The Sweet-Shop Owner Read Online Free Page B

them,’ he said. His voice sounded odd and strident. They were in a first-class compartment with no other passengers. His hand was on one of those smooth, perfect legs. He would have slid it up her pale green skirt. But her face had turned towards the sun-brushed window, her finger-tips were at her necklace.
    ‘Not now.’
    I was the odd one of the family.
    Yet her face was exquisite, with its detachment, with its sulky pallor, as she turned back, making him hold his hand as if he were a thief caught in the act of plunder.
    Outside, the stations were passing. Woking, Farnborough, Basingstoke. London was left and the munificent house in Sydenham Hill in which they were clearing away the wine glasses, the white napkins, and discussing with satisfaction how the thing had been done. The June sun was sinking over smooth, cooling fields and willowy streams, over reddened, long-shadowed figures caught, nonchalant, by hedgerows and gates, cycling in lanes, grouped at tables outside pubs. The evening air was melting their rigour, their day-time reserve. But she wouldn’t relent, and let those features lower their guard. She only took and squeezed his hand now and then and gave him those short, quick smiles that were like small coins thrown without fuss to someone who has done a service. And she let him lead her, when she prompted, along to the dining-car, where she sat, ordered a light meal, toyed with her fork, and eyed him warily, circumspectly, as though considering an action of the utmost delicacy which could no longer be postponed, and asking herself, ‘What must I do? What must I offer that would suffice? What would be a satisfactory concession in the circumstances?’
    Then the sun had sunk, she had put on a little cream scarf and he was carrying cases. And there, suddenly, were the country cottages, and the honeymoon hotel set back from the road, seen already as if in a frame, as if in a photograph in an album opened many years after; the downs of Dorset, pillowy in the dusk, and, beyond, the sea, somewhere murmuring under cliffs. June, 1937. And already landmarks were passing, thick and fast, faster than the passage of the train across the southern counties. Already the church, the bridal dress, and the speeches under the marquee. And she wouldn’t relent.
    They unpacked clothes in a room which smelt of polished wood and lavender. What had her mother told her, of the dangers of loitering and the wolves that prowl? But how could he be a wolf? He was a pet dog to be led ona lead; he would run when you called. Oh, she did the right things. She walked with him down a lane where the trees bent like arches and rested her head in the crook of his neck, so that if one needed to demonstrate (if ever it should be a case of demonstrating) one could say, Look, sweeping one’s palm over the scene, there is the picture. But the picture was incomplete.
    Later, in their room, with the wooden beams, she undressed deliberately, slowly, as if she were unwrapping a gift, as much as to say: ‘There, see the reward you have got. And do you think such a reward will not ask certain things in return?’ Moonlight, like some theatrical trick, filtered through the lattice windows and lace curtains.
    ‘Willy,’ she said, stopping him. He was poised and trembling, ready to take his gift. ‘Willy, I’m sorry. I’m not – all I should be. Do you forgive me?’ And what should he have done? Protested, demanded explanations, with her lying blanched in the moonlight? Her face was a mask; sometimes it seemed not to be part of her body. She let him continue, without shrinking, without encouragement, as if it were only done for the form’s sake, as one of the terms of the agreement.
    Afterwards he felt he had not touched her, not touched that beauty. He sat up to light a cigarette. Her breasts pointed at him. She pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her face, there on the pillow, hair stuck to her brow, was like a victim’s; and yet it looked at him,