The House of Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page A

a long car journey ahead of me tomorrow, and I expect that you will allow me, on that account if no other, an uninterrupted night’s –’
    – and here he turned off the light –
    ‘–sleep.’

2
    Here, just for a few hundred yards, the town suddenly attempted to make something of its seaside location, and to take on, at last, some of the character of a holiday resort. Twenty bathing huts, shabbily painted in pale shades of yellow, green and blue, stood between the esplanade and the beach. A kiosk sold ice-cream and candy floss. Deck-chairs were available for hire. But there was, about all of this, an air of the perfunctory, the half-hearted. It fizzled away before it had really begun. Few holidaymakers came to this place; few of the rooms available in the various seafront boarding houses were occupied, even at what passed for the height of summer. And today, on this warm, windswept Sunday afternoon in late June, as discarded crisp packets flapped disconsolately against the pebbledashed walls of the public toilet, and seagulls bobbed with the queasy rise and fall of the incoming ocean, there were only two figures visible on the beach. One of them, a young woman of about twenty, her bare arms folded, her hair long, thin and jet-black, stood only a few feet from the water, looking out to sea. The other, who was perhaps fifteen or twenty years older, sat on a bench near the bathing huts, her overcoat folded neatly beside her, a small suitcase at her feet, her eyes closed, her face tilted towards the occasional sun.
    The younger woman turned and started walking back across the pebbly beach. She stopped, bent down, picked up a curiously shaped stone, but then discarded it. She kicked a Pepsi can, accidentally, and the sound made her realize what a quiet afternoon it was.
    The older woman, hearing the sound, opened her eyes and looked around her.
    There were three benches: but one of them had been vandalized, almost dismantled, and was no longer usable; and another was entirely occupied by the supine, dormant form of a middle-aged man, his face purple and shaggily bearded, his clothes giving off a stale odour, his right hand clutching a can of strong cider.
    The younger woman, however, still wanted to sit down.
    ‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ she was forced to ask, in the end.
    The older woman smiled, shook her head and moved her overcoat.
    The two women sat in silence.
    The older woman was tired. She had walked all the way to the beach from the railway station, carrying her suitcase. She was sweating copiously, and was beginning to suspect that her shoes, which she had bought only two weeks ago, were half a size too small. She had taken them off when she sat down on the bench, and found her bare feet marked with angry red lines which were only now beginning to fade. She continued to curl and uncurl her toes, relishing the freedom, until she realized that the younger woman was staring at her feet; staring at them with a kind of awed fascination. Immediately she crossed her legs and tucked them away under the bench, out of the younger woman’s sight. She hated her clumsy, mannish feet and thick ankles, and the way that people stared at them – women especially, and especially (as, already, in this case) women to whom she was herself attracted.
    Embarrassed, the younger woman caught her eye and smiled, shyly, apologetically. Now it was clear: they were going to have to talk to one another.
    ‘If you’re looking for somewhere to stay,’ the younger woman ventured, ‘I might be able to help you. I can recommend somewhere.’
    ‘Oh?’
    She gave the name of a nearby boarding house.
    ‘And what does it have, to make it different from all the others?’
    The younger woman laughed. ‘Nothing, really. Only my mother runs it.’
    The other woman smiled. ‘Well, thank you, but I’m not looking for anywhere to stay.’
    ‘Oh. Only I thought, with your suitcase…’
    ‘I’ve been away,’ said the older woman. ‘I’ve