Red Joan Read Online Free PDF Page A

was young. Society meant something in those days. It was not like it is now, when the news is filled with nothing but gossip about people who have never done or achieved anything, who don’t seem to know the first thing about grammar or the etymology of the word
celebrity
, who appear doll-like and too colourful and yet somehow the same. What sort of society glamorises these people? She knows what her husband would have said: that the rot set in with Mrs. Thatcher, and perhaps it did, but she also knows that it happened on the Left too, after all that fuss with the unions in the seventies. There was nothing for anyone to believe in any more, and the realisation of this saddens her, not just for itself but because she recognises it as an old person’s thought. Redundant and unnecessary. She shakes her head.
    â€˜Please speak up for the recorder,’ Ms. Hart says, her voice firm and unwavering.
    â€˜Nobody encouraged me. Nobody in particular.’
    Ms. Hart looks at her as if she was expecting a different answer. Her gaze is unblinking. She waits a little longer. ‘Fine,’ she says at last. ‘I believe you were about to tell me about your friendship with Sonya Galich, as she then was. If we’re going to be chronological about it, that is.’
    Joan shivers. She looks down at her feet, trying to weigh up how much she can tell them against how much they already know.
    Â 
    *
    Â 
    As promised, the girl comes to Joan’s room the following morning to return the dressing gown. Joan is in the middle of writing an essay on diffraction techniques in the study of atomic particles and does not hear her approaching. When she looks up, she sees the girl leaning against the doorframe, dressed in a blue trouser suit and wool-covered slippers. Her hair is wound up and knotted in a chocolate brown scarf in a manner that Joan imagines her mother would dismiss as ‘washerwoman style’ but which, on this girl, makes her look as if she has just stepped off a filmset. She produces a thin silver box and flips it open. The silver glints and sparkles in her hand. ‘Cigarette?’
    Joan smokes occasionally but only in company and never yet in her room. It makes her feel self-conscious in a mildly pleasurable way. She likes the obligatory pout which the act of inhaling requires, the narrowed eyes, the wisps of smoke. It amuses her to think how furious her mother would be if she could see her now, smoking before lunch on a weekday—
Who do you think you are? Some sort of femme fatale?
—but her mother cannot see her, so she shrugs her assent, and the girl takes this as an invitation to come in. She hands a cigarette to Joan, and Joan places it between her lips in what she imagines to be the manner of a femme fatale. The girl strikes a match to light her cigarette, and then holds it out for Joan to do the same. Joan leans forwards, closing her eyes and inhaling gently until the cigarette catches.
    There is a brief silence but it is not uncomfortable. The girl glances around the room, amused to see her shoes filed neatly by the door. ‘Thanks for last night. Sorry if I startled you.’
    Joan grins. ‘You did rather.’ She goes into the small kitchen to find an ashtray, rummaging through the cupboards above the gas ring and eventually locating the ceramic bowl she once made in a pottery class at school. She taps ash into it as she walks back into the room and places it between them on the desk. ‘Where had you been anyway? Anywhere good?’
    â€˜I was with my cousin and some of his friends.’
    â€˜Is he a student here too?’
    â€˜He’s at Jesus College. Doing a PhD.’
    Joan waits for her to elaborate but she doesn’t. Instead, she leans over the desk to read Joan’s half-finished essay, her hand resting on her hip as her eyes skim the page, and to Joan’s surprise, she realises that she is glad it was her window this girl chose to climb