Helga's Web Read Online Free PDF

grinned sadistically. “Takes all sorts, don’t it?”
    “What?”
    “To make a world.” Then he looked more carefully at Savanna. “You got something on your mind, mate?”
    Savanna shook his head, managing a smile that rested on his face like a momentary scar. “It’s my stomach that’s worrying me, not my mind.”
    Bixby stared at him a moment longer, then shrugged and went up into the wheelhouse. He continued to look down at Savanna as the latter moved to the bow of the boat, and when Savanna glanced back he saw that both Bixby and the man at the wheel were staring at him. He turned his face into the morning breeze and thought: twenty-five or thirty years ago I’d have shrugged this off as none of my business. It’s still none of my business, but why am I—scared? (He said the word doubtfully in his mind, as if he were scared of it. ) Does the backbone go in middle age, along with the hair, the muscles and the jawline? Is atrophy of the spirit, of guts, part of the process of aging? Twenty-six years ago he had proved to himself and the army that he had courage and the army had decorated and promoted him for it. But his courage now seemed as faded as the long-forgotten ribbon they had given him to mark it.
    Now as he walked along the jetty in the early sunlight, the same thoughts still cluttered his mind, like rocks in a bed that, though lumpy and sagging, had up till now at least been bearable. Nothing was perfect, he had been telling himself for the past six months, throwing straws to save himself from drowning, and the negative optimism had been enough: something was bound to turn up sooner or later. But not this morning: last night’s discovery, the fear (fear? Was that too strong a word?) of Bixby’s knowing what he had learned, the queasiness of his stomach, the bitter joke of the sign on the side of the truck: it all added up to a despair that he had suspected for a long time was eventually going to hit him. Some men lived in the resigned expectation of cancer or heart disease. His expectation had been despair and now it had come this morning, finally triggered off by something whose connection with him was so tenuous as to be ignored. Except that he had always found it impossible to ignore Grafter Gibson …
    He heard the toot of a car horn and looked along to see Helga sitting in her car twenty or thirty yards along the road.
    Til see you at the studio/’ he said to Hopkins and Cole-gate, and walked along to Helga. Her car was a low Datsun sports model and he had to lean down, feeling his spine crack, as she *put her face up for him to kiss her. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Hopkins and Colegate watching him, but there was nothing he could do about it. If your mistress expected you to kiss her in public, you couldn’t blame the public for taking a free seat. Except that Helga, in the past, had always been more discreet than this.
    Tired, sick and nervous, he turned his irritation on her. “What the hell are you doing down here at this hour?”
    “Darling.” Thank God she wasn’t coy; that was always one of Josie’s worst sins. There were some women who would never learn that coyness was as unattractive on them as a bad complexion. “I shouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was necessary. I’m usually asleep at this hour.”
    “Then I didn’t make the mistake of being flattered, thinking you had come down here just to see me.”
    “But that’s why I did come, darling. To see you. I want some money.”
    He swore, jerking his head up as th 3 truck went past. In it Hopkins and Colegate sat with their heads turned aside in exaggerated discretion; some men could act coy, too, blast them. “What makes you think I carry a walletful of cash on me at this hour, getting off a fishing trawler after being all night at sea?”
    “I only want forty dollars, darling. I have to go to my dentist and I’m afraid he won’t do anything unless I’ve paid my bill for the last time.”
    “What