Birthday Read Online Free

Jenny. There was nothing more they could want, but wanting for nothing at such a price was no bargain to George. He couldn’t believe it. ‘Me! Why me?’ he said a million times, to himself but to Jenny as well often enough. ‘I’d have been better off wounded as a soldier. There’d be some pride in that. But in a foundry! That’s what I can’t understand.’
    The more quickly his thoughts returned to the point from which they had set out, without having made him wiser or more content, the darker his anguish became and went on for months before he reconciled himself to the fact that any good reason for being on earth had been taken away. The short change of mental torture turned up no meaning to his fate, and the nightmare was that he would live as a cripple for the rest of his life.
    Jenny’s skin blistered with tears as she sat by him. She loved him. Everything would be all right. At least he was still alive. But so deep was her misery that she sometimes thought how good it would be if they could be struck dead together.
    Walking through a bookshop to get a present of coloured pencils for Eunice’s birthday she saw something on the table with Tobruk in the title. During the week it occupied George he wasn’t in such despair, so from then on she took everything from the library connected with that place during the war, so that he could relive his days and stop regretting he hadn’t died in the foundry.
    His experience of artillery and machine guns helped his expertise with a wheelchair and orthopaedic bed. When a telephone was installed he smiled that it was like having his own headquarters in a dugout, able to call up friends and family whenever he liked. She suspected that he never left off secretly wanting to die, but knew it was a comfort for him to go even further back in time before he met her, and live again in the world of Tobruk. Dangerous though it had been, he’d at least had the use of his limbs.
    Brian first saw George when he’d been twenty-five years in a wheelchair. His mother persuaded him to call: ‘Sometimes Jenny comes and sits with me. If I’d been in her place I’d have gone mad now, but she always asks after you, so it would be nice if you’d pop in and say hello.’
    Sunlight through the gaps of a high-clouded day gave amplitude to the spirit. He slowed along the tree-lined dual carriageway, reading each street sign so as not to overshoot the drive on which Jenny’s house stood. He found a dwelling anyone should be happy to live in, the roof as if someone got up to scrub it every morning, windows as clean as if without glass, nothing too old to be unpointed or shabby, immaculate paintwork on doors and window frames, the house behind an area of sloping well cut lawn.
    When setting out on his travels he hadn’t wanted to live in either the cosy but decrepit houses of Basford Crossing nor a place like this, but he was happy for Jenny that she had such a pristine house. He had thought only of getting away, even if to be a homeless figure stricken by rain and bitten into by the cold, for whom any house would be paradise.
    To be well fed and shod, to be out of the rain and have clothes on his back, was all he needed. A one-roomed dwelling in the middle of a wood had figured in his childhood dreams, but by craving the romantic he had achieved far more. A house like Jenny’s had seemed an unattainable luxury, but as soon as he had money enough to get one he despised it. The fee for a single script could buy a dozen huts in a wood, as well as the wood and surrounding fields.
    Believing that this life was the only one, that there was no God to help you (and he was intellectually incapable of believing He was other than dead and buried) meant that safety and contentment didn’t exist, an ever-likely and interesting state in which there was no class, nation, or religion to capture his allegiance or give comfort. If you