Dead Babies Read Online Free PDF

murmured. "I dote on him, as you know, but I'm afraid that—if he has a fault—it might be a certain parsimony of imagination."
"Pardon?"
"I mean he tends to assume that everyone is very much like himself. Keith, are you all right?"
    Whitehead sniffed and ran a finger along the isthmus that separated his nose and his mouth, collecting a bubble of snot which he wondered vaguely where to deposit. Quentin : held out his fringed silk sudary and Keith blew into it with grateful enthusiasm. It had occurred to him, working on the assumption that insensitivity must have its limits, that Andy had seen no important connection between Keith's ill looks and his ability to attract Lucy, that it might be all one to her, that she was as undiscriminating as people regularly suggested she was; but Quentin's compassionate words had burst even this tiny pimple of expectation. Keith sniffed again. "I don't care any more, anyway," he said.
"Keith, you must never talk like that," said Quentin.
The room paled as a cloud passed between it and the sun, then brightened again. Quentin leaned forward and gently tousled Keith's hair: the artfully posed strands scattered beneath his palm to divulge a broad area of unoccupied scalp. Quentin's fingers retreated.
"Don't worry," he said softly. "I'll make sure something unusual happens to you this weekend. Something or other, if not with Lucy."
    7: penthouse cloudscape
Lucy Littlejohn lived in a top-floor Knightsbridge maisonette with three other girls. It was not by any means an atypical household and we would do well to look at it closely. On a normal day they rise between one and two in the afternoon either for long Badedas ablutions in the luxury bathroom or scathing showers in the downstairs closet. Then, while the color television flashes and rumbles in the background, they sprawl about the sitting room in nighties and dressing gowns, angelically aglow in the penthouse cloudscape, sipping coffee from French-style bowls and talking about their respective nights out. At four they wander off to shop in Sloane Street and Beauchamp Place, returning at six for glasses of Tio Pepe and further chat before drifting upstairs to change. Between telephone calls they flit in and out of each other's rooms to borrow scent, swap tights, crave advice. Their voices glide out from brightly lit bedrooms to congregate in the
dusky landing; the conversation might lead one to believe
that they are restaurant critics, nightlife pundits, gossip columnists, incognito bailiffs; they are not. At nine, the taxis and limousines start to arrive.
All the girls have what they call "daytime lovers," but only Lucy habitually sacrifices her financial affairs to her amatory ones, a tendency apotheosized and, ironically, terminated by the handsome, insolvent Adorno. They met the summer before. Andy had run up to her in Pont Street and said, brushing the hair out of his eyes and not smiling, "Hey—why don't you let me come home with you now?" "Yes, all right," Lucy had said at once. They walked to her flat in silence, with tight chests and almost equal shares of surprise. "I wouldn't have asked," Andy said diffidently as he entered Lucy's room, "but you looked so nice."
And she was nice. Short brown-and-blond hair, big violet eyes, her innumerable saris, veils, beads, jewels, belts, garters, scarves not entirely obscuring her friendly figure, a forty-tooth smile and a deafening laugh, areas of mild grease showing through her elaborate though hastily applied makeup, worn-thin shiny patched jeans, lucent orange skin visible beneath her stained and holey blouse, immaculate white underwear. For fifty-five consecutive evenings Andy appeared, smudged and steaming from his holiday job in a Westminster timber yard, bearing a bottle of wine, some hash perhaps, and a toothbrush. For eight weeks Andy talked to Lucy about politics and the American novel, played her the derelict guitar he had restrung and unwarped (Lucy found this embarrassing at first