Rituals Read Online Free PDF Page B

guardian."
    "Was."
    "He was afraid you would cost him money. We don't like that. He could get out of it quite easily, being a governor of the Child Welfare Board."
    Money or God, who was to say. Inni had seen him once. A grey man in an armchair beneath his own portrait as a governor, a diamond ring on each of his little fingers — but that was all right when you were old and ugly — and a hand bell within reach ("Treezy, give my nephew a glass of port") . The story of his grandmother's money ("I shall manage it for you to the best of my ability") had not become clear to Inni, nor had it been a happy interview in other respects. Inni, pointing with thin, long hands and speaking in his sharp, northern boy's voice, had explained why God did not exist.
    "We only became Catholics later. Those are the best ones. Originally we were a Protestant military family. The first Wintrop to come to Tilburg was a lieutenant colonel in the lancers. They came from the Westland."
    Fables, thought Inni, lies and fables. Invented characters from an invented past. Because your own life is too dreary.
    "He arrived here with the bodyguard of Willem the Second, who built the town hall and palace where he never lived, and he married a Catholic girl."
    The word girl stirred him. So there had been, in other centuries, girls who had been relations of his. Invisible girls who, with girls' mouths that he had never seen, had pronounced their surname, his.
    "Ever since that time the Wintrops have been in textiles. Woollens. Tweeds. Factories. Agencies."
    More shadows still. People who had the right to course in his blood, to dwell in his shoulders, his hands, his eyes, his facial features, because they had procreated him.
    The car sliced the landscape in two, tossing it casually backwards. It made him feel as if the life he had been leading these last few years was being flung away at the same time. His aunt remained silent for a while. He saw the blood throbbing in the blue veins of her wrists and thought my blood, but on his own wrists nothing was to be seen.
    "Arnold Taads was once my lover," said his aunt. She started applying makeup to her face. It was not an attractive spectacle. She spread a second skin of orange-coloured pancake on top of the first, slack white skin, but she did not do it very accurately, so that narrow strips of white remained visible between the streaks of orange.
    "I met him the other day for the first time since the war."
    He could not conjure up any visual image of a lover of this woman, and when he saw Arnold Taads, he understood why. He could never have visualized someone who looked like that, because he had never seen anyone like him.
    He was a short man, standing in the doorway of the low, white house that lay half-hidden in the woods, and was looking at his watch. He had a glass eye — the right one - and wore tall bushranger's boots and an old Red Indian jacket with long chamois fringes. This was in those long-forgotten days when people still wore suits and ties. The man's face was brown, but close beneath his conspicuous health seethed something else, a greyer, sadder element. One eye and no eye, a healthy and an unhealthy skin, a booming voice out of a grim, domineering face, a voice which had been meant for a larger body than that which housed it.
    "You are ten minutes early, Therese."
    At that moment an enormous dog appeared behind him and shot out into the garden.
    "Athos! Come here!"
    This voice was loud enough to command a battalion. The dog stood still, trembling in his skin of dark brown curly hair. Then he lowered his head and slowly went back into the house, past his master. The man himself turned and went inside. The white door fell shut behind him, softly and decisively.
    "His dog, his dog," complained his aunt. "He lives for his dog."
    She looked at her watch. From the house came piano music, but Inni could see nothing through the windows. It did not sound very good. Too sharp, too stiff, without lustre.