Suspension of Mercy Read Online Free PDF

curtainless window beyond. A crumpled page had missed the basket and lay on the floor. The bedroom was gayer, to the left, and since the door was open, Mrs. Lilybanks paused a moment and looked in. She saw a rather sagged double bed with a blue counterpane, a banjo or mandolin fixed aslant on the wall above the bedstead, a striped wallpaper of raspberry vine pattern, more abstract pictures by Alicia, a chest of drawers and a straight chair with a pair of cotton trousers tossed across it. On the chest of drawers was a large rabbit doll of the kind Prissie still kept from her childhood days, and a silver-framed mirror of good quality. Mrs. Lilybanks went on into the bathroom which was between Sydney’s study and the bedroom. Here the purple towels with one big yellow flower on them attracted her eyes, and following this the pinned-up newspaper photograph which she thought she remembered from an Observer front page about a year ago. It was of a group of public school-boys in boaters and carrying umbrellas, and one was making a remark, inserted in a balloon, that made Mrs. Lilybanks start, blush, and then smile. It was rather funny. Mrs. Lilybanks washed her hands at the basin, while her eyes swam over the confusion of bottles on the glass tray below the medicine cabinet. Perfume, aspirin, iodine, deodorant, nail polish, shaving brush, talcum, shampoo, toothache solution, Enterovioform—looking like an aerial view of Manhattan skyscrapers, Mrs. Lilybanks thought, and no doubt this was only the overflow from the sizable cabinet above. She went downstairs again, was noticed and pressed to have a Drambuie or another cup of coffee, but she declined.
    “I’ll just stay ten minutes, then I must go, thank you,” Mrs. Lilybanks said.
    “It just came to me tonight that I’d love to do a portrait of you,” Alicia said to her. “Would you mind? It’s been so long since I’ve tried anything realistic. I mean, recognizable.”
    “I’d be delighted,” said Mrs. Lilybanks.
    “You really wouldn’t mind sitting? I mean, not reading. I like people to look at me or into space. Some people don’t like to waste the time.”
    “I’ve got time,” Mrs. Lilybanks assured her.
    Sydney insisted on seeing Mrs. Lilybanks home, and with his own torch, though she had brought one in her handbag.
    The Polk-Faradays went to bed shortly afterward, as they were tired from the drive, and Alicia told Hittie she didn’t need to help her with the dishes. Alicia and Sydney did the dishes.
    “Was it a decent dinner, darling?” Alicia asked sleepily, her hands in the sink.
    “It was great. Too bad the conversation didn’t quite match it.”
    Alicia smiled slyly, anticipating a small row, but not a big one, because the Polk-Faradays were in the house. Once Sydney had tripped her deliberately and sat her down in a carton full of orange skins and potato peelings. “That’s because we’re not all Sydney Smiths, I suppose. We just have to do the best we can conversation-wise.”
    “That’s not what I mean,” Sydney said with even more vicious sweetness. “I mean the charming, the wifely crack about my writing being my first love, but she died several years ago, or something like that.”
    “What?” asked Alicia, who really didn’t remember.
    Sydney took a breath. “Died years ago, or my muse isn’t living here any more. You ought to remember, because you said it. Everyone else heard it.” Sydney remembered the brief silence, the smiles at the table, and he recalled it not so much with pain as with pleasure in his resentment of Alicia, his continued resentment for her saying it.
    “What?” on a higher note, and a chuckle. “I think you’re making it up. Or it’s your inner voice. Really, Sydney, anyway it’s true, isn’t it? Otherwise it wouldn’t bother you. Did you ever think of—”
    He gave her a backhanded slap across the face with the damp dishcloth—which she called in the English manner a glass cloth.
    Alicia started,