The Love Object Read Online Free PDF

piling the black fluff into my palm.
    ‘A woman further up, her husband was a bandleader, used to be out late. One night she went to the dance hall and saw him with another girl; she came home and did it straight away.’
    ‘Gas?’ I asked, genuinely curious.
    ‘No, sedation,’ he said, and was off on another story about a girl who’d gassed herself and was found by him because he was in the house treating dry rot at the time. ‘Naked, except for a jersey,’ he said, and speculated on why she should be attired like that. His manner changed considerably as he recalled how he went into the house, smelt gas and searched it out.
    I looked at him. His face was grave. He had scaled eyelids. I had never looked at him so closely before. ‘Poor Michael,’ I said. A feeble apology. I was thinking that if he had abetted my suicide he would then have been committed to the memory of it.
    ‘A lovely young girl,’ he said, wistful.
    ‘Poor girl,’ I said, mustering up pity.
    There seemed to be nothing else to say. He had shamed me out of it. I stood up and made an effort at normality – I took some glasses off a side – table and moved in the direction of the kitchen. If dirty glasses are any proof of drinking, then quite a lot of it had been done by me over the past few days.
    ‘Well,’ he said and rose and sighed. He admitted to feeling pleased with himself.
    As it happened, there would have been a secondary crisis that day. Although my children were due to return to their father, he rang to say that the older boy had a temperature, and since – though he did not say this – he could not take care of a sick child, he would be obliged to bring them to my house. They arrived in the afternoon. I was waiting inside the door, with my face heavily made up, to disguise my distress. The sick boy had a blanket draped over his tweed coat and one of his father’s scarves around his face. When I embraced him he began to cry. The younger boy went around the house to make sure that everything was as he had last seen it. Normally I had presents for them on their return home, but I had neglected it on this occasion, and consequently they were a little downcast.
    ‘Tomorrow,’ I said.
    ‘Why are there tears in your eyes?’ the sick boy asked as I undressed him.
    ‘Because you are sick,’ I said, telling a half-truth.
    ‘Oh, Mamsies,’ he said, calling me by a name he had used for years. He put his arms around me and we both began to cry. He was my less favourite child, and I felt he was crying for that as well as for the numerous un-guessed afflictions that the circumstances of a broken home would impose upon him. It was strange and unsatisfying to hold him in my arms when over the months I had got used to my lover’s size – the width of his shoulders, the exact height of his body which obliged me to stand on tiptoe so that our limbs could correspond perfectly. Holding my son, I was conscious only of how small he was and how tenaciously he clung.
    The younger boy and I sat in the bedroom and played a game which entailed reading out questions such as ‘A River?’ ‘A Famous Footballer?’, and then spinning a disc until it steadied down at one letter and using that letter as the first initial of the river or the famous footballer or whatever the question called for. I was quite slow at it, and so was the sick boy. His brother won easily although I had asked him to let the invalid win. Children are callous.
    We all jumped when the heating came on, because the boiler, from the basement just underneath, gave an almighty churning noise, and made the kind of sudden erupting move I had wanted to make that morning when I stood at the bedroom window and tried to pitch myself out. As a special surprise and to cheer me up the plumber had called in two of his mates and between them they got the job finished. To make us warm and happy as he put it, when he came to the bedroom to tell me. It was an awkward moment. I’d avoided him