Suspension of Mercy Read Online Free PDF Page B

straightened a little, then hurled at him the cup she had been about to put in the drying rack. The cup missed him, but smashed against the refrigerator.
    “Number two today,” Sydney said, bending to pick up the pieces. His heart raced. As he stood up with the glass fragments, he noticed with pleasure the pink streak on Alicia’s cheek.
    “You’re barbaric,” she said.
    “Yes.” Yes, and one day he’d go just a little too far and kill her. He had thought of it many times. One evening when they were here alone. He’d strike her in anger once, and instead of stopping, he’d just keep on until she was dead. Then as he looked again at Alicia, she smiled at him, and turned again to the sink. She smiled because she had gotten the last word, Sydney supposed, the thrown cup.
    “Perhaps it’s time I took another little trip. Let you cool off and get some work done,” Alicia said.
    “Why not?”
    She had several times taken trips to Brighton and stayed two or three days, and once she had gone to London and stayed with the Polk-Faradays, each time in sort of a huff and not saying clearly where she was going.
    “Excuse me—” Alex stood at the kitchen door in an old Sherlock Holmesian dressing gown, oversized pajamas, and soft felt shoes, which were why they hadn’t heard him. “Could you spare a glass of milk? One of Hittie’s bedtime habits.”
    “Oh, certainly, Alex. Syd, get a glass, would you?”

4
    A bout ten days later, in the first week of June, Alicia finished her portrait of Grace Lilybanks. It was three-quarter length, a three-quarter view of Mrs. Lilybanks just under life size. Mrs. Lilybanks was holding some black and yellow pansies. Alicia had done it in her old style—starting with background first, closing in to the face, doing the face in quick strokes once she got there, the last touch of all the light that showed across the irises of Mrs. Lilybanks’ strongly blue eyes. Alicia was quite proud of the portrait—realistic to be sure, and realism was something to be looked down on, to apologize for, among people she knew, people who painted and people who didn’t, but it was hardly more realistic than Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, which Alicia and lots of her friends, too, considered a masterpiece.
    “It’s better than the one over the fireplace,” Sydney said, “so why not put it there?” Alicia had not let him see it until it was completely finished. She had worked in her studio upstairs, where Mrs. Lilybanks had come every morning at ten to sit for an hour or so.
    But Alicia’s pride in it did not go that far; it was still realistic, and therefore less of a work of art, somehow, than her most inferior abstract. She hung it on a side wall in the living room, removing the abstract that had been there.
    “Yes, I do like it,” Alicia said pensively, gazing at it. “I’ll pick up a frame at Abbott’s or somewhere.” Abbott’s was the large, barnlike, secondhand furniture place in Debenham, where the Bartlebys had acquired Sydney’s work table, their living-room sofa, chest of drawers, and many odds and ends around the house. “It’s funny not to know somebody for very long and succeed in getting a likeness, isn’t it? But I’ve heard of writers who say that to write about a place they’ve known all their lives is harder than to write about a place they’ve known just three weeks, because they can’t choose the right details about a place they’ve known so long.”
    True, and Sydney knew exactly what she meant, but the words touched him like a personal, directly aimed criticism: he had been stewing too long over The Planners , he knew, and so did Alicia know. He couldn’t really see any more details about it, or the whole of it, either, couldn’t see it. And yet it was the best bet he had for making money in the near future, so he was sticking with it.
    They went to Ipswich that evening for a Chinese dinner, then to the cinema. And when they came out, their