He Wants Read Online Free PDF

old age, whose shopping Lewis did and whose shelves Lewis put up, whose roof Lewis still lived under. On a few occasions, Lewis brought a male colleague – the art teacher, the chemistry teacher, a physical fitness instructor – round for dinner, but Lawrence was not the best host. ‘Don’t they have wives?’ he would say of these men. ‘Don’t any of them have wives to get home to?’
    When the school recruited a new librarian who was a single lady of Lewis’s age, Lewis became a big reader of whatever classics the library carried. As he returned each of these books at the end of the loan period, he attempted to discuss them with her, but each time, Edie, eyeing the Austen, the Eliot, the Woolf, would say, ‘I haven’t read it. It’s not my sort of thing.’
    On their first date, they did not talk about books; they talked about food, what they had or had not eaten in their lives. ‘I’ve never had beef Wellington,’ said Edie. ‘I’ve never had black pudding,’ said Lewis.
    When Lewis and Edie had been courting for a year, Lewis’s father asked if he planned to marry Edie. He asked again, many times, over the years, saying to Lewis, ‘What are you waiting for?’ They had been a couple for seven years before Lewis finally got around to proposing. After a three-year engagement, they married in the summer of 1977.
    On his wedding day, Lewis was driven to the church by Edie’s brother, who was his best man. En route, in a quiet side road still hung with decorations from the silver jubilee, they came across an old, yellow car that had come to a stop, its hazard lights flashing. ‘We’d better go around it,’ said Lewis. As they drew alongside it, Lewis noticed the hula girl on the dashboard, ready to dance but still for now. The driver was sitting on the bonnet, reclining against the windscreen, sunbathing with his long legs out in front of him, one knee raised up. He had his shirt off. There was music coming from the car’s stereo and the man was drumming his hands against the bonnet while the bunting fluttered above him, like someone on a float at a parade. They paused at the junction, and Edie’s brother, glancing in the rearview mirror, said that they ought to go back and see if they could help. Lewis was looking in his wing mirror. ‘We haven’t got time to go back,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get my suit dirty. He looks like he’s waiting for someone.’ He opened his mouth to say something else, to say, ‘I don’t know,’ but Edie’s brother was already pulling out of the junction, pressing on in the direction of the church.
    At the wedding, Edie’s brother made a joke in his best man’s speech about this half-naked man atop a broken-down car, and Lewis and Edie slow-danced to ‘Everything I Own’, a song that was forever afterwards on the radio, someone new recording it every few years. Lewis never mentioned to Edie that it was not really the romantic song she thought it was but a tribute to the songwriter’s dead father, a love song for an old man.
    When their baby came along, she was a biter. Edie bit the baby right back to teach her not to do it, but when the baby bit Lewis he just looked pained and that made Ruth laugh, displaying her sharp little teeth. ‘You must bite her,’ said Edie, but he could not bring himself to do it, and soon the moment had passed, it seemed to him, although Edie came over and bit her anyway. The baby screamed, and she screamed in the night, wanting Edie, who sometimes went to her and sometimes did not. (Lewis, conversely, had become quiet in bed. Every Friday, he put a pillow in between their headboard and the partition wall, and came without making a sound.)
    When Ruth reached the age at which some little girls want to marry their fathers, she chose her grandfather, although he did not like the game. When she