The Chequer Board Read Online Free PDF Page A

did not want to be mixed up again in the sly, illegal deals in pastry flour for East End confectioners that had proved profitable for him in the post-war years. He had somemoney saved. He wanted to lay off the business of petty earning now and do something different.
    He had about three thousand pounds in savings. He had never told his wife the extent of these riches because they had been amassed in a variety of dubious ways; only a small fraction came from legitimate saving out of his income. Full of ideals gleaned from the cinema, she was so rude about his way of life in general that he could not bring himself to tell her how he had built up their joint security, and now things had reached that pitch between them when he did not even want to tell her what he had achieved to safeguard them in sickness or old age. He knew that three thousand pounds would not go far to meet her needs after his death. Safely invested, after income tax it would not provide her with much more than a pound a week; she had been making five pounds a week in the office when they married, and five pounds ten by the end of the war, when she had retired from work. She could earn that again if she went back to office life; she had not treated him so well, he felt, that he need fear to spend his money for the sake of giving her another pound a week on top of the five or six that she could earn.
    The little bell rang from the house; he heaved himself up from his chair and went in to tea. She had laid it in the dining room, tea and cold sausages, and salad, and bread and jam, and cherry cake. They usually had it cold in the summer; in winter it was a more generous meal, with a hot kipper or bacon and eggs. Supper was a light meal that took place when they wanted it.
    Mollie was already seated when he came into the room. He sat down heavily and forked a sausage on to his plate;she passed him his tea and he buttered a piece of bread, “What about a run in the car afterwards?” she said.
    He considered this. He had a little ten-horsepower Ford in the garage by the side of the house, seven years old; he liked driving it. It was one of their chief relaxations, marred only by the destination of their journey. She would have liked to drive out into the country and sit in the sun in some beautiful place and read a book like girls did in the pictures. He liked to drive for an hour to some country pub or roadhouse and drink beer in an atmosphere of smoke and laughter and good company.
    “All right,” he said. “Might end up at the Barley Mow.”
    “Lord,” she said, “can’t you ever get away from beer?”
    “That’s enough of that,” he said. “I don’t mind doing what you want to first, and after that we do what I want to. Otherwise, we better go out separate.” He paused. “What were you thinking of?”
    She said, “I wanted to go out somewhere in the country and pick flowers.”
    He glanced out of the window at their roses. “Want any more flowers? There’s flowers everywhere this time of year.”
    “Wild ones, I want,” she said. “Hawthorn and violets and forget-me-nots, and them sort of things.”
    “Okay,” he said. “Go out past Hatfield, ’n then come home by the Barley Mow.”
    She said, “All right, if we’ve got to.”
    He slit his sausage up the middle carefully, and spread a little mustard on it. “One thing,” he said casually, “you better drive.”
    She stared at him. “Don’t you want to?”
    “Not much,” he said. “I don’t feel like it.”
    She said, “I’m not going to drive all the way—you can’t see the country, driving. I’ll drive back from the Barley Mow. I’d better do that anyway.”
    He said irritably, “You’ll drive all the way, or we don’t go at all.”
    She said, “For the Lord’s sake! Why won’t you drive some of the way?”
    He said angrily, “Because the specialist told me not to. That’s why. If you think I like being driven by you, you’re very much mistaken.”
    She stared