The Lime Twig Read Online Free PDF Page B

to include a saucer of red jam, covered the hot salted portions withfolded table napkins. Then I listened. I heard nothing but the iron clock beating next to the stove and a boot landing near the dog upstairs.
    The door was off the latch and they were sleeping. I turned and touched it with my hip, my elbow, touched it with only a murmur. And it swung away on smooth hinges while I watched and listened until it came up sharply against the corner of a little cane chair. They lay beneath a single sheet and a single sand-colored blanket, and I saw that on his thin icy cheeks Banks had grown a beard in the night and that Margaret—the eyelids defined the eyes, her lips were dry and brown and puffy—had been dreaming of a nice picnic in narrow St. George’s Park behind the station. Behind each silent face was the dream that would collect slack shadows and tissues and muscles into some first mood for the day. Could I not blow smiles onto their nameless lips, could I not force apart those lips with kissing? One of the gulls came round from the kitchen and started beating the glass.
    “Here’s breakfast,” I said, and pushed my knees against the footboard.
    For a moment the vague restless dreams merely went faster beneath those two faces. Then stopped suddenly, quite fixed in pain. Then both at once they opened their eyes and Banks’ were opalescent, quick, the eyes of a boy, and Margaret’s eyes were brown.
    “It’s five and twenty past six,” I said. “Take the tray now, one of you. Tea’s getting cold. …”
    Banks sat up and smiled. He was wearing an undervest,his arms were naked and he stretched them toward me. “You’re not a bad sort, Hencher,” he said. “Give us the tray!”
    “Oh, Mr. Hencher,” I heard the warm voice, the slow sounds in her mouth, “you shouldn’t have gone to the trouble. …”
    It was a small trouble. And not long after—a month or a fortnight perhaps—I urged them to take a picnic, not to the sooty park behind the station but farther away, farther away to Landingfield Battery, where they could sit under a dead tree and hold their poor hands. And while they were gone I prowled through the flat, softened my heart of introspection: I found her small tube of cosmetic for the lips and, in the lavatory, drew a red circle with it round each of my eyes. I had their bed to myself while they were gone. They came home laughing and brought a postal card of an old pocked cannon for me.
    It was the devil getting the lipstick off.
    But red circles, giving your landlord’s bed a try, keeping his flat to yourself for a day—a man must take possession of a place if it is to be a home for the waiting out of dreams. So we lead our lives, keep our privacy in Dreary Station, spend our days grubbing at the rubber roots, pausing at each other’s doors. I still fix them breakfast now and again and the cherubim are still my monument. I have my billet, my memories. How permanent some transients are at last. In a stall in Dreary Station there is a fellow with vocal cords damaged during the fire who sells me chocolates, and I like to talk to him; sometimes I come across a gagger lying out coldin the snow, and for him I have a word; I like to talk to all the unanswering children of Dreary Station. But home is best.
    I hear Michael in the bath, I whet Margaret’s knives. Or it is 3 or 4 A.M. and I turn the key, turn the knob, avoid the empty goldfish bowl that catches the glitter off the street, feel the skin of my shoes going down the hallway to their door. I stand whispering our history before that door and slowly, so slowly, I step behind the screen in my own dark room and then, on the edge of the bed and sighing, start peeling the elastic sleeves off my thighs. I hold my head awhile and then I rub my thighs until the sleep goes out of them and the blood returns. In my own dark room I hear a little bird trying to sing on the ledge where the kidneys used to freeze.
    Smooth the pillow, pull down the sheets