Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

general, people meant what they said. Besides, he was poor and could not have afforded to support her and her children, even if he had wanted to. His eyes were watering so badly the dark young woman before him shimmered.
    ‘I could make things very unpleasant for you at the university,’ she said.
    Now it was his turn to be shocked.
    ‘So it’s true what my aunt told me about the duplicity of the bourgeoisie?’
    Then the baby wailed and its mother gave a small shriek and twitched a little. Lee was filled with angry sadness.
    ‘Ah, come off it,’ he said. ‘You had what you wanted, didn’t you?’
    ‘You have a cold heart, I must say.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You lay me and you don’t give two straws –’ Her hair was coming loose from its band and her face was flushed.
    ‘What is it that’s troubling you, honestly, I mean, troubling you so much?’
    ‘Go away,’ she said. ‘I feel degraded.’
    Lee was deeply offended and demanded, shocked: ‘Here, how can you possibly find sex degrading?’
    She stopped short, taken aback, shot him a puzzled look and then took a deep breath.
    ‘I could have you thrown out of the university.’
    ‘Yeah, well,’ said Lee slowly for he was beginning to realize she was attracted to him because she thought he was a thug. ‘Yeah, well; then I’d come and beat you up, wouldn’t I? Me and my bruvver, we’d both come.’
    She had seen his brother in the street.
    ‘Dear God,’ she said. ‘I really think you would.’
    She might have wished, all the time, that Lee would fall in love with her to lend the whole encounter a little more significance but if this was so he did not realize it. It seemed to him she had used him as a screen on which to project her own discontents, a fair exchange. He had a simple sense of justice.
    ‘Go away, Leon Collins,’ she said.
    Lee realized she had learned his name by glancing through her husband’s class list for nobody ever called him Leon, not even his teachers, face to face. But, then, he did not know her first name, either. Diminishing screams of the still-untended baby followed him down the stairs.
    ‘Well,’ thought Lee, ‘you live and learn.’
    But he was very bewildered and extremely ill at ease. His room reverberated with harpsichord arpeggios. Annabel had let the fire die down to a few red coals so all was a glowing darkness intermittently punctuated by headlights of passing cars which flickered through the uncurtained windows to play like the aurora borealis on the body of the girl on the white floor, which was the only object to disturb the emptiness of the room but for her recordplayer. The music ended and the needle hiccupped over vacant grooves. Lee went to switch it off and she caught his arm.
    ‘You smell of outdoors,’ she said. ‘But you’ve been with some woman.’
    ‘Well, yes and no,’ said Lee, who always spoke the truth. ‘Does it hurt your feelings?’
    He spoke very gently because her distress was so impassive. She shook her head wordlessly and the tears came pouring down without a sound.
    ‘Then why are you crying?’
    ‘I thought you wouldn’t come back.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Lee, nonplussed. Her huge, grey eyes were fixed on his face; his own eyes began to scald again as if burned by her metaphysical fire. He thought she was making some monstrous demand on him but he could not interpret it and, trapped in this strange regard, he found he was trembling so much he had to put out his hand to support himself on the floor. He was astonished to discover he was so touched by this grief, perhaps because it seemed evidence he was important to her in some mysterious way he could not fathom. The longer he stared into her eyes, the greater grew his confusion until, at last, with both relief and fear, he saw her newly magic outlines were those of a thing that needed to be loved. He thought: ‘Oh, God, I should have recognized her sooner.’ So his stoic sentimentality betrayed him. He kissed her hesitantly and