A Five Year Sentence Read Online Free PDF Page B

conscious of that too.
    â€˜I’ve a stone in my shoe,’ she said, marvelling at her sudden duplicity.
    â€˜D’you mind waiting?’
    He sat down beside her. She turned her back slightly, needing to hide the stone that wasn’t there. At the end of the settee stood a large potted plant, and coating the earth was a lining of small white stones. Surreptitiously, she slipped one into her hand and into her shoe as she eased it off her foot. She smiled to herself. She was discovering talents that she never thought existed, and it encouraged her to be henceforth more bold in her diary’sorders. For almost everything was accomplishable. She held up her shoe and ostentatiously emptied it, catching the rolling stone and replacing it where it was found.
    â€˜I’ve never been to an exhibition before,’ she said, unashamed of this display of unworldliness.
    â€˜Not even the National Gallery?’
    â€˜Where’s that?’ she said.
    â€˜In Trafalgar Square.’
    â€˜I’d like to go there one day.’
    He couldn’t leave that hanging in the air. She had made an obvious request, and there was no-one else around to fulfil it, so he said, ‘We’ll go there one day if you like.’
    She wanted to beg him to desist, to avail himself no more, to give her time and peace to assimilate the momentous gestures and words he had already donated. After such a long emotional fast, her lustful appetite was large only in principle. Her capacity had sorely shrunk and any overload was painful. ‘One day,’ she said.
    They sat in silence, and though she was grateful for the pause, she was equally afraid that, if prolonged, she would lose him. ‘Shall we look at the pictures?’ she said.
    He got up and stood beside her. Then, in a deliberate movement, he crooked his arm, as if ordering her to take it. Out of his own weakness, and lack of self-assertion, he rarely took the initiative in any situation, but when he did, it was performed with the vicious aggression of a bully, as if he despised himself for his own weakness. ‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said.
    She took his arm quite naturally, as if it were her proper due, and she worried that after a lifetime’s deprivation, she could so quickly attune herself to its very opposite, and more than simply attune but to actually take it for granted. Yesterday and all her yesterdays, she had walked alone, her body-skin hard-calloused with disuse. Now suddenly it craved attention and with wanton appetite, not simply as a plea, but as a downright expectation, peppered with anger at being so long deprived. She would have to take a strong hold on herself not to become too greedy.
    They were facing a collection of factory pictures, with singleclose-ups, or straightforward rows of girls packing munitions. She had been one of those girls, with the same white muslin turban, and white overall that gave an odd look of purity to the lethal poison that shuffled between their fingers. During the war, the ‘For Your Pleasure’ sweet factory was given over to munitions and the same girls who so deftly wrapped the mints, now equally skilfully encased the bullets. She had never questioned the dubious morality of her work. For her it was simply a question of packaging. Her wage had increased considerably and it was during that time that she was able to put down a deposit on the small flat where she still lived. The manager of the factory had said she was sensible. Flats were cheap in bomb-risked London, and she was wise to risk the advantage. The other girls thought her staid and middle-aged before her time. They could all be killed tomorrow. What was the point in paying out good money for a future that one might never live to enjoy. And, in fact, some of the girls turned out to be right. Especially one, she remembered, who had particularly sneered at Miss Hawkins’ husbandry. Downes it was, one of the orphan-women, who, one