The Hothouse by the East River Read Online Free PDF Page A

women do — everyone does. I
do.’
    ‘Why
isn’t she anxious about me? I’m in danger, ‘says Paul.
    ‘Look,’
says Pierre wildly. ‘Talk to Garven. I’m not an expert on these feelings.’
    ‘My
God, it’s a rational normal fear. Why should I talk to Garven?’ Paul says. And
he thinks, as one who hopes to still the tempest: Now let us turn to something
else. ‘Listen to me,’ his voice is saying…. In the summer of 1944, he is
telling his son, life was more vivid than it is now. Everything was more
distinct. The hours of the day lasted longer. One lived excitedly and
dangerously. There was a war on.
    Pierre
looks ahead at the painting on the wall opposite and wonders if the annual
allowance that his mother gives him on the condition that he keeps on good
terms with his father is worth it.
    ‘We
really lived our life,’ says Paul.
    It’s
like the electric fixtures in Peregrine’s apartment, Pierre meanwhile is
reflecting. In Peregrine’s apartment, which is a long barn-shaped room on the
third floor of a barn-like warehouse off lower Broadway, the main lighting
fixture in the ceiling is fitted with a three-way adapter into whose sockets
are fitted, in turn, the light bulb, a cord leading to a two-plate cooking
stove and a longer cord leading to a further three-way adapter which is hooked
on to the wall. The adapter on the wall also has three sockets; one for an
electric razor, another for a bright lamp which Peregrine uses when he works at
his drawings at night, and the third is a free-lance receptacle for an iron, a
coffee-pot, an electric cork-opener, and various other electrical things which
Peregrine uses alternately. When Peregrine first put up this rigging, it was
expected to fuse within a few hours, a few days, any time; it was predicted
that the whole neighbourhood would have a black-out, maybe the whole of
Manhattan, or the eastern seaboard. But more than two years have passed and
Peregrine’s fuse has not blown. It must happen any time, any moment, thinks
Pierre. Perhaps it is happening now. My father and mother, and the rest of us,
will blow a fuse and the current will stop flowing, thank God. Useful as it is,
it’s all too precarious. I’ll get my vital juice from some other source.
    His
father says, ‘You don’t seem to take in how real it all was. And now it’s
caught up on me again, you don’t seem to believe that I’m in danger.
    You’re
like your mother, Pierre, during the war when we were on secret work. She was
careless.’
    Pierre
gets up and bends over the long window-seat to look down at the street. He
says, ‘Do you see that man going up towards Fifth? Come and look, Father.’
    Paul
joins him, his nose peering forward.
    ‘There,’
says Pierre, ‘the man in the light suit just now passing the pharmacy, there.’
    ‘Yes,
why?’ says the father.
    The
stared-at man stops at the corner and turns his head for a meaningless moment
to look across to Pierre’s building as people generally do, as it were
obligingly, when picked on by chance to be looked at from afar. Pierre says,
‘He’s there every night. Usually he stands on the corner for a while then walks
back up the street. He’s watching the entrance.’ It is all just a fabrication,
but in Pierre’s ears it sounds better than his father’s kind of truth.
    ‘My
God!’ says the father, still watching the corner where the man has disappeared.
    ‘Did
you recognise him? You know his face?’ says the tall son who still holds up the
edge of the nylon curtain somewhat sweetly between his thumb and his index
finger.
    ‘No,’
says Paul. ‘Drop the curtain,’ he says. ‘He’ll know we’ve seen him.’
    Pierre
lets it fall from his fingers and pats the curtain into place like a devoted
housewife.
    ‘This
is serious,’ says Paul.
    The son
sits down and looks at his watch. ‘Yes, really,’ he says. A police siren swoops
past their hearing like a primitive bird and wails on the wing far into