The Muse Read Online Free

the land post-­independence was being sold to foreign companies who invested the profits back into their own countries? What were we youngsters supposed to do, when we reached the bottom of those schoolbags and found nothing there – just a seam, split from the weight of our books? We had to leave.
    â€˜Are you all right, Miss Bastien?’ said Quick.
    â€˜I came here with my friend, Cynth,’ I said, not wishing to dwell on Port of Spain, the death board with Dad’s name on it, his empty plot in Lapeyrouse Cemetery that Mama still kept vacant, the Catholic nuns who’d taught me as I grew up in my grief. ‘Cynthia’s engaged,’ I said. ‘She’s getting married.’
    â€˜Ah.’ Quick picked up her knife and began to lift a small segment of the sole, and I had the strange feeling of saying too much without having said anything at all. ‘When?’
    â€˜In two weeks. I’m maid of honour.’
    â€˜And then what?’
    â€˜Then what?’
    â€˜Well, you’ll be alone, won’t you? She’ll be living with her husband.’
    Quick always insisted on skirting her own truths whilst getting to the core of yours. She told me nothing about the Skelton, focusing only on finding out about me, and had soon skewered my darkest fear. The fact was, Cynth’s imminent departure from our little flat had hung between me and my oldest friend like a silent question, heavy with foreboding. We both knew she would leave to live with Samuel, but I couldn’t imagine rooming with anybody else, so I didn’t talk about it, and neither did she. I boasted about my new job and she fretted over wedding invitations and made me sandwiches I overlooked. The salary from the Skelton would cover the second room she was going to vacate, and this was my only comfort.
    â€˜I enjoy my own company,’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘It’ll be nice to have some space.’
    Quick reached for another cigarette, but then seemed to change her mind. If you were alone , I thought, you’d have already smoked three more. Her eyes rested briefly on my face as she lifted the steel dome to reveal a lemon meringue. ‘Do eat something, Miss Bastien,’ she said. ‘All this food.’
    Whilst I ate my slice of meringue, Quick didn’t touch a thing. She seemed born to all this, to the smoking and the telephone orders, the tangential observations. I imagined her in her twenties, raffing round London with a glamorous, careless set, a cat amongst the Blitz. I was piecing her together from Mitford and Waugh, dousing her with a coat of my newly discovered Muriel Spark. It was perhaps a vanity, instilled in me from the education I’d received, which was little different from the model used in English public schools, with its Latin and Greek and boys playing cricket – but I had yearned for eccentric, confident ­people to enhance my life; I thought I deserved them, the sort of ­people you found only in novels. Quick hardly had to do anything, I was so sprung for it, so willing. Starved of my past life, I began to concoct a present fantasy.
    â€˜Your application interested me greatly,’ she said. ‘You write very well. Very well. At your university, you seem to have been one of the brightest students. I take it you think you’re too good to be a secretary.’
    The fear ran through me. Did this mean she was letting me go, that I hadn’t passed the trial? ‘I’m very grateful to be here,’ I said. ‘It’s a wonderful place to work.’
    She made a face at these blandishments and I wondered what it was she wanted. I reached for a bread roll and rested it in my palm. It was the weight and size of a small marsupial and I had an instinct to stroke it. Feeling her eyes upon me, I plunged my thumb into the crust instead.
    â€˜And what sort of things do you like to write?’
    I thought of the piece of paper on the