John Brown's Body Read Online Free PDF

snapped hard against the square of each breast. He stood up, and he had the playtime air that he used to adopt after their monthly “progress” meetings.
    “I daresay you’re wise, old boy, not to tell Pecry. He’d be bound to ask why you didn’t spot it before.”
    *
    That was Ralph Shilling’s day, that and the encounter with the new little creature. Seeing her suddenly, out of the brown so to speak, made him wonder if she had just been born. She was so absolutely unmarked. He could not recall such newness even in a baby. Of course a baby was not completed as she was, she was a completed woman. And little she could be without diminution. Ralph then forgot her. She provided bright though not comic relief to the day and he had other things to think about.
    He liked an even tenor. He liked the way the cat greeted him when he went into the flat. He always arrived home at the same time and the cat, waiting on the other side of the door, rose to its feet with a mutter. They did not touch each other, each ventured a little way towards a common ground where for a moment they communicated as equals. Thereafter each resumed his place, the animal’s undefined, the man’s mapped and bounded with his every breath.
    The cat knew what time Ralph came home just as it knew that he shut up the flat and went away on Friday nights for the week-end. The cat absented itself and then Ralph supposed it went hunting, two days and nights red in tooth and claw. He worried about it when the weather was bad but it was always there to greet him on Sunday nights.
    They did not require each other, that was the crux of their association. Anything Ralph did for the animal was permitted, even his own permission for it to sit on his chairs and come in through his window, even this was permitted him. Skirting the animal now as it crouched in the middle of his floor, it was in fact Ralph who felt gratitude for the continuum.
    As Ralph saw him, Krassner was not so much a criminal, was not good or bad, except in his function as a disruptive agent. There Ralph saw him as being very good indeed. Whichever way things went, Ralph would be disrupted.
    Disruption had already begun. His head was buzzing with voices – Pecry’s voice saying, “I regard it as a serious reflection on your handling of the department,” and the Chairman’s voice picking up words – “Shilling states that he was unaware” – and stripping them – “Unaware?” How shameful, how naked a word! And Bertha’s voice, “But dear, that’s not bad judgment, that’s trust. You have to trust people.”
    I shan’t think about it, thought Ralph, until I have eaten. I cannot be objective on an empty stomach.
    He prepared his meal of a lamb chop and frozen peas. For the cat he had bought its favourite, tinned pilchards. These he cut up and set the dish on a sheet of newspaper because the cat was a messy eater. It had a bit of beard to which particles of food clung, and a habit of chewing with its head in the air, at once ruminant and wary.
    Ralph thought again of the new little creature downstairs. How she had surprised everything: she set the old place quite aback, they were not used to strangers here. Old Miss Hanrahan who had died in the downstairs flat had lived there for thirty years. Ralph himself was the latest comer and he had been at Lilliput Lodge for six years. For eighteen months after he came Madame Belmondo, in the rooms below his, would scarcely say “good morning” or “good evening” when they passed in the hall. Ralph found outafterwards that she thought he worked for the Inland Revenue.
    “Off to inspect more taxes?” she said viciously one day as he raised his hat.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Of course taxes are the last thing you’d inspect, Government departments don’t put their house in order.”
    When she knew that he worked for a firm of pesticide manufacturers she became friendly and even arch. Ralph was puzzled by her archness which was like the