Secret Story Read Online Free Page B

like an admonitory finger, to the bathroom.
    Kathy had tidied his clothes into the basket, surely a promising sign. He bolted the door and climbed into the bath. It was as large as she liked it, and for the first time it made him feel stunted to childishness. As the water that had been lying in wait in the shower found him, he began to shiver. Hot water followed it, and he could have imagined that the June heat had been transformed into a mass of needles to prick him. He did his best to rake the sweat off his body with it before challenging his own gaze in the mirror while he dried himself. Once he’d knotted the cord of his towelling robe he padded downstairs. He was ready for a fight, he tried to think, since he was robed like a boxer.
    Kathy was washing breakfast dishes in the kitchen sink. She must have released her greying hair from whatever style she’d worn to work—however she’d looked when she’d waved him off that morning—because it was halfway down her back. She was in her civil service clothes, not the faded russet kaftan she so often wore at home. As she turned to him the sunlight caught the hint of a dark moustache that he sometimes thought was the badge of her ambition to contain all Dudley needed of a father. Her broad large-boned wide-eyed face, which was rather let down by a small flat knob of a chin, looked determined to be reasonable, as always. She rested a fingertip in the groove above her mouth as though holding the expression still before releasing her lips to ask “Which room shall we sit in? Would you like a drink?”
    “I don’t want anything.” This sounded defensive, and he tried to rescind his mistake. “You wanted to talk,” he said close to accusingly, and pulled out a chair with a screech of pine on linoleum.
    “I just don’t want you to be . . .” She recaptured her voice as she sat across the table from him, but only to say “Do you know when you really upset me?”
    Until now, was she implying? The obliqueness of her approach turned his thoughts into hard spiky lumps that scraped the inside of his skull. “No idea,” he mumbled.
    “Try and think. There’s a reason.”
    “The first day I went to school.”
    “And you kept running back to me in tears. You’re not still angry with me over that, are you? Remember I told you I felt the same on my first day. That wasn’t the time, though it was bad. I knew you had to get used to school. We couldn’t afford to have you taught at home even if you were ahead of the other children.”
    He found her wistfulness even more suffocating than usual. As heat swarmed over him he realised she was still awaiting the answer to her question. “The first day I wanted to walk to school by myself.”
    “You were too young, Dudley. Do you remember the tantrum you threw? I was fond of that vase. I never told you it was my mother’s, did I? But no, not then either. Part of me admired you for wanting to be independent when you were only eleven.”
    “When I went for my job interview and wouldn’t let you come.”
    “What makes you think I was unhappy then? I was so proud of you.”
    That wasn’t how he remembered it. He’d heard her sobbing as soon as she closed the front door after waving him off. “When I went to look for my dad,” he suggested impatiently.
    “I was afraid for you till the police found you. You were just thirteen, you know. But I didn’t mean that kind of upset. I’m sure I realised Monty leaving was something you had to work through.”
    At the time and for years Dudley’s impression had been thatshe’d felt betrayed by her son. “Then I don’t know,” he complained. “Tell me.”
    “When you tore up that story I said you should try and get published.”
    “You shouldn’t even have read it.”
    “You know I thought you’d left it on your bed for me. If I wasn’t meant to read it, why didn’t you shut the door?”
    “I did.” Surely this argument had been buried a decade ago. “That’s why