All Souls Read Online Free PDF Page B

not told Ted that she was in Reading last night?")
    "Of course not; anyway, he didn't ask me."
    "You're mad. That just makes it worse. If he doesn't know it already, he'll find out soon enough from Rook."
    "Not directly from Rook. They scarcely know each other."
    "In Oxford everyone scarcely knows everyone else, but that doesn't stop them talking to each other at all hours and leaping to the first interpretation of the facts that occurs to them. All itneeds is for Rook to have met Ted this morning in a corridor or in the street. 'Oh, by the way, tell your wife I meant to offer to share my taxi with her last night. We were on the same train from Reading, but she got off so quickly I didn't have time to offer. I expect the Spanish gentleman took her home. Very polite, that Spanish chappie, we've had the odd chat before, he and I.' That's all it needs for you to be faced with a barrage of questions that I really don't know how you're going to answer."
    "What questions? Ted hardly ever asks questions. He waits until I tell him things. There's no need to get so worried."
    I was always the one who worried about her. I played my part and sometimes hers as well. Now I was playing all three, mine, hers and Edward Bayes', or rather the part that, according to her, Edward Bayes was not playing.
    "What do you mean 'what questions'? 'What were you up to in Reading last night with our Spanish friend? Where had you been? Why did you leave the station in such a hurry? Rook saw you both. Why didn't you tell me you were going to Reading? Why didn't you tell me you'd been in Reading? Rook saw you. Rook. Reading.'"
    "I'd get out of it somehow."
    "Get out of it now. Tell me how you'd answer those questions. They're simple, concrete, conjugal questions."
    As usual Clare was barefoot. She'd sat down behind her desk with the newspaper in her hand (her index finger still keeping the same place; I wondered what was so important about what she was reading that she didn't want to lose her place) and I was standing with my back to the window opposite her. From there I could see the tips of her toes, the dark tips (the toecaps so to speak) of her dark tights. They peeped out from beneath the desk, on the carpet. I would have liked to touch her dark feet, but Edward Bayes or Cromer-Blake could arrive at any moment. Clare was looking at me silhouetted against the light.
    In her other hand, she held a cigarette. The ashtray was some way from her.
    'Ted could arrive at any moment," I said, "and if he did meet Rook this morning, he might start questioning us both the minute he comes in that door. We'd better think up something first. I've spent the whole night thinking up answers. Perhaps you bumped into me in Reading. At Reading station? Why were you coming back so late? Why had you gone there? You couldn't have been shopping, there's nothing to buy in Reading."
    "You're a fool," Clare said to me. "Fortunately, though, you're not my husband. You're a fool with the mind of a detective, and being married to that kind of fool would make life impossible. That's why you'll never get married. A fool with the mind of a detective is an intelligent fool, a logical fool, the worst kind, because men's logic, far from compensating for their foolishness, only duplicates it, triplicates it, makes it dangerous. Ted's brand of foolishness isn't dangerous and that's why I can live with him, why I like living with him. He just takes it for granted, you don't yet. You're such a fool that you still believe in the possibility of not being one. You still struggle. He doesn't."
    "All men are fools."
    "We all are, I am too."
    She tapped ash off her cigarette with her forefinger but miscalculated so that it fell instead on the carpet, near her bare feet. I looked at her dark, desirable feet and looked at the ash, waiting for the moment when her feet would tread in it and become smeared with grey.
    "If you were Ted you wouldn't ask me those questions because you'd know that I could