Lewis Percy Read Online Free PDF Page A

sadly. One evening, as he came into the kitchen, she turned with a start from a curiously crouched position over the table; in turning, her hand swept the radio to the floor. ‘Oh, really, Mother,’ he cried, exasperated. She looked at him, her face full of fear. ‘It’s all right,’ he said awkwardly, appalled at her expression. ‘It’s still going.’ The radio lay at their feet, emitting a minuscule metallic sound. He replaced it carefully on the dresser, turned a few knobs: it gave forth nothing but residual static. ‘I’ll have to get it repaired,’ he told her, but he was still annoyed. Foolishly, she kept it on. It was no further use to him and he went up to his bedroom without it. When he came down later for his supper it was still giving out its tiny scratchy sound. He switched it off, furiously, telling himself that she had never really appreciated it.
    Bad temper made him hungry. Going late at night, long after her bedtime, in search of a glass of milk, he opened the refrigerator and found inside it a plate of stewed steak and spinach. The knife and fork were still on the plate, crossed, as if this meal might be taken up later, when circumstances were more favourable. This must have been her lunch, he thought, since he himself had had the same thing for dinner. Then why had she not eaten it? The incident with the radio could not have upset her: at lunchtime it had not yet happened. He felt disquiet, then more anger, as if she were playing an unfair trick on him, binding him with chains of obligation and pity just when he had devised aprogramme for his future. He scraped the congealed food into the dustbin, washed the plate, and put it away. Slowly he argued himself into a more robust frame of mind. There was no cause for alarm: she had merely not felt hungry. This was practically incomprehensible to him but he supposed it might happen if one were old. He went miserably and angrily to bed, unable to distinguish between his misery and his anger, but careful to let the anger predominate.
    Nevertheless a certain uneasiness remained and he resolved to spend more time with her. Perhaps she was still lonely without him, although his days at the British Museum were hardly a treat or a recreation. His attitude to his work these days was grim, as if it were forcing him into various uncomfortable or untenable positions. He longed for it to be over. Yet it was going well, and his tutor was pleased with him. Much to his surprise, the writing presented him with few problems. It was as if he were programmed to do this thing, in defiance of his natural biology. He came to dread that moment of altered concentration before he actually put pen to paper; he felt an anguish at the prospect of that moment endlessly repeating itself. But when he was writing he forgot himself entirely, raising his head in surprise when it was time for the library to close. At the beginning of the day he found himself longing for a humble job, any job, doing something manageable in the convivial surroundings of an office. By the end of the day he had succumbed once again to the mystery of what he was actually doing, the aligning of words in an apparently logical argument. His recent French interlude fell away from him as he tackled his English sentences. Yet writing, which came easily, also underlined his indeterminate status. Was he to continue to do this? His age had proved to be no handicap: rather the reverse. The life of action, which he could not quite visualize, remained out of reach. He had the disagreeable sensation of signing away his future. Having found that he could do this work he seemed to have sealed his fate. This idea unsettled him profoundly.
    His unexpected ability, or so it seemed to him, and the gratification on his professor’s face, satisfied his pride but not his judgment. His judgment told him that such competence was at odds with his experience, or rather his lack of experience. He saw himself as an old man in a young