles of birth and death, she sniffs unbearable conjectures in the wind. She functions on the middle ground. By temperament and habit of mind, she is unsuited to her work.

      I have of course, she thought, a right to be here. It was more with herself than with the Axons she was irritated. She stepped off the path and peered into the bay window of the front room. It was too dark to see very much, just the outline of a fireplace and an old-fashioned dining suite. The high lattice gate to the back was not bolted. It creaked; of course, it would creak. These are two women alone, they do not maintain their property. She stepped through dead leaves, along a blank brick wall. A low sky, a neglected garden; October in melancholy retreat towards November. Sharply she knocked at the side door. It was four in the afternoon. She could see her own breath on the air, and a distant sickle moon. She knocked again; nothing. She felt that someone was watching her, watching with interest; discounted it as absurd. The house was built on a slope, higher at the back than at the front, so that when she tried to peer in to the kitchen window it was too high for her, the bottom frame almost level with the top of her head.

      There were steps down on to the overgrown lawn. She looked around for something to stand on—a bucket, perhaps. She jumped into the air to try to see into the kitchen, but she caught only a glimpse of a varnished cupboard door with a calendar pinned to it. If anyone is watching, she thought, I must look absurd. She wondered if she could get a grip on the windowsill and pull herself up for long enough to see if there was anyone in the kitchen. No, she thought, I draw the line at gymnastics, I am not trained for it. There must be another door, she thought, going into the kitchen or the hall from this sort of greenhouse. The panes were so filthy that she could hardly see inside. It seemed to be full of rubbish, boxes piled high. Something scurried away from her feet and she jumped aside. It was beginning to drizzle,

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