Life: An Exploded Diagram Read Online Free

Mr. Mortimer was referring, slyly and benignly, to Percy Little.
    Percy was a year older than Win and had been a nuisance for most of her life. As a boy, he’d been a ringleader of the small mob who’d pelted acorns and snowballs at her. He’d put a toad in her school desk. He’d darted sticky arrowgrass at her skirts, untugged her hair ribbons. Over the years, Win’s tormentors had dwindled away, attracted by younger, softer targets or repulsed by her icy disdain and wicked tongue. But Percy had persevered in his pursuit of her. Gradually his harassment had softened into a rough courtship. When he was thirteen, he’d persuaded Win to kiss him on the mouth. She’d thought the experience peculiar and not worth repeating. Later Win had started to fill her clothes in a way that she found troubling and Percy found interesting. He wanted to touch her in particular places and she wouldn’t let him.
    When he left school, Percy had gone to be a stable-lad for the Mortimers. He discovered he had an affinity with the huge, placid cart horses and plow horses. He loved the careful way they placed their feathery, iron-shod feet on the earth. When they were not working and needed exercise, he led them past the Sparling cottage and hoisted squealing Win up onto their backs. She found it thrilling to be so high off the ground, perched atop half a ton of warm and muscular architecture.
    During the winter, when her father was dying, Percy made repeated efforts to put his hands inside her clothes. She wouldn’t let him.
    He’d said, “If we was married, Win, yer’d hev to.”
    Walking with Stanley and her mother back from the graveyard, thinking about what Mortimer had said, Win understood — or thought she understood — what the framework of her life had to be.
    So the next time Percy put his hand on her leg, she said, “Not till we’re married, Percy.”
    “Yer’ll hev me, then?”
    “If yer behave yerself,” she said.
    Afterward she realized that she’d be called Win Little. A foolish name.
    Their engagement was accelerated by the First World War. Magnificent recruiting sergeants addressed gatherings on village greens and in church halls, speaking of Heroism and Duty and the Vileness of the Huns. From behind them, vicars and squires and chairmen of parish councils glared into the audience, daring cowards to meet their gaze. Men started vanishing from the countryside, marching away accompanied by faltering music. On one Saturday afternoon, six of Mortimer’s men went off and joined up; they came back from the recruiting office beery, puffed up, and boastful.
    Win thought that Percy might not go if he was married.
    The wedding took place five days after her eighteenth birthday. Stanley gave her away, fumbling it. Percy moved into the cottage, sleeping with Win in the bedroom that Jimmy and Albert had shared.
    She kept him safe for a whole year. He showed no sign of wanting to fight, and because he was a newlywed, he was not condemned for it. No one handed him a white feather, that soft and silent accusation of cowardice.
    Two days after their first wedding anniversary, Percy was conscripted. He went to Thetford for six weeks’ basic training, then came back to her, a stranger in a manure-colored uniform, his eyes unfamiliar beneath the peak of his cap. He insisted that they have their photograph taken before he went to France. They walked to Borstead, from where they took the train to Norwich. The photographer’s studio was on Prince of Wales Road. They had to queue; other men in uniform with their wives and fiancées were there ahead of them. They posed in front of a painted backdrop of a garden with a fountain. Afterward they had tea and cake at a café in Tombland, in the shadow of the cathedral.
    He came home once more after that. Then in 1918 he was shot in the belly and drowned facedown in a Belgian meadow that battle had turned into a smoking and bloody swamp.
    Win was very angry. She was angry with him for