Incarnate Read Online Free PDF Page A

have liked to crawl under the seat when she saw his reaction, a lopsided smile that couldn’t quite mask his pain. “He was my brother,” he said.
    “One more question,” the festival director said quickly, and a young man wearing a bowler hat asked about influences. Molly closed her eyes as if that might make her invisible, as she’d thought it would when she was little. She’d made things worse for Martin Wallace than the Australian had, intruded where she shouldn’t have. When Leon squeezed her hand, she clung blindly to him.
    “Martin Wallace, thank you very much.” Applause merged into the thunder of upturned seats. A few people made their way to the stage, where Wallace was chatting away from the microphone. “Oh, Leon, I wish I’d kept my mouth shut,” Molly whispered. “I’d apologize if I knew how.”
    “Why don’t you? Come on, before we lose him. If you don’t you’ll only go home and brood.” He made for the stage without looking back to see if she were following, and she was so annoyed with him for being right about her that she almost didn’t.
    “Martin Wallace? I’m Leon Bardin. And this is Molly Wolfe, the best production assistant I know.”
    “Hello, how are you?” He mustn’t recognize her, for he was smiling. “It’s good to meet you,” he told Leon. Close up, his thick eyebrows stood out even more, despite his dark complexion, and so did his large, deep blue eyes. “I hope I can live up to your faith in me.”
    “Met’s, not mine. All I did was make them look at your work.”
    “It’s lucky they didn’t see me up here today.”
    “You were fine. Especially considering the bug.” Leon was leading them past rows of empty seats draped with abandoned program notes. “What you need is a little medicinal alcohol. Let’s take a stroll and avoid the film buffs.”
    A neon sculpture stained the misty air above the Hay-ward Gallery; the spotlighted Houses of Parliament looked trapped in amber. Molly accompanied the others as far as Waterloo Underground, and then she blurted, “I’m sorry I asked you that question. I was only trying to shut the cobber up.”
    Martin blinked at her. “Which question was that?”
    “About your brother.”
    “Oh, was that you? That’s all right, it was a legitimate question. I mean, I put my feelings up there.” He smiled at her and looked away, murmuring, “That’s all right,” to himself. Of course it wasn’t, and she wanted to reach out and touch him, say she was sorry that way. Instead she turned toward the ticket office. “Thanks very much for the film,” she said to both of them.
    “At least have one for the road on a night like this,” Leon cried. “Besides, you wouldn’t leave Martin at my mercy, would you?”
    “Yes, please do join us, won’t you?” Martin said, and she wasn’t sure why she felt unable to refuse.
    Leon found a pub off Waterloo Road. He was always for walking until he found somewhere new. The barmaid, a squat woman with a yellowing perm and a pugnacious lower lip, took her time in coming to them, though nobody else was waiting to be served. They carried their drinks from the low smoky bar into a back room where workmen in overalls rested their muddy boots on the guard in front of a coal fire, and Molly couldn’t help feeling that the workmen were eavesdropping as Martin began to talk about himself.
    He was from Chapel Hill in North Carolina, but he’d attended university in the south of the state—“the Baptist belt,” he said with a jokey shudder. His parents still lived in Chapel Hill and seemed to trouble him, for he went on quickly to describe how he’d become a filmmaker, first making a half-hour fiction film with a group of actor friends before deciding that film was so exacting that it ought to be about something more substantial. He’d made six features now and was satisfied with none of them. “Sometimes I think I need to work with someone who’ll head me off from getting too