The Lake of Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

course it was quite absurd. He had never done any wrestling and he was sure Tim hadn’t. But he thought a lot about it, more, he knew, than was good for him, and such a wrestling figured sometimes in his dreams. It was part of these fantasies that in real life he should actuallyprovoke Tim to a fight, and that might not be so difficult for, in spite of his affection for Tim, he knew he wasn’t really a nice person. Long before the wrestling fantasy began, he had seen in Tim signs of ruthlessness, egotism, and cupidity.
    Tim lived in Stroud Green. To this address Martin had sent business letters, but he had never phoned Tim on his private number and he had never been there. This wasn’t for want of being asked. It was the way Tim had looked and the tone he had used when asking that had set Martin so determinedly against ever visiting those rooms or flat or half a house or whatever it was. Tim had said to come and see his “menage,” smiling and raising his somewhat satanic eyebrows, and at once Martin had understood—Tim was living with a man. Martin had never actually been in company with two men living together in a sexual relationship, but he could more or less imagine it and the fearful embarrassment he would feel in such a situation.
    He had returned a polite refusal—he always had an excuse ready—and after a time Tim seemed to understand, for there were no more invitations. But had he really understood? Martin hoped Tim hadn’t thought he wouldn’t come because he disliked the idea of slumming down in Stroud Green.
    Tim seemed impressed by the flat in Cromwell Court. At any rate, he listened and admired when Martin showed him some new item he had bought, and he enjoyed sitting on Martin’s balcony on summer evenings, drinking beer and admiring the view. Martin, like his father, often mixed business with relaxation, and it was on one of these evenings, when Tim had expressed his envy of those who own their homes, that he suggested he too should buy a flat. He should do so as much for the tax relief on a mortgage as for security.
    “With your income and the increasing income you’regetting from these short stories, I’d say you can’t afford not to.”
    “My income, as you call it,” said Tim, lighting his twentieth cigarette of the evening, “is the lowest rate the NUJ allows the
Post
to pay me.
You
know what my income is, my dear, and I haven’t got a penny capital.” Martin almost shivered when Tim called him “my dear.” “The only way I’d, ever get the money to put down on a house is if I won the pools.”
    “You’ll have to do them first,” said Martin.
    The blue eyes that could sometimes flame were lazy and casual. “Oh, I do them. I’ve been doing them for ten years.”
    That had surprised Martin. He had supposed doing football pools to be an exclusively working-class habit. He was even more surprised to find himself agreeing to do them too, just to have a go, what had he to lose?
    “I wouldn’t know how to start.”
    “My dearest old Livingstone,” said Tim, who sometimes addressed him in this way, “leave it to me. I’ll work out a forecast for you. I’ll send you a coupon and a copy, and all you’ve got to do is copy the same one every week and send it off.”
    Of course he had had no intention of copying it out and sending it off. But it had come and he had done so. Why? Perhaps because it seemed unkind and ungrateful to Tim not to. Martin supposed he had been to a great deal of trouble to work out that curious pattern on the chequered coupon, a pattern that he found himself religiously copying out each successive week.
    Five times he had filled in and sent off that coupon, and the fifth time he had won a hundred and four thousand pounds. He had won it on the permutation Tim had made for him. Tim, therefore, was something more than indirectly responsible for his having won it. Shouldn’t he then have gone straight to the phone as soon as the news came to him to tell