A Closed Eye Read Online Free

The arrangement worked, well enough. The flat above the shop was small, which meant that the nurse had to go, and the landlord was somehow shady, lavish with extra clothes coupons, and perpetually mentioning that the rent would have to be reviewed. Merle grew very thin, smart, haggard, brilliant-eyed. Harriet went to school.
    There were moments of peace, of unity, of something like sweetness. After school Harriet would sit with Hughie in the room behind the shop and do her homework. Hughie would place before her, with slightly shaking hands, a cup of weak tea, and later, even more tremulously, a doughnut on a cracked plate. He would subside into his chair with a sigh of contentment and address himself to his own tea, but sometimeshis hand shook so violently that he could only raise his cup to his lips with a visible effort at control. After this he would wink at Harriet. ‘Everything okay, sweetie?’ he would ask. His slang dated from before the war. ‘Everything tickety-boo?’ Yes, she would nod, for she was a stoic in her way. ‘Merle means blackbird,’ she might say, looking up from her French homework. ‘Blackbird, eh?’ he would reply. ‘To me she’s Helen of Troy.’ And he would get up and go into the shop, as if unable to be parted from her for another minute. And the old ladies from Pont Street would smile as he put his arm round her waist, although Merle herself was now too tired and too busy for this kind of thing. ‘I can get it for you, Mrs Armstrong,’ she would be saying. ‘I saw the material the last time I went to Maddox Street.’ In Maddox Street something mysterious went on once a month and resulted in the exchange of scarce cloth for illegal coupons. Merle gave the material to an outworker, and everyone was precariously satisfied.
    It was demanding, it was even hazardous, but they managed. Regularly a car drew up and out stepped their landlord, Mr Latif, a sharp-eyed Lebanese businessman, come to pick up the post-war pieces in the form of derelict property. Those were the days when the Lebanese were rich, active, and influential, a merchant class of infinite resource. ‘Hughie! Harriet!’ Merle would call, agitation in her voice. They would present a smiling front, coffee and cakes would be brought out, and Mr Latif would lay aside his hat and his coat with the razored lapels and relax a little. Few people welcomed him these days, and he liked the girl, with her eyes flowering candidly above the birthmark. She did not wince when he patted her cheek, seeing no harm, as indeed there was none. He liked her for that perception. She was perhaps young for her age; he liked that too.
‘Eh bien, ma petite, comment allez-vous ces jours-ci?’
he would say, in order to seehow she was doing in French.
‘Très bien, merci, Monsieur Latif,’
she would reply. It was all he could get out of her, but all the same he was quite pleased. He was sorry for her, doing her lessons at the back of the shop, with only the impotent father for company, for so he thought of him. It was perhaps pity for Harriet (or was it for Merle, who accepted his embraces?) that kept him from raising the rent: the shop did not interest him, although he had his eye on the flat, which he intended to repossess. But he was in no hurry, and in his way he was glad of the welcome they gave him. He thought them doomed, but hoped that the girl would be all right. At Christmas he brought her a large box of crystallized fruits. She thanked him and put them on one side. Hughie’s shaking fingers seized on them with delight. He craved sweet things, as well as sweet thoughts, sweet words, sweet music. There was not enough sweetness in the world to satisfy Hughie, who aged only physically, and that barely at all: his mind retained the ardour and goodwill he had possessed as a boy. Merle, seeing him smile with satisfaction as he performed some small task—a cup to be washed, a parcel to be tied—asked herself whether she had the strength to