The End Of Solomon Grundy Read Online Free PDF Page A

never ceased to please him. “Doesn’t belong to me, this Heath, you know,” he would say to friends, adding with a mock-rueful shake of the head, “Wish it did,” or in a variant of this ploy he would say solemnly, “Used to be mine, this whole area, they even named it after me, did you know that? Had to sell it, though, when money got tight.” His wife was a little wispy woman, who was generally silent, but upon certain subjects became extraordinarily voluble. To outsiders it seemed remarkable that Marion, cool, logical, progressive Marion, should have had such parents, should be extremely fond of them and should call them Mum and Dad. To Grundy, however, who remembered the quiet, docile young librarian he had courted thirteen years earlier, a young woman who had been perfectly at home in what her family called the good residential part of Croydon where they lived and had been intent to console them for the loss of her elder brother Robert who had been killed on the Normandy beaches, what seemed strange was the metamorphosis of the Marion he had married into the woman who now sat opposite to him at meals. In the presence of her parents Marion was transformed again into the docile young lady of Croydon, the treasure her parents had been so unwilling to lose.
    “You like this, then, do you? You like it here,” Mr Hayward said as he had said several times before, with a note of surprise. “Wouldn’t do for me, I can tell you that.”
    Grundy nibbled nuts, drank sherry, made no reply. It was Marion who said, “Of course we like it, Dad, or we shouldn’t have come here.”
    Mr Hayward walked over to the window, jingled the coins in his pocket. “No, wouldn’t do for me. Sharing everything with your neighbours, haven’t even got a bit of garden to call your own except for that pocket handkerchief out there. Living in a goldfish bowl.”
    “It wouldn’t do for us all to like the same things though, would it?” Mrs Hayward said boldly.
    “No, it wouldn’t. You’re just about right there, it wouldn’t,” her husband assented.
    “I’d better make sure nothing’s boiling over.” Such a remark from Marion invariably preceded a lengthy period of absence.
    “Well, Solomon, how are things?” Mr Hayward always spoke Grundy’s ridiculous Christian name in full, and did so with a sense of its absurdity, which was not less obvious because it was always repressed.
    “All right.”
    “Our little girl looking after you properly? That’s one thing she was brought up to do at home, isn’t that so, Mother? Got to feed the brute.” His tone changed.
    “What have you done to your face?
    “A cat scratched me.”
    “Puss puss,” Mr Hayward called. “You haven’t got a cat.”
    “A neighbour’s cat. Have some more sherry.”
    They had some more sherry. Mr Hayward kept up a monologue about a holiday in Spain from which they had just returned, until Marion came back, becomingly flustered, to say that lunch was ready. They ate their steak, chips and salad sitting in the picture window. Peter and Rex were in their places opposite.
    “That chap, he’s a TV producer, I think you told me,” Mr Hayward said. “Does he do Emergency Ward 10 ?”
    “No. Plays of different sorts.”
    “Ah. You get a lot of arty types here, don’t you? Shouldn’t care for it myself.”
    “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” This was Mrs Hayward.
    “We get all sorts. Professional men mostly, I should think you’d call them.” Marion offered the remark, as it were, to her husband, but Grundy was not disposed to call them anything. Mr Hayward’s eye, which did not lack keenness, followed this exchange or lack of exchange.
    After lunch, back to the living-room for coffee. “You don’t have to hurry away, do you?” Marion said, but her parents had promised to have tea with friends near Reigate. There was a lot of traffic on the road, Mr Hayward said, and they must start soon. The word traffic might have been a spring