There was an Old Woman Read Online Free

themselves. The sink was full of filth and dishes that were covered by a mossy fungus. I didn’t look too closely. In the centre of the floor stood a round wooden table with a faded oil-cloth or plastic covering. A spider had spun a web from an empty wine bottle to a plate on the table. On the plate, something moved, then ran along the table and down a leg. I stood back, trying to concentrate on the faded cloth lampshade that was barely attached to a tall floor-lamp from the thirties. Everywhere, the smell was poisonous.
    I shouldn’t go on describing the mess I encountered, but I became fascinated. “Mess” hardly covers the territory. I was looking at squalor that had the depth of many years behind it. The rats in the kitchen were generations removed from the pioneers who knew a good kip when they found one. The stench in the blocked plumbing was what my father used to call “pre-war,” which would have made it at least fifty years old. The bedroom at the back was a woollen mass of moths in bliss. A cloud of dust particles stood in a beam of light coming through the back window, revealing a view of outdoor plumbing just a block and a half away from City Hall. Light fell on a clot of discarded clothes and linen that had been pressed into a kind of felt on the floor near the bed. When somethingmoved in the bed, I took it as a cue to leave bad enough alone. I tried not to run.
    Once out in the misty wet, I took a few deep breaths while looking back at the house. Something in me was delighted by the gall of the old lady to pull this off in the middle of Grantham. It takes courage to become an eyesore to all you meet. The house was a wooden sermon on the futility of storing up goods here on earth. Who, in his right mind, could have warned old Liz that she couldn’t take it with her?
    I rarely take a drink in the afternoon, but after walking through Liz Oldridge’s place, I needed one. The Nag’s Head was an English pub imitation that had come along some time in the sixties. It did well for a while with the young people, but finally it was left to a few regulars who used to haunt the old Harding House, until they pulled it down. It had a lot of engraved frosted glass on the outside and darts and half-timbering inside. Like all the places in town, they served the same draft beer and all the regular brands. They had tried fancy specialty beer, the imported and the locally made, but the customers only wanted the old stuff, the familiar amber glasses with a few bubbles moving up regularly to the tiny white head on top.
    I sat down at a round table near the dark-stained door and ordered a draft, which I downed in a gulp. Without comment, the waiter replaced it. As a non-serious beer drinker, I took my time with this one. It seemed thicker, more tepid, harder to get down, than the first. I looked around me to see who else could spare a few moments fora beer this soon after the beginning of licensed hours. I was curious. Against the wall sat a man whose face I’d seen before. It was a grey, lined face with red hair that had gone dusty instead of white. I guessed he was about ten years older than me, but, on him, it looked more. It took me a minute to remember that his name was Rupe (short for Rupert) McLay. A few of the boys at the registry office used to call him the “Philadelphia lawyer” and grin at one another. I guess they meant that at one time he appeared to be promising. And then he’d broken his promise. Isn’t that the way with promise?
    There were a string of empties on McLay’s table, which the waiter didn’t seem in a hurry to replace. He sat patiently, staring into his beer, not trying to locate the waiter in the room. When the waiter took away my next empty, I indicated the empty glasses across the floor. “Oh, him?” he said. “He only gets one trayful and then he’s washed up, old Rupe. He likes to sit and stare at them for a while, then he