Small World Read Online Free PDF

his own. She was forty-two at the time, and the affair had settled into a comfortable and occasional convenience. ‘Pinkie’ says the irrepressible Maggie never could resist a chance to shock; it was not her having Sartoris’s baby, or her husband’s bemused acceptance of the fact, but Maggie’s calm statement that Sartoris was a bloody liar; the child was her husband’s that scandalized. It was only after Lord Weiler's death in 1964 that she dropped the pretense. ‘Pinkie’ suggests the farce was Maggie’s curious way of apologizing to her much put-upon husband. . . .
    2.22.80    — VIPersonalities, VIP
    Maggie Weiler, who hadn’t used the name Jeffries in half a century, laughed so hard she lost her grip on the News of the World, and dropped it into the marmalade. Her nurse, Connie, wiped it off with a napkin and gave it back to her when she’d caught her breath.
    ‘Oh, I am sorry, my dear,’ she wheezed, seeing the mild reproach behind Connie’s thick lenses. ‘The things that go on.’ Connie could never really be angry with Lady Maggie. She laughed over the newspaper nearly every day. It had shocked Connie once upon a time before she knew how really good Lady Maggie was, so good it made her think those old scandals must be just wicked lies, but now she defended the old lady to herself,
    reflecting that one might as well laugh as cry.
    ‘The things that go on,’ Lady Maggie repeated emphatically.
    ‘Please God, none of your friends has died?’ Connie asked. It did seem Lady Maggie laughed harder over her friends’ obituaries than anything else.
    Lady Maggie threw up her hands to screech with delight. The newspaper flew into the coddled egg. Connie, vaguely discomfitted at having said something unintentionally witty, summoned up an uncertain smile. She hoped, may the Blessed Virgin intercede for her, that Lady Maggie wasn’t off to a difficult day.
    Captain Morrisey wasn’t supposed to have the car out. He’d promised his wife to use it only for car shows, parades, and on the ranch, at low speeds. She didn’t understand, being a woman, that a machine like this one needed a run now and then. So when she went to Ventura to see her sister in the hospital, he slipped the Villerosi out of its bay in the garage and headed for the freeway, in the opposite direction from Ventura.
    He went a good hundred miles, a satisfying run, with just one stop by a cop, who had really only wanted to admire the car. He let the Captain off with a warning and a grin. And kept his grin when the Captain gunned the Villerosi up to ninety right in front of him. The cop probably realized that a man who could own and drive the likes of a 1949 Villerosi wasn’t one of those punk kids in their souped-up Camaros, looking for an accident to happen.
    The Villerosi was thirsty after a while, and so was Captain Morrisey. He left the freeway to gas up at a big trucking terminal. There was a small bar on the far side from the pumps, evidently catering to the truckers. The Captain parked the sportscar next to a blue van outside the little bar. Considering the time of day the place was fairly lively; the parking lot was nearly full of pickup trucks, vans, and jeeps, but perhaps some were spillovers from the busy shopping center next door.
    He settled gratefully onto the cool vinyl cushion of a bar stool and sucked up a pair of Guinnesses. The bartender was obviously unhappy about serving warm beer, let alone warm foreign beer, and looked suspiciously at the Captain’s canary-yellow trousers and Bally boots. Captain Morrisey had not arrived at his station in life by attending to the stares of the unwashed and unsuccessful. He enjoyed his beer, and also the smoke and noise, the masculine ambiance of the place, subtly enriched by the silence that signified the absence of his wife, bless her. When he came out into the sunshine twenty minutes later and stretched all over, he felt positively sybaritic. He strode confidently to the blue van