Life: An Exploded Diagram Read Online Free PDF

to do with love. Ruth developed a talent for it. When Miss Selcott filled the left-hand side of the blackboard with chalk numerals and, with a challenging flourish, drew the equals sign, Ruth’s mind ticked like a cooling tractor. Miss Selcott surveyed her gawping pupils with a tragic patience. Eventually, inevitably, she would say, “Ruth?” And Ruth would stand up and walk between the desks to the blackboard while the boys hissed and sniggered at her. Then she would write the answer in white on the mysterious space at the right of the blackboard. Blushing and costly moments of triumph.
    When Ruth left school, it was Miss Selcott who found her a position — junior bookkeeper — with Cubitt and Lark, Corn Merchants and Agricultural Auctioneers. The firm’s offices were the upper two floors of a sober-faced Georgian building that kept watch over Borstead’s marketplace. Ruth worked at a high desk in a back room with a view over the churchyard. Old Mr. Cubitt flirted with her; young Mr. Lark sought to find fault with her work. Neither had any success. After three years, the word junior disappeared from her job title, and her wages went up to fifteen shillings and sixpence a week. She spent her half-hour lunchtimes with Stanley. In the winter, she’d walk the short distance to the bakery and share a pie with him in his tidy, monastic little room above the shop. He’d fuss over the spilled crumbs. On warmer days, he’d bring the pie to the churchyard, and they’d eat on a bench with a congregation of sparrows at their feet.
    Ruth Little became a tall, athletic young woman. In passive defiance of her mother’s wishes, she let her hair grow long; it fell in soft red billows onto her shoulders. In bright light her brown eyes held flecks of bottle-green.
    She began to accompany Mr. Lark to livestock auctions, sitting at the small portable table behind and below his lectern, recording the sale of animals. The men gathered around the sale ring looked at her as if assessing her breeding potential. But few ever approached. Once she heard a man say to another, “Cawd, no, boy. You wunt get nowhere with that mawther. Thas Win Little’s gal, that is. She anythun like her mother, she’d hev yer nuts for mince.”
    Mrs. Sparling — Ruth’s grandmother — died in 1935. Congestion of the heart, Dr. McVicar scrawled, messily and meaninglessly, on the death certificate. And now Ruth had something she’d never previously experienced: short periods of solitude. They came in the mornings. At the window, cupping her hands around her tea mug, she watched Win hoist herself into Willy’s van and disappear backwards, holding on to her lacquered black straw hat as if walking pace were a reckless speed.
    Ruth had an hour. She locked the doors.
    She went to her bedroom and reached for the shoe box hidden at the back of the top shelf of the wardrobe. She carried it to the dressing table and took out the things she’d bought, fearfully, from Griffin’s, the chemist’s. Lipstick, face powder in a gold-effect compact, mascara. A bottle of scent called 4711. A chocolate-colored eyeshadow called Temptation. She made up her face, not really knowing how. She looked, thrilled, at the clumsy tart in the mirror. She kissed a dark invisible Gypsy lover with her ruby lips.
    She stripped to her ribbed vest and knickers. The silk stockings felt lovely, sliding them on.
    The only way she could see all of herself in the mirror was to stand in the bedroom doorway. She posed in its frame.
    Were her legs too heavy-looking? Would her breasts get bigger? Did breasts stop growing at the age of eighteen? She lifted a shoulder and flicked her long hair behind it. She pouted. She imagined Mr. Lark licking his lips, his trembling fingers reaching for her. And now she imagined — oh, God, it made you weak at the knees, and it was like aching for a wee but different — that she was undressed like this and swanning around the sale ring with all the men looking at