A Judgement in Stone Read Online Free PDF Page B

in uncomprehending blankness.
    There were things Eunice could do. She had considerable manual dexterity. She could clean expertly and shop and cook and sew and push her mother up to the common in her wheel chair. Was it so surprising that, being able to do these things, she should prefer the safety and peace of doing them and them alone? Was it odd to find her taking satisfaction in gossiping with her middle-aged neighbours and avoiding the company of their children who could read and write and who had jobs and talked of things beyond her comprehension? She had her pleasures, eating the chocolate she loved and which made her grow stout, ironing, cleaning silver and brass, augmenting the family income by knitting for her neighbours. By the time she was thirty she had never been into a public house, visited a theatre, entered any restaurant more grand than a teashop, left the country, had a boy friend, worn make-up, or been to a hairdresser. She had twice been to the cinema with Mrs. Samson next door and had seen the Queen’s wedding and coronation on Mrs. Samson’s television set. Between the ages of seven and twelve she four times travelled in a long-distance train. That was the history of her youth.
    Virtue might naturally be the concomitant of such sheltering. She had few opportunities to do bad things, but she found them or made them.
    “If there’s one thing I’ve taught Eunice,” her mother used to say, “it’s to tell right from wrong.” It was a gabbled cliché, as automatic as the quacking of a duck but less meaningful. The Parchmans were not given to thinking before they spoke, or indeed to thinking much at all.
    All that jerked Eunice out of her apathy were her compulsions. Suddenly an urge would come over her to drop everything and walk. Or turn out a room. Or take a dress to pieces and sew it up again with minor alterations. These urges she always obeyed. Buttoned up tightly into her shabby coat, a scarf tied round her still beautiful thick brown hair, she would walk and walk for miles, sometimes across the river bridges and up into the West End. These walks were her education. She saw things one is not taught in school even if one can read. And instincts, not controlled or repressed by reading, instructed her as to what these sights meant or implied. In the West End she saw prostitutes, in the park people making love, on the commons homosexuals waiting furtively in the shadows to solicit likely passers-by. One night she saw a man who lived in Rainbow Street pick up a boy and take him behind a bush. Eunice had never heard the word “blackmail.” She didn’t know that demanding money with menaces is a popular pastime punishable by the law. But neither, probably, had Cain heard the word “murder” before he struck his brother down. There are age-old desires in man which man needs no instruction to practise. Very likely Eunice thought she was doing something original. She waited until the boy had gone and then she told her neighbour she would tell his wife unless he gave her ten shillings a week not to do so. Horribly frightened, he agreed and gave her ten shillings a week for years.
    Her father had been religious in his youth. He named her after a New Testament character, and sometimes, facetiously, would refer to this fact, pronouncing her name in the Greek way.
    “What have you got for my tea tonight, Eu-nicey, mother of Timothy?”
    It riled Eunice. It rankled. Did she vaguely ponder on the likelihood that she would never be the mother of anyone? Thethoughts of the illiterate are registered in pictures and in very simple words. Eunice’s vocabulary was small. She spoke in clichés and catch phrases picked up from her mother, her aunt down the road, Mrs. Samson. When her cousin married, did she feel envy? Was there bitterness as well as greed in her heart when she began extracting a further ten shillings a week from a married woman who was having an affair with a salesman? She expressed to no one