Bethany Read Online Free

picking a runner in the three-thirty, looked first with resentment, then with admiration, and finally with a fierceprotective love at this slip of a woman, five foot four, who smoked cigars and bought her round, and drove a Thames truck as well as any of them, and had about her a gentleness which they had never seen in their wives. Their wives, of course, hated her.
    I was sufficiently sure of my own worth not to resent being eclipsed by Alex’s personality. In any case, I did not share Alex’s conviction of the innate superiority of the working class, and I thought she was welcome to the spoils. With our London friends I did sometimes feel I had been edged into a subservient position, and I reacted either by competing or by silence, depending on my mood. But I knew that it was as much my fault as hers. She removed from me the odious responsibility of being sociable.
    Inequalities of personality were aggravated by the fact that when we began to live together she had a house and a private income and I, having given up a job to leave London, had nothing at all. The psychological structure thus established persisted long after her income stopped and we were both living on my earnings. But in a sense these considerations were all superficial. Alex dominated, and I did not challenge her dominance however disastrous the results might be, because she had a rare and precious quality. I could not name it, but when I met her I knew that, having found it, I must never let it go.
    It was like a candle-flame that, however near to guttering, never quite goes out. It was at once an innocence, a wisdom and a strength. I had seen her draw on it to cope with situations in which I was utterly at a loss: Jacques nihilistic and blaspheming, with Manuela weeping in terror and the children white-faced against the wall; Manuela’s brother, black eyes burning, covering sheet after sheet of paper with pencil drawings of landscapes made out of faces, never looking up, never lifting the pencil, for six hours; gentle William, devastating in his lobotomised simplicity, asking after five minutes’ acquaintance if he could sleep with her; crazy Caroline, squatting on the unswept floor in her Highbury flat, working out numbers,working out the number of the house added to the numerical value of the street name plus the postal district, divided by the numerical value of her own name reduced to a single figure, because if the answer came out exactly she would survive the night in that house.
    Alcoholics, drug-addicts, schizophrenics, the lost and the damned – to all these people, from whom I drew back in fear because I could not begin to understand the darkness into which they had fallen, Alex found something to say. Across that terrible gulf she would lean and hold their hands, and they would look up for a moment and hope.
    It was a kind of grace. It came, obviously, from God, whatever that meant. Thus I acknowledged that Alex, however irrational, inconsiderate, wilful and self-opinionated, was better than me, and better in a way that transcended my scale of values. She had the true gold, the spark, the spirit. I bowed to it.
    And now I saw that I had been mistaken. Oh, it was there. But what a small, threatened thing it was, and how unsure of its way. How weak she was, this woman I had thought so strong. How puerile was the wisdom that held them spellbound in the pub. I knew; and, looking at me as I sat by her on the steps that night, she knew that I knew, and buried her face in my shoulder.
    All next day, and the day after that, we talked. I realised with growing dismay that she was in grave spiritual danger. I could see the light and the darkness struggle within her as she half-answered, parried or evaded my questions, or tried to translate what I was saying into something more congenial. She did not want to see Simon: she was afraid, as I had been. Or, rather, the darkness was afraid. I told her there was nothing to fear, but the dark