Good Man Friday Read Online Free PDF Page B

knowing Uncle Veryl.’ Chloë sighed.
    â€˜What does he do? Teach, I assume.’
    â€˜Oh, no. At least, he does so now … or that’s what he came to America to do.’ She rearranged the alphabet blocks again, trying to reverse the letters of the alphabet without moving any block from its original place. A small frown printed itself between her pale, delicate brows. In her gown of gray silk, severely cut and relieved only with the thinnest of ivory piping, she looked like a child dressed by grown-ups to counterfeit adulthood, thin and solemn behind her round spectacle-lenses.
    â€˜For most of his life M’sieu Singletary has done the accounts for banks. Five or six in various parts of England, two in France, and one in Amsterdam. Most of his time he spends traveling between them. I suppose it’s why he’s such an odd man: no family, no friends, but hundreds of correspondents through mathematical and scientific societies, like me and, it turned out, Henri.’
    â€˜I didn’t know Henri was mathematical.’
    â€˜He’s not. But M’sieu Singletary is also interested in insects, and Henri wrote to him after reading a monograph M’sieu Singletary published on cockroaches in Bordeaux. The correspondence flourished. Many people admire Henri’s collections of butterflies, but he has found few to share his enthusiasm for Dictyoptera.’
    January said, ‘Hmmn.’ In the cottage that Henri had purchased for Dominique on Rue Dumaine, where Henri himself lived three or four days a week in carnival season, he had seen the planter’s collections of insects, shells, and flowers exquisitely desiccated in sand. His medical training appreciated the other man’s fascination with those delicate variations in the forms of organic life, but he’d lived too long in New Orleans to take any delight in trays of preserved roaches. Dominique – Minou, the family called her – wouldn’t even go into the room.
    â€˜Be that as it may,’ Chloë went on, ‘last year the University of Virginia offered him a year’s post. Henri and I both had to write assuring him that Americans were not barbarians and that the United States was a perfectly safe place to visit if one refrained from playing cards in waterfront taverns.
    â€˜To do him justice,’ she added, ‘while I don’t think M’sieu Singletary capable of telling a scoundrel from a Presbyterian minister, he dislikes human company so much that I can’t really see him blundering into trouble that way. Yet something has undoubtedly happened to him.’ She sat back on the sofa, folded lace-mitted hands. ‘Quite apart from the affection I feel for him, I feel responsible for encouraging him to come. I meant it for the best …’
    â€˜Does he play cards?’
    â€˜Not as most people understand playing. He’s written to me more than once that games as such bore him, as they bore me. You have no idea what a relief it was to hear from someone who understood about working out mathematical probabilities when you’re playing copper-loo with idiots who think they’re being so daring, playing cards behind the nuns’ backs. Indeed,’ she added wistfully, ‘to write to
any
one about
any
thing other than how my music lessons were progressing, not that a single member of my family can distinguish a nodal pattern from a cat’s cradle.’
    She smiled her precise cut-glass smile. ‘Even when I was little – and he deduced quite quickly that I was a ten-year-old girl and not Uncle Veryl – he’d send me long treatises on the algorithmic probabilities generated by shuffling – he hadn’t the slightest idea of what little girls were interested in, of course – exactly as if I were an adult member of the Mathematics Society. He always assumed I’d be able to follow him, though he was perfectly ready to explain if I