Incidents in the Rue Laugier Read Online Free PDF

disappoint them, although he was determined somehow to implement his own wishes, even if he had to wait to put them into effect. With a heavy heart he had asked the solicitor to find him a tenant for the rooms above the shop. This was accomplished without difficulty. He himself, in a burst of gritted-teeth activity, rented a furnished flatin a purpose-built block behind the King’s Road. He had disliked it on sight, but by that stage was so desperate to get to France that once he had transferred his belongings from Eastbourne he slammed the door behind him and fled.
    But his steps led him inevitably back to the shop, for which he felt an increasingly exasperated distaste. The sight of the dull green façade, embellished with the single word ‘Sheed’, did nothing to encourage him. Who came here? Who would visit a secondhand bookshop in an ordinary, rather downmarket street in Pimlico? During the hour and a half he spent there on that first afternoon not a soul came near. Furious, he examined the stock, which was meagre, and seemed to be devoted to Latin and German textbooks and popular novels of the Thirties and Forties. Who now read Harrison Ainsworth or Hugh Walpole, Warwick Deeping or Jeffrey Farnol? How did this stuff sell? And yet it must have done, for Mr Sheed had left him a quite useful sum of money, and so embarrassing was this generosity from a man whom he had neither liked nor disliked but in whom he had never had the slightest interest that he felt, with a groan, that he was bound to be the custodian of Mr Sheed’s enterprise until such time as he could pass it on and get on with his real life. This would take place abroad, in circumstances which were not quite clear to him but which were surrounded by a great deal of very fine weather, either very hot or very cold, and in both cases very picturesque, in comparison with which the lightless street outside the dusty window appeared unendurable, not to be endured.
    It occurred to him, on that first afternoon, that Mr Sheed must have sold pornography, but he could discover nothing of a questionable nature in the boxes under the counter, merely more Beatrice Kean Seymour and Rafael Sabatini. Who bought this stuff? Obviously, there must be collectors, of asimple-minded nature, but he could find no list of subscribers. He could find nothing in the drawers of the old-fashioned roll-top desk which would give him a clue as to the real nature of Mr Sheed. Who was this man who had placidly sat down to tea in his parents’ home on innumerable Sundays, and whose presence, surely rather odd, had been just as placidly accepted? To begin with, one did not sit in a train on a Sunday just for the sake of a cup of tea. Was he in love with Polly Harrison, and was this fidelity to a situation long laid to rest behaviour of the highest chivalry? Or did he have a mistress in Eastbourne whom he saw on irregular weekends and whom he took to lunch at the Grand before topping off his stay with an innocuous cup of tea
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Harrison? Edward inclined to both theories, although he found them both unappealing. They had all, his parents and Mr Sheed, seemed to him so very virtuous, cheerful and right-minded and equable, conversing rather than chattering, and even enjoying peaceful silences, until Mr Sheed looked at his watch and hauled himself out of his chair. ‘I’ll walk down with you, Ted,’ Harrison’s father had invariably remarked at this point, and ‘Children! Come and say goodbye!’ he had called through the French windows. Growing older, Edward had tended to ignore him, out of distaste for his bulk and general unmanoeuvrability, or rather had continued to ignore him, only to discover in time that the thread had been there, that some residual feeling—a shy man’s feeling—had been there all along, and thus his present and unwanted ownership of the shop was proof that he had, in some sense, been cherished. The alternative idea—that Mr Sheed had been hurt by his indifference