The Man Who Killed Himself Read Online Free PDF

job do you do?’
    Clare gave one of her gusty laughs. ‘Just a bit of part time work for the WVS. I’m independent.’
    There was a pause. Then Arthur suggested that they should have another drink.
    During the next few weeks they played a great deal of tennis together, and Arthur made some tactful inquiries about Clare. The results were encouraging. Her father had been a fairly important administrator in the Indian Civil Service. Clare had gone to school in England but spent the holidays out in Calcutta, and after leaving school had gone there to live. When her father retired, just before the war, he had bought a house called The Laurels in Fraycut, a prosperous little town in Surrey. Arthur’s lodgings were at Stonehead, the next station up the line and a mile or two away, and he fully realised that Fraycut was one social step up from Stonehead. Rich commuters had built houses that were almost small estates on the edge of the town, and he spent an interesting afternoon looking round the place. Livingstone Road was not on this high income commuter level – in another place it might have been called suburban – but still, when he made an exterior inspection of The Laurels, he was impressed by the good bourgeois solidity of the house. Mr Slattery had been dead for a couple of years, his wife had predeceased him, and there were no other children. Altogether, Clare must be quite comfortably off. She was an attractive proposition, and the attraction was if anything increased by the fact that there was, as he put it to himself, no nonsense about her. Something about the sturdiness of her legs and the rough, slightly chapped nature of her skin seemed to put nonsense quite (to use a tennis term) out of court. After one rather gay evening at the club he proposed, standing with her just outside the club-house. He was faintly disturbed by the alacrity with which he was accepted. It was rather as if he had put his head inside the jaws of an apparently stuffed alligator and had found them decisively snapped together.
    They were married at a registry office, and given a good send off by the tennis club members. His father met the bride for the first time on the wedding day, and expressed his opinion of her briefly. ‘You won’t get much change out of her , in bed or out of it,’ he said. Clare had mentioned more than once that the rest of the family would be coming to the wedding and that she didn’t know what they would think about it, and at the reception Arthur first really became aware of the Slattery connection, in the form of two immensely old men called by Clare Uncle Pugs and Uncle Ratty. Uncle Pugs, whose name was Sir Pelham Slattery, made a short but still rather incoherent speech about Clare being a sweet little girl who had grown up to be a lovely young woman. There was a drop on the end of his nose and Arthur waited for it to fall off. Instead tears from his eyes coursed down his cheeks as he was heard to say, ‘Wish every happiness…and all the best of…ship never…rocks…Mr and Mrs Browning.’ He sat down with the drop on his nose still there. It did not seem worth correcting his error.
    A little later Uncle Ratty cornered Arthur. Red-faced and apparently in a state of permanent anger, he was a more formidable proposition than Uncle Pugs. His first words were, ‘Now you’ve got her I hope you can keep her.’
    ‘Keep her?’ Arthur had a vision of Clare as some great furry animal escaping from him across fields.
    ‘Look after her, man. Pay the bills.’
    Arthur goggled. The idea was quite the reverse of that with which he had married, but he realised that this must not be admitted. ‘I have my own business.’
    ‘So Clare said. Selling bits of cars or something. Doesn’t sound like much to me.’
    ‘We have agencies.’
    Uncle Ratty stared hard at him, and it occurred to Arthur that this terrifying specimen of prehistoric man from the Lincolnshire fens probably did not know what an agency was. All he