A Five Year Sentence Read Online Free PDF

would have to share Morris with somebody. Sooner or latershe would gently have to cut her down and bury her. More and more as she grew older, the ghostly image swung relentlessly in her head, to and fro with metronomic regularity, the up-turned toe sheering her nerve-ends, orchestrated to the screaming apology of a young white face that had proved itself to be that of a woman. Miss Hawkins looked at her companion. ‘What’s your name?’ she said. She had to know that, and she had to know it in full.
    â€˜Brian,’ he said. ‘Brian Watts. And yours?’
    â€˜Miss Hawkins,’ she obeyed her time-honoured conditioning.
    â€˜Miss what Hawkins?’
    Out of her past she plucked that infrequent monosyllable. ‘Jean,’ she said.
    He had by now gathered a half a dozen books. ‘I wonder if it’s stopped raining,’ he said. He walked over to the window. She took in the full-length view of him for the first time, and she noticed that his shoes needed heeling. She ascribed it to negligence rather than poverty. How could a man who spent his life looking after his mother find time for personal attention. Soon her diary would order her to take Brian’s shoes to the mender’s. He came back to the shelves. ‘It’s pouring,’ he said.
    She wanted to detain him, to give him some reason to shelter from the rain other than that of her own company. On her way into the library, she’d noticed without interest that there was an exhibition of war pictures in the basement. It would do. She told him about it. ‘We could look at that until the rain gives over.’ She thought of all the orders she could have given herself that morning in her diary. ‘Helped a man to choose books for his mother.’ ‘Went to an exhibition’ and heaven knows what events would follow. So many red ticks in such an abundance of obedience. But the diary would never be that ordinary, even though there was now more than adequate copy in her life to justify a journal. Her diary was an order book, and would continue to be so if her life were to have any purpose at all. She might never see Brian Watts again. She might be alone for ever, and the single reliable joy in her life, was the daily red-crayoned tick, and that pleasure she could not jeopardise.
    â€˜All right,’ he said.
    They descended the stairs and she waited while he checked out his mother’s borrowings. The exhibition was in the annexe of the library and they had to walk through a covered way to reach it. The narrow path was irregular with grassy humps and holes, and without thinking of the consequences, she crooked her arm so that he might lend her his for her support. And he did, because he could not leave it just jutting out into the air. At the touch of his arm, Miss Hawkins had a sudden desire to go home. She feared that her body could no longer tolerate the battering of such frequent and unaccustomed pleasure. Even though she had invited it herself, she could not believe that she was the object of anybody’s attention, and she tightened his elbow on her hand as if she would keep it there for ever. She wanted its imprint indelible on her skin so that it would be proof to Maurice at dinner that this had really happened to her, and that it was no mere figment of her frustrated imagination. At the end of the path she released her grip. There was a revolving door into the exhibition, and Brian hesitated. It was a contraption that he always tried to avoid because it frightened him a little. But there was no other means of entry. He wanted Miss Hawkins to go first, and to this end, he placed his hand on her shoulder, guiding her as the path-beater through the door. Miss Hawkins’ body was now feverish and she would have liked to sit awhile on one of the leather settees that flanked the exhibition. But she did not want to call attention to a fatigue that might have betrayed her age, for she was suddenly