The Lime Twig Read Online Free PDF

to side, settled the helmet securely on my own smooth head. I extended my hands again and took the wheel.
    “How’s the fit, old girl?” I whispered. “A pretty good fit, old girl?” And I turned my head as far to the right as I was able, so that she might see how I—William Hencher—looked with my bloody coronet in place at last.
    Give a kiss to Rose
.
    Between 3 and 4 A.M. on the night she died—so many years ago—that’s when I set out walking with my great black coat that made the small children laugh, walking alone or sometimes joining the crowds and waiting under the echoes of the dome and amid the girders and shattered skylight of Dreary Station to see another trainload of our troops return. So many years ago. And I had my dreams; I had my years of walking to the cathedral in the moonlight.
    “My old girl died on these premises, Mr. Banks.”
    And then all the years were gone and I recognized that house, that hall, despite the paint and plaster and the cheap red carpet they had tacked on the parlor floor. I paid him in advance, I did, and he put the money in his trouser pocket while Margaret went to lift their awkward sign out of the window. Fresh paint, fresh window glass, new floorboards here and there: to think of the place not gutted after all but still standing, the house lived in now by those with hardly a recollection of the nightly fires. Cheery, new, her dresses in one of the closets and his hat by the door. But one of his four rooms was mine, surely mine, and I knew I’d smell the old dead odor of smoke if only I pushed my face close enough to those shabby walls.
    Here’s home, old girl, here’s home.
    So I spent my first long night in the renovated room, and I dared not spend that night in the lavatory but smoked my cigars in bed. Sitting up in bed, smoking, thinking of my mother all night long. And then there was the second night and I ventured into the hallway. There was the third night and in the darkened cubicle I listened to the far bells counting two, three, four o’clock in the morning and all that time—thinking now of comfort, tranquillity, and thinking also of their two clasped hands—I wondered what I might do for them. The bells were slow in counting, the water dripped. And suddenly it was quite clear what I could do for them, for Michael and his wife.
    I hooked the lavatory door. Then I filled the porcelain sink, and in darkness smelling of lavender and greasyrazor blades I immersed my hands up to the wrists, soaked them silently. I dried them on a stiff towel, pushing the towel between my fingers again and again. I wiped the top of my head until it burned. Then I used his talc, showed my teeth in the glass, straightened the robe. I took up the pink-shelled hair brush for a moment but replaced it. And off to the kitchen and then on boards that made tiny sounds, walking with a heavy man’s sore steps, noticing a single lighted window across the court.
    It grew cold and before dawn I left the kitchen once: only to pull the comforter off my bed. Again in the kitchen and on Margaret’s wooden stool I sat with the comforter hooded round my head and shoulders, sat waiting for the dawn to come fishing up across the chimney pots and across that dirty gable in the apex of which a weathered muse’s face was carved. When I heard the dog barking in the flat upstairs, when water started running in the pipes behind the wall, and a few river gulls with icy feathers hovered outside the window, and light from a sun the color of some guardsman’s breast warmed my hooded head and arms and knees—why then I got off the stool, began to move about. Wine for the eggs, two pieces of buttered toast, two fried strips of mackerel, a teapot small as an infant’s head and made of iron and boiling—it was a tasteful tray, in one comer decorated with a few pinched violet buds I tore from the plant that has always grown on Margaret’s window shelf. I looked round, made certain the jets were off, thought