The Night Watch Read Online Free PDF Page B

heads that had rubbed the cushions bald. Mr Mundy's house, itself, rather gave her the creeps: an old person's house, it was, its little rooms crowded with great dark furniture, its walls swarming with pictures. On the mantelpiece were flowers of wax, and pieces of coral, under spotted glass domes. The lamps were gas ones still, with fish-tail flames. There were yellow, exhausted photographs: of Mr Mundy as a slim young man; another of him as a boy, with his sister and mother, his mother in a stiff black dress like Queen Victoria. It was all dead, dead, dead; and yet here was Duncan, with his quick dark eyes, his clear boy's laugh, quite at home amongst it all.
    She picked up her bag. 'I've brought you something.'
    It was a tin of ham. He saw it and said, 'I say!' He said it in the affectionate, faintly teasing way he'd said smart lady secretary , before; and when Mr Mundy came limping in with the tea-tray, he held the tin up extravagantly.
    'Look here, Uncle Horace! Look what Viv has brought us.'
    There was corned beef on the tray, already. She had brought that last time. Mr Mundy said, 'By golly, we are well set up now, aren't we?'
    They pulled out the leaves of the table and put out the plates and cups, the tomato sandwiches, the lettuce-hearts and cream crackers. They drew up their chairs, shook out their napkins, and began to help themselves to the food.
    'How is your father, Vivien?' Mr Mundy asked politely. 'And your sister? How's that fat little chap?' He meant Pamela's baby, Graham. 'Such a fat little chap, isn't he? Fat as butter! Quite like the kids you used to see about when I was a boy. Seemed to go out of fashion.'
    He was opening the tin of ham as he spoke: turning its key over and over with his great, blunt fingers, producing a line of exposed meat like a thin pink wound. Viv saw Duncan watching; she saw him blink and look away. He said, as if with a show of brightness, 'Are there fashions in babies, then, like in skirts?'
    'I'll tell you one thing,' said Mr Mundy, shaking out the ham, scooping out the jelly. 'What you never used to see, that was wheeled perambulators. You saw a wheeled perambulator round here, that was something marvellous. That was what you used to call, top-drawer. We used to cart my cousins about in a wagon meant for coal. Kids walked sooner then, though. Kids earned their living in those days.'
    'Were you ever sent up a chimney, Uncle Horace?' asked Duncan.
    'A chimney?' Mr Mundy blinked.
    'By a great big brute of a man, setting fire to your toes to make you go faster?'
    'Get away with you!'
    They laughed. The empty ham tin was set aside. Mr Mundy took out his handkerchief and blew his nose-blew it short and hard like a trumpet-then shook the handkerchief back into its folds and put it neatly back in his pocket. His sandwiches and lettuce-hearts he cut into fussy little pieces before he ate them. When Viv left the lid of the mustard-pot up, he tipped it down. But the slivers of meat and jelly that were left on his plate at the end of the meal he held to the cat: he let her lick them from his hand-lick all about his knuckles and nails.
    When the cat had finished, she mewed for more. Her mew was thin, high-pitched.
    'She sounds like pins,' said Duncan.
    'Pins?'
    'I feel as though she's pricking me.'
    Mr Mundy didn't understand. He reached to touch the cat's head. 'She'll scratch you, mind, when her dander's up. Won't you Catty?'
    There was cake to be eaten, after that; but as soon as the cake was finished, Mr Mundy and Duncan got up and cleared the cups and plates away. Viv sat there rather tensely, watching them carrying things about; soon they went out to the kitchen together and left her alone. The doors in the house were heavy and cut off sound; the room seemed quiet and dreadfully airless, the gas-lamps hissing, a grandfather clock in the corner giving a steady tick-tick . It sounded laboured, she thought-as though its works had got stiff, like Mr Mundy's; or else, as if it felt