The Death of William Posters Read Online Free PDF Page A

was to be expected, but that too would change. After all, not only could you not have everything, but as far as she was concerned it was often true that the less you had the more might be in store for you later. This was a parsimonious, puritanical, yet unpredictable state of mind, at the mercy of any strong outlandish circumstance that came unexpectedly from beyond the outer limits of such prickly defences.

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    â€˜Of course,’ she said, ‘come in a moment.’
    It was a plainbricked four-roomed cottage and, when he entered, a steep flight of stairs faced him. One door to the right led into a parlour, that to the left, a dining-room. ‘Leave your pack by the stairs.’ He dropped it and followed her into the dining-room. On the table was a tea tray, and she took another blue-ringed beaker from the shelf: ‘Sit down and have some tea. That is, unless you’re determined on water.’ She was tall, had ginger hair and flowerblue eyes, thin lips that smiled back at him. Her frock had a cardigan over it, and she wore stockings and houseshoes. He put her at over thirty, but then, he thought, I’ve never seen a young midwife. ‘You look as if you’ve walked a long way,’ she said.
    He faced her across the table, slid down the sweet scald of the big cup. ‘From Spilsby.’ It had been the longest footslog so far, his eyes fried and feet sore, his body feeling dustcaked and sweatbound. He offered her a cigarette.
    â€˜Thank you,’ she said. The silence won over the birds, backed up by heavy cloud shadows approaching road and hedgerows, and the humping softloamed fields beyond the window. A car went by, leaving a heavier silence. ‘It’s rare for someone to stop at my door and ask for a drink of water – unless it’s children in the summer.’
    â€˜It’s rare for me to get tea when I ask for it. I’m on my way to Lincoln.’
    â€˜Why Lincoln?’ She spoke well, smoked as if she smoked a lot, and seemed always about to laugh at him, which he sensed and was amused at.
    â€˜To get to Sheffield. I’m just tramping around the country.’
    â€˜You don’t look like a tramp. When I opened the door just now I thought you were an ordinary young man from the village to see about some carpenter’s work I want doing.’ He had that sort of build – yet now he didn’t seem like that to her at all. Maybe that’s what put that bastard’s back up who thought I was begging his lift, he thought. He didn’t know what I looked like, out on the road with rucksack, but dressed in smart enough jacket and trousers, travelling in heavy and well-polished shoes, a short haircut, and a tie on. If I’d snivelled and was clobbered up like a tramp, that would have been O.K., but it worried him that he couldn’t place me – private, corporal, sergeant. He thought back again to giving the soldier a lift. After dropping him at a house in Loughborough he had headed north again, the day opening wider as his car drove into it, black trees and green hills of the Trent hemming around the curving road. Summer was poleaxed: the sapjuice smell of wild flowers and dead wheat soaked in sun was giving place to spent grass and barren trees. September was playing it cool, and the first subtle change of season rolled a desperate message up from the turning tyres, whispering it was time to light out to the unlit far-and-wides felt to exist with such potency only by a man more than fed-up to the teeth.
    A policeman was flagging him to a halt by a barrier of black cars and cycle-cops, plainclothes men and brasshats talking together as if the word had gone out to get Bertrand Russell. He slowed down and a black cyclop swung towards him: jackboots crunching, helmet unstrung above a red, vacant face, in truth the timid Midlands visage of a man who should have been serving behind the Co-op counter, joshing with the women in some collier’s