Perfect Gallows Read Online Free PDF Page A

A shudder shook him. He twisted his chair round and shrugged it across the carpet till the cylinder of the stove rose almost between his knees. When Adrian passed him his glass he cradled it in shivering hands as he crouched into the rising warmth. The flame, shining through the pattern of holes in the stove-top, cast yellow oval blobs on to the mottled face.
    â€œDone a job yet?”
    â€œOnly war-work in the hols. I got a scholarship to the grammar school and I’m staying on to take Higher Cert in the summer. Then I’ll be due for call-up.”
    â€œI left school when I was twelve. What’s the good, once you’ve learnt to write a hand and add up? Time I was your age I was digging on the Vaal. Time I was twenty-one I had three hundred thousand pounds in the bank. You going to beat that, acting?”
    â€œI might strike it lucky as you did.”
    â€œHorse shit. What I struck was fellows less sharp than I was. I learnt my lesson on the Vaal, up to my waist in water, rocking a cradle six hours a day, nothing to show for it beyond a pile of gravel. When I trekked out to the dry diggings I promised myself that then on I’d see to it that some other bugger did that sort of work for me. Heard of Cecil Rhodes?”
    â€œYes, of course.”
    â€œHe was a gent. Liked to make a show of it. Read the books and you’ll find not more than a couple of lines about Arnold Wragge, the writer-johnny wondering how a gent like Rhodes could have given the time of day to a bounder like Wragge. They wrap it up, of course, or I’d screw them for libel, but it’s there, and it’s true. I tell you, Rhodes would never have got started without me. He wanted to keep his hands clean, so he’d got to have a partner didn’t mind paddling in the shit. I didn’t, and I don’t. Gimme some more port.”
    He drank without bothering to sluice the wine round for the taste. The glass was empty in three gulps. He held it out again.
    â€œI built this house by paddling in the shit. What makes you think I intend to leave one brick of it to a pansy little actor?”
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œDon’t what?”
    â€œI don’t expect you to leave me anything, sir.”
    â€œHorse shit. The moment I whistled, there you were on the doorstep.”
    It wasn’t true, but it must have looked that way. In fact Andrew had fought against coming, because Cyril had half-promised him a job helping with the panto. It was only going to be a semi-professional production, two weeks’ run in St Michael’s Hall, because all three theatres had been bombed flat in the blitz, but it was what Andrew wanted. Then the letter had come with the last Christmas cards, and Mum had said better go. Now that that poor young man had gone and got himself killed in Italy, Andrew was the last of the line. Stupid to pass up a chance like that. And so on. She had got really worked up about it. He’d even thought of pretending to set off and sneaking back to take the job at St Michael’s, and sleeping rough somewhere, but of course the Wragges would have started asking where’d he got to. In the end he’d given in, but there was no need to tell Uncle Vole any of that.
    â€œI don’t want you to leave me anything,” he said. “I’m going to make my own way.”
    â€œHorse shit again. You live in Fawley Street. I remember Fawley Street.”
    â€œIt’s been bombed since then, but not our end.”
    â€œShut up. I tell you I know Fawley Street. One cut above a slum. Front parlour, snug, back kitchen. Two rooms up, neither big enough to swing a cat. Outside shit-house. Right?”
    â€œWe’re on main drains. Dad put the plumbing in when I was born.”
    â€œYou’d give your right arm to be shut of it.”
    â€œI will do that myself.”
    â€œActing? I know actors. I knew ’em at the Lanyon in Kimberley. If the diggers didn’t