A Start in Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

success of their efforts, content to act as foil for the two protagonists. Mrs Cutler had taken one look at the intent gathering and retired in disgust to her room. With that acute sense of timing that distinguishes the accomplished woman from the mere amateur, Helen and Anthea rose to say goodbye before the jokes became too prolonged and the laughter too disturbing. Ruth and her father were taken a little by surprise. ‘Don’t go,’ said George, ‘you’ve eaten nothing. I can easily make some more tea.’
    Anthea smiled brilliantly and pressed his hand. She kissed Helen and promised to return. Ruth saw her to the door.
    ‘And how often is that little act put on?’ asked Anthea. ‘I can see why you don’t bring too many people home.’ Anthea knew everything. ‘The best thing for you to do is to find somewhere of your own. And don’t leave it too late.’
    ‘What a delightful girl,’ said George, when Ruth returned to the drawing room.
    ‘Quite pretty,’ said Helen, blowing smoke down her chiselled nostrils, ‘but not your type, darling. She has the soul of an air hostess.’
    By the end of her second year a restlessness came over Ruth, impelling her to spend most of the day walking.
The work seemed to her too easy and she had already chosen the subject for her dissertation: ‘Vice and Virtue in Balzac’s Novels’. Balzac teaches the supreme effectiveness of bad behaviour, a matter which Ruth was beginning to perceive. The evenings in the library now oppressed her: she longed to break the silence. She seemed to have been eating the same food, tracing the same steps for far too long. And she was lonely. Anthea, formally engaged to Brian, no longer needed her company. Why don’t you do your postgraduate work in America? I can’t see any future for you here, apart from the one you can see yourself. At home, things had become a little disquieting. Helen was out of work. At least, she had chosen to be. She had been offered a couple of parts as the heroine’s mother and these she had spurned with hauteur. She rarely got dressed these days, preferring to lie on her bed in the caftan and her bracelets, smoking and drinking cups of instant coffee brought in by Mrs Cutler. Like early theologians or doctors of the church, the two women would debate whether she should include this or that skirmish with a director, this or that love affair, in her autobiography. This now filled half of one of the notebooks that George had bought her two years before. As neither Helen nor Mrs Cutler possessed any literary gifts or were given to reading anything more serious than, historical romances (though Helen still kept her old copy of
Anna Karenina
on the bedside table) the writing did not proceed. But points of content were hotly argued.
    ‘If only Ruth would give me a hand,’ moaned Helen.
    ‘I don’t know why you don’t dictate the whole thing and let her put it together,’ said Mrs Cutler.
    George did not feel happy. The presence of the two women in the bedroom, and, in the evening, their repetitive arguing of the same points, seemed to make him superfluous. The shop had been sold to a Mrs Jacobs, a
sad-eyed widow whose husband had been in the trade and whose psychiatrist had urged her to do something useful with her time. George rather liked her, and spent some days going over the stock with her. She was grateful, but could not refrain from telling him that he had been undercharging for years and that he could have got more for the business had he tried. Miss Moss listened resentfully from the back room. George wondered, with a slight qualm, what his father would have made of the sale. He even wondered if he had been wise to sell at all, for with Helen not working and Mrs Cutler’s wages to pay, the money would not last all that long. He banished these thoughts to the back of his mind and promised Mrs Jacobs that he would look in from time to time to see how she was getting on.
    Even this was not so simple. With his