A Commonplace Killing Read Online Free PDF Page B

blue eyes were now slush. Everything about him reminded her of all that they had once been; of all that they might have been. She suppressed the urge to sweep away his shaving things, lined up on the mantelpiece along with the clock and their wedding photograph, just as she suppressed the need to sweep away Walter.
    He appeared to be listening to the wireless, but Walter never listened to anything; like all men painfully unaware of their own limitations, he preferred the sound of his own voice.
    “Fancy them wanting communism,” he was saying, in a voice flecked with incredulity and indignation.
    “Who wants communism?” She hated the way he always had to put in his tuppence-worth, engaging with the BBC as if he was an equal.
    “The Jews,” he said, as if only a moron would have failed to follow his line of thinking.
    She scalded the teapot with water from the kettle. Evelyn and she often had a good laugh at his expense. “Oooh Walter,” the kid would say, wickedly, “you ought to be on
The Brains Trust,
really you should.” And Walter, being so vain and so lacking in humour, had no idea that he was being mocked, and would preen, unbearably smug.
    “Fancy them wanting communism,” he continued, “when they’re the biggest capitalists of all.”
    She spooned tea from the caddy into the pot.
    “You have to feel sorry for them, though, don’t you?” she said. “They’ve had a rotten time of it, poor sods. It’s no wonder they want a revolution.”
    Walter did not respond. He was concentrating all of his efforts on attaching his collar and cuffs. In the mirror she could see where his pale hair was thinning in two neat lines either side of his head.
    “I didn’t know you were going in early,” she said. “I’d have got you up if you’d told me. I’ve been up since before seven.” She poured him a cup of tea and set it down on the table, alongside a plate of toast and marge scrapings. “I’m going to Nag’s Head to try for some bread. It’s going on the ration on Monday.”
    Walter gave a sardonic little laugh.
    “More of our food going to feed fat Germans,” he said.
    “I don’t know about that.” She found a perverse pleasure in contradicting him. “They’re living on liver sausage made out of sawdust.”
    “They deserve to,” he said. “They deserve to starve.”
    “What, even the kiddies?”
    Walter spat on the palms of his hands and slicked back his hair. She congratulated herself. Twice in one morning: it was childish, she knew, but she enjoyed shutting him up.
    “Have you got half a crown I could have?”
    “That depends. What do you want it for?”
    “I want it to treat my fancy man to tea at Lyons. What do you think I want it for? I’ve hardly got a penny left to spend on the necessaries. There’s a pile of washing in Mother’s room that needs doing, and I was going to give Evelyn a couple of bob…”
    He put his hand in his trouser pocket and jangled his change, searching through the coins on his open palm, before selecting a half-crown, which he tossed on to the table.
    “She won’t do a damn thing without payment,” she said. “Can’t you say something to her? She just ignores me and you know how much I hate a scene. Why should I have to shriek up the stairs like a fishwife every time the floors need mopping?”
    Walter was chewing on his toast, his jaw clacking as it moved from side to side in a sort of circular motion. His teeth didn’t fit him properly.
    “We could get fifteen bob for that room if she wasn’t here,” she said.
    “Don’t know who you’d get, though, do you, old girl?” He took a slurp of tea. “Wouldn’t do to have a stranger in my own home. Don’t think I could stand for that.”
    She was going to say that it wasn’t his home; it was her mother’s home; and if it was left to him they’d still be living in two rooms over a stationer’s up at Archway. A fine start to married life that was.
    He wiped his ’tache with the edge of his