The Millstone Read Online Free PDF Page A

another drink."
    "I was just going," I said.
    "Well, stay a while."
    "All right," I said, "I will."
    So George bought me another drink; when he came back from the bar with it he was smiling with gentle malice, and he said, "Well, all you have to do is ring up Roger. How wise you are to have your life so well organized."
    "I don't like Roger much," I said, and laughed. "You don't either, do you?"
    "No, I must confess that I prefer Joe. Personally," said George. And he too laughed.
    "Anyway," I said, "Roger's gone on his summer holidays."
    "Has he really? Amazing how people go on going on
summer holidays, don't you think? I gave it up when I was seventeen."
    "How old are you now?"
    "Twenty-nine."
    "Like Joe."
    "So Joe's gone and left you, has he? What had you been on at him about?"
    "Oh, this and that," I said, and told him the story of the pound note. We talked for half an hour more, and then it began to cross my mind that he might have better things to do than to talk to me: that he didn't come into the pub to talk to me, and might well have other aims for the evening: and that he was probably spending so much time on me because he felt sorry for me being left on my own. He was a man much susceptible to the tender emotions of pity and sorrow, I suspected. As soon as these suspicions crossed my mind, they immediately seemed to me to be the simple truth, so I looked at my watch and said, "Good heavens, is that the time, I really must be going."
    "Oh no, not yet," he said. "Let me get you another drink."
    "No, really," I said, "I must be going, I have some work to do before the morning."
    And I picked up my bag and my scarf and started fishing for my shoes which I had lost under the bench.
    "I'll walk you home," he said.
    "Don't be ridiculous," I said with asperity, "I only live just down the road."
    "Now then, now then," he said, soothingly, "I know where you live. I didn't mean to offend you. I know you're quite capable of walking down the road by yourself. Let me walk you home."
    "Why?" I said, wriggling my feet into my shoes. "Don't you want to stay and talk"—I waved my hand disparagingly around the room—"to all your friends?"
    I was still not convinced that he really wanted to walk
back with me, but as I wished his company I was prepared to accept his offer without the comfort of total conviction. We set off down the broad dusty street. I was wearing a pair of rather flimsy string-backed high-heeled sandals, which kept coming off as I walked: my unsteady progress in them had not helped Joe's irritable attitude earlier in the evening. When I fell off them for the fifth time, George smiled with a mild reproof and offered me his arm. I took it and was amazed, in hanging on to it, to find how much it was there. I had never touched him before, and had always assumed he would be as insubstantial as grass, or as some thin animal: but he was there, within my grasp. I was a little shocked to find it so. He too seemed somewhat surprised, for he became silent, and we walked along without talking. When we arrived at the front door of my block of flats, we paused and I withdrew my arm with some reluctance; then I said what I had decided, marginally, not to say.
    "Why don't you come up," I said, "and have a drink? Or a cup of coffee or something?"
    He looked at me, suddenly very thin and fey and elusive, then said, in his most defensive tone, "Well, I don't mind if I do. That would be lovely, don't you think?"
    "Yes, lovely," I said, and we went in and I opened the lift door for him, and up we went. I felt unreasonably elated and the familiar details of the building seemed to take on a sudden charm. As he followed me into the kitchen, he seemed a little subdued by the grand parental atmosphere which never quite left the place, and I had a moment of horrid fright: perhaps he wasn't quite up to it, perhaps he wasn't quite up to my kind of thing, perhaps I should never have tried to talk to him for more than five minutes, perhaps we