The Gigantic Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page A

statue had spoken. One or two drops from the chocolate went on to her frock. ‘Three and a half years, Anna. It’s a long time.’
    Tears welled easily into her eyes, as they are said, inaccurately, to come into the eyes of babies. ‘You’re going to leave me.’
    He stood up to look at himself in the glass and saw a burly figure, a bruiser’s face with its blunt features and a squashed nose. The neck was thick, ropy, the body big and clumsy. The ridiculous bandage topped it. When he pulled off the bandage thick reddish hair sprang up eagerly. On his forehead there was a bump, no blood.
    ‘But why? Don’t you like me any more?’ Now the tears rolled. They did not make her look unsightly. Glycerine tears could not have made less impact on the smooth glow of her cheeks.
    ‘Three and a half years since that night at Biff Ellerby’s party.’ Biff Ellerby was a minor band leader and Hunter, who was on the news desk of an evening paper, had been invited to the party at second hand, by the paper’s radio critic. There he met Anna, wearing a blue frock the simplicity of which she had not quite been able to spoil by adding to it a number of chains and trinkets. There had been, there still was, a softness and pliability about her. He had immediately christened her, mentally, the Dunlopillo girl. She was a commercial artist, she told him, a freelance doing work for an agency, but that was only temporary, she did serious paintings as well and they were so much more interesting, really, didn’t he agree?
    Hunter was enchanted. He went home with her that night, and appreciated the untidiness of her flat off Marylebone Road, the knickers left in the lavatory, the six unfinished canvases sweating in the bathroom. He moved there next day, bringing his few belongings in a battered blue suitcase. Within a week she had given up the freelance work to concentrate, as she said, on real painting, but somehow the real paintings – portraits of him and of their friends, still lifes, abstractions – turned into rather bad commercial art, just as her most wholehearted attempts to produce purely commercial work were touched, and in a way spoiled, by her dim knowledge of something better. But she had made enough money out of her work as a freelance to live independently of horrified parents in Ealing, and no doubt – he told himself – she would always earn enough to keep herself in comfortable disorder.
    ‘Why do you want to go? I don’t see.’
    How could he explain? ‘After what happened last night there’s no room for me in TV, you understand that.’
    ‘But you could go back to a newspaper.’
    ‘Or in newspapers.’ He hesitated, but the impulse to self-revelation was too strong, the current of the past carried him along with it. He said it baldly. ‘I spent ten years in jail. For murder.’
    ‘For murder.’ Her hand groped instinctively for another chocolate, then moved rejectingly away.
    ‘I was in the IRA when I was a boy. In the thirties. We were in what they called a fund-raising group. We came over to England, three others and I, and we robbed a big store in Manchester. The night watchman found us, there was a fight, and I shot him. I never meant to kill him,’ he said protestingly. ‘You believe that, don’t you?’
    She said nothing, but took a chocolate, put it into her mouth.
    ‘I got a life sentence. Pardoned after ten years. That’s all.’ That was the story, and with what miraculous compression he had told it, leaving out so much, the days on bread and water, the nights when he had prayed, truly prayed, for a bomb to hit the prison and kill every living thing in it, the other times when he had gone over and over the raid on the store and seen how ludicrously careless it had been, the absolutely inadequate precautions taken against possible discovery by the watchman – and then had replanned it in his mind so that the whole thing went like a charm, the watchman was taken out and filled with drink or