The Fox in the Forest Read Online Free PDF Page A

herself. “You don’t want too many of them chips,” she said, ignoring the fact that it was she who had piled his plate with then. “Bad for your spots, they are.”
    Charlie ran his hand automatically over the small outcrops on his forehead and neck; tact was not a quality to be associated with the aged. He made a note to use the ointment tonight, so that it could have its opportunity to work before he went to the dance on Christmas Eve. He was twenty now, and in a year the spots would be gone, as a confirmation of the manhood he pretended to have attained some time ago. But he did not know that: the pink and purple excrescences still filled him with a hot adolescent embarrassment.
    He put down the black leather bomber jacket and his gauntlets. ‘It was time to be moving’; Gran had left the plastic container with his sandwiches by the door. “I may get a couple of hours’ overtime, so don’t wait up. And don’t worry if I’m late.”
    “I have to worry when you’re on that motorbike,” she grumbled. “Noisy, dangerous things. Ought not to be allowed.”
    He didn’t bother to argue, nor did she expect him to. Her protests had become a ritual for both of them. She had been through the same business thirty years earlier with his father. Both of them knew really that there was no way he could get to his employment at the electricity works without the bike. Public transport to the village had ceased ten years ago, and there was no way he could afford to run a car.
    Charlie took the polythene cover off the Honda and pushed it round the side of the house. He looked at the watch Gran had given him on his birthday before he pulled on his goggles. He was on the last minute again. He would have to use the road through the forest, as usual.
    ***
    It was well after dark when Peter Barton returned to the vicarage. He called upstairs, “Clare, I’m home!” but he knew because the front of the house was in darkness that his wife had not come back.
    He went to check that the garage was empty, hoping against hope that she had come home and gone out again into the village. Its absolute stillness and carless concrete floor seemed sinister on this icy evening, as if emphasizing the presence that had been removed.
    He felt a sudden, futile indignation that she could have taken the car and not returned it. She had left him to make his calls on foot, without checking on his schedule to see if that was possible. It was not the absence of the car itself which irritated him, but the petty selfishness involved in its removal like this. He was not a man used to feeling sorry for himself, and the emotion only disturbed him.
    The house tonight seemed to echo cheerlessly around him, as if reflecting his misery. He was tired out, emotionally as well as physically. He had spent almost an hour with a man who was dying of lung cancer, wrestling with the problem that while the central figure now accepted his fate, his family was still fighting it. He wanted to ring Clare’s mother, to see if she was there. Instead, he forced himself to make the phone call to the hospice, knowing it would press upon his mind through the night if he left it for the morrow.
    He made himself beans on toast. He was a man for whom food was not important, who became embarrassed indeed if it was dressed up for his consumption with too much care and ceremony. Yet tonight, he would have liked to have a fuller meal than this; above all, he would have liked it to have been prepared and served to him by his wife.
    Watching the television without seeing it, he wondered again where Clare was at that moment.

 
    5
     
    The Old Vicarage in Woodford was an architectural embodiment of changing times; sociologists, of which there was a merciful scarcity in Woodford, could have dwelt upon the fact at tedious length.
    Even after the sacrifice of some rooms to the demands of en suite bathrooms and more spacious servants’ quarters, it had six bedrooms and four reception rooms.