The Good Apprentice Read Online Free PDF

flushed and put her hand up to the neck of her jacket. As shewent over to him he shrank into an even smaller compass. ‘Edward, how are you? Are you taking those pills I gave you? Are you eating? Harry, is he eating?’
    ‘Sort of,’ said Harry.
    ‘Edward, you must eat. I’ll come over and talk to you tomorrow. May I?’
    ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Edward in a dead voice.
    ‘Is he still staying in bed all day?’
    ‘Not so much.’
    ‘He must eat, he must. We must surround him with — we must surround him — oh dear — ’
    Midge McCaskerville came in followed by Willy Brightwalton. Midge was wearing a long straight blue and pink and white striped silk dress, with a poised undulating collar with smaller closer stripes of the same colours, and a suggestion of a train which slid sibillantly upon the formal tapestry of the carpet. With a flourish she whirled up the train revealing her fine legs in pink stockings, and laughed. Thomas stared at her as if he had never seen her before. Her copious fairish brownish hair, which contained many tinges, including red here and there, disposed itself in a decorous graceful mop about her head, tossed mane-like from time to time. She wore little but very careful make-up, whose boldest feature was the deep glossy red of the little fingernails upon her small hands. She rarely wore jewellery. Her eyes, a cordial gentle brown, seemed always to petition and persuade: like me, like me! Her face expressed an almost insistent sympathy. She was friends with everyone, and her little air of self-satisfied animation made people, even as they admired her beauty, smile a little. She had a perfect nose and was often photographed in profile in the ‘smartest woman’ days. Since then she had admittedly put on weight.
    Her self-appointed chevalier Willy was comfortably stout and bald. He continually, even in the middle of dinner, combed a long lock of his gingery hair over his bald patch, but as often the lock fell away, depending awkwardly over his ear, giving him a slightly mad look. Willy was famous for having, as a child, witnessed his father’s death, killed by a camel on a long-planned long-looked-forward-to visit to Egypt. The camel, perhaps mistaking Brightwalton senior for a driver who had ill-treated him, knocked him down and knelt on him. Willy also witnessed the shooting of the camel which happened soon after. When Ursula said ‘he thinks about it all the time’ she scarcely exaggerated. ‘He feels that camel kneeling on his heart.’ This tragic business had, in the callous hurly-burly of social life, become a joke, and people warned each other how important it was never to mention camels in Willy’s presence, and how mysteriously difficult it was to keep off the subject. Willy, clever, lazy, always anxious, always guilty before his pupils, was a Proust expert, but never managed to finish his great book. He disliked intellectual conversations which he would dreamily break off by murmuring his favourite saying, ‘Ah well — tout passe, toute casse, tout lasse .’ He had lately developed the notion, entertained in fact by no one else, that he was expected to take Edward with him to America so as to ‘distract him from his troubles’. Willy especially regarded Harry as having framed such a plan. With a glance now at Edward, whom he had greeted earlier and did not have to attend to now, Willy at once began explaining, ‘Pardon, gentles all, I’m afraid, I’ve told Midge, I can’t stay to dinner. I’ve got to go home and pack, I’m leaving for California tomorrow morning.’
    ‘So soon?’ said Thomas.
    ‘I have to go earlier, it’s because of Giles, he quite insists, it’s my first sabbatical for I don’t know how long, I’ve been looking forward to it so much — ’
    ‘It’s true,’ said Ursula, ‘he’s like a child waiting for his hols, Willy loves America, he feels liberated there like so many Englishmen, he’s longing to see Giles, how I wish I could go!