The Gigantic Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

Now, on the sofa beside him, she rocked with laughter. These sudden changes of mood, which had once charmed him, now seemed merely distractions. But she dropped back quickly into seriousness, tears glistened becomingly on the plump cheeks. ‘Why can’t you take me with you, wherever you’re going? I won’t be any trouble. I love you, Bill.’
    There it was, the direct and naked statement. He felt himself moved by it, yet there was an ice block somewhere within that remained unfrozen by the words.
    ‘Ralph would divorce me,’ she went on. ‘You know that. We could get married.’
    He was appalled by the words. To marry was to accept responsibility, and it had always been for him one of Anna’s attractions that she had a husband in the background, a plodding, pleading civil servant whom she had left after a year. He wrote to her once or twice a month, offering to divorce her but saying that he loved her still, and asking her to go back to him. Anna sometimes showed him the letters, and one recurrent phrase in them impressed him particularly. ‘If you come back we would wipe out the past, and start again with a clean sheet,’ the phrase ran, with occasional variations. To wipe out the past – what a fool the man must be even to consider it possible. And now Anna herself, whom he had always thought of as living by and for the minute, was proposing a variation of this wipe out the past idea.
    ‘Don’t you see,’ she said now, ‘it’s what you want? A fixed point, something to rely on. Don’t you see that it’s no good running away?’
    He shook his head by way of implying what he obviously could not make comprehensible to her, that running away was not the way to talk about it, that for a man like himself life must consist of a series of attempts, however unsuccessful, to break with the past.
    ‘What’s the use of talking like that?’ he said roughly, and then, more because he knew she expected it from him than because of real concern, added, ‘What will you do, Anna?’
    ‘Me?’ She seemed surprised. ‘Go back to commercial art, I suppose. I might even do some real painting. But you’re not worried about me. Why should you be? You don’t love me.’
    There was evidently to be a scene, and one of the things he had always liked most about Anna was the fact that she avoided scenes. He felt obscurely, perhaps, that he if any- body had a right to make scenes and that if he, with the shape of his life disastrously decided in youth, made no complaint about it, kept the fact tucked away like the Spartan boy with the fox, others had no right to voice their trivial complaints about the hardness of life and the narrowness of love. Yet he knew that that was what they did, and prepared himself now for Anna’s scene, her grand renunciation.
    But at the last moment the storm did not break. She got up, walked away from him, smoothed down her skirt over her hips. ‘It’s whatever you want. It always has been. I’m going out now. I shall be gone for a couple of hours. I want you to be out of here when I get back.’
    ‘Yes.’ He was, in a way, cheated by her calmness. ‘Don’t tell me where you’re going. Then I shan’t be able to tell the newspapermen who come round asking.’
    He said yes again, surprised, almost alarmed, by the placidity on her plump face. She bit a dirty nail.
    ‘There’s one thing. Have you thought that you might be giving up too soon?’
    ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
    ‘You said you were tried as Hartley. But Mekles called you O’Brien. Where did he get that name from? And for that matter, why did he say what he did about you?’
    He shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
    ‘To me it would matter. But to you perhaps it doesn’t. You want to think of yourself as one of the lost, and I can’t stop you.’
    The blow struck too near home for comfort. He wanted to explain that he had no choice in the matter, that what she interpreted as a feeble fatalism was simply acknowledgement of the