The Circle Read Online Free Page A

hide the threatening letters; to protect herself from Ben’s knowledge. Always in all their conversations she offered the same mistaken optimism. Like a defence. Which he had to tear down.
    –I won’t listen, he would say. Because that’s what got us into this mess.
    –But it’s not so bad this month, she would persist, stupidly.
    –Ha. I can’t even afford a pair of trousers.
    –But you can, she would say eagerly.
    –With that overdraft? You and your fiddling ways with money. Where’s it all gone? Anyway I never even liked this bloody house.
    –No, she would say. That isn’t fair and would be already crying so that he looked at her with real hatred.
    –God, what a life I have. Must you do that?
    And upstairs Gertrud, moving about, humming to her transistor. One tune, always one tune. Gertrud, not quite au pair. So long with them now. Sometimes she told them stories of her home in East Germany, some isolated village in deep countryside where her father had his farm labourer’s job, and there were fruit trees and nuts to be taken from common land; of how she and her brother had to climb to the top of a hill to get the deliveries of rich local bread and how there were soft brown cows, that put warm faces through her window in the mornings. Long ago all that, she’d had her schooling in England, her voice and vowels were wholly those of East Anglia, only in the width of her arse and the flatness of her face was there any touch of the foreign. And really she was a plain girl, except for her skin, and her hair, which she wore long and was red like a copper beech. She was like some great mother animal, humming pop song about the house, taking herweekly pay, ignorant of their disasters. Her job: children and clothes, no more; no housework ever.
    *
    –Look at these. It was Michael. Lena took them, the pearled stones, the strands of green rubbery stuff, fronded, tentacular, mysterious, took them into her hand and said: Look, Ben. Aren’t they lovely?
    And she could feel the pain starting like a slow acting poison somewhere in the blood.
    *
    –This place is a mess, Ben said, looking round the kitchen.
    –It’s the weekends are always the worst, Lena said. But I’ll get it straight. She began to push things about.
    –Do what you like, I’m going out, he said.
    –Out?
    –Yes. I can’t stand it here. But I’ll take the kids, he offered.
    And Gertrud came down the stairs in a new frock, untouched laughing.
    –Do you want to come to town? he asked her. Why not? And yet it was a strange set-up.
    When they were gone Lena worked. As she could work when she wanted to. She cleaned the house, tight-lipped and like her mother would, fast and angry and fit. And when they all came back there were flowers in the vases and the floors all shone.
    –What do you think, she said incautiously as Ben entered the room, and looked: at where she stood, hair wild as a witch, shining with effort, her feet stuck in old shoes. His nose wrinkled.
    –The room, she cried out stricken by that look. Can’t you see? while you’ve been out. What’s happened?
    But he’d walked off into the hall again to find post in the mat. She could hear him opening the envelopes.Sat in the chair, lit a cigarette. Listened to his feet returning.
    –Look at this, he said.
    And she looked familiarly. The bill was not one she’d concealed, as it happened, but he said he couldn’t remember seeing it before.
    –They’ll wait, she said sullenly.
    –How many more? How many more?
    *
    –It was like a cry for help. You went away. He said it, staring over the sands.
    And it was true she had gone away. Not often and not for long, but not for money either or not only. She had her own desperation; for something that could be her own, that she could hold to under the savagery of his definitions. And sometimes she had even been grateful. That he had forced her to exist as a separate creature. But now she sat on a spar in the width of a grey March beach in a