The Beast Read Online Free Page A

you were his son. He’d think you were just trying to get something out of him.’
    ‘Why didn’t you ever tell him?’
    ‘Partly because I didn’t want to be bothered with him, partly because he was already married with children of his own and wouldn’t have left them for me if I’d wanted him to, which I didn’t; and partly because even then he’d never have believed it. He wouldn’t have wanted the responsibility or something, and anyway I don’t think he ever knew that I never had sex with Eduardo. Oh, it was all too silly, really. Like an opera.’
    Another smile out across the empty steppes …
    ‘Though it’s a shame Eduardo never knew you. He’d have liked you, and given you money.’
    ‘You shouldn’t have divorced him.’
    ‘I shouldn’t have married him.’
    She had wanted someone to take care of her …
    ‘He shouldn’t have married you .’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘He shouldn’t.’
    He had, poor Eduardo—as far as she’d been able to discover —because he pitied her; or because he felt some sort of affinity with a thin and strikingly beautiful survivor of a concentration camp; or because he needed a wife for social reasons, and felt that she, at least, after all she had been through, would understand . Whatever his motive, however, it wasn’t until after they were married that he had made it clear that theirs was to be a marriage in name only. She had put up with it, having the occasional discreet affair, for almost six years; and then, for no particular reason, had decided she would put up with it no longer. And wanting to free herself, she had done so in the crudest, most effective, and only way possible. She had had an indiscreet affairwith the one man her husband couldn’t forgive her for having an affair with; the man that he himself was, and had been for years, in love with. (Though this man, stupid as he was, had never realized it, and merely considered Eduardo his best friend.) And everything had gone according to plan. The divorce, that is. What didn’t go according to plan was that Eduardo, in his hysteria, declared his love, and finding his declaration received with disgust, put a gun in his mouth and blew off enough of his face to kill him three months later, and that his young ex-wife, arriving penniless in London (penniless because she wanted nothing from her husband, and in London because she couldn’t think where else to go), realized that she was pregnant.
    ‘Anyway,’ she said at last ‘money isn’t everything.’
    She thought that might provoke an explosion. What she got instead—and she might have preferred the explosion—was a long deep stare from her son; a stare which took in her huge bloated body, the old armchair in which she sat, the striped wallpaper around her and, somehow, the whole of her life for the last twenty-six years.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re right. And I don’t want money. You know that. I just want to be able to paint.’
    What could she say? She sighed, and smiled saying ‘Well, if I’m dead, you might just as well inherit now. I’ve got ten pounds in my bag if you want it.’
    He stared at her again, and she was afraid he was going to start crying.
    ‘I can’t.’
    ‘Take five then.’
    ‘But five is no use. Ten is no use. I can get one canvas for that. One’s no use. And anyway—’ he stopped, and gazed at the wreckage on the floor; at the remains of the two paintings.
    ‘They were beautiful, weren’t they?’, he whispered.
    *
    Yes, they had been beautiful, Elisabeth Vidozza thought half an hour later as she cleaned up the mess, and after she had given Mirko four pounds to go to the cinema with, or to buy a film for his camera, with which he would take beautiful photographs. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Only—she had been beautiful once, and now the father of her only child didn’t recognize her. And the house where she had lived as a girl had been beautiful—and now it no longer existed. And her mother had been