The Pupil Read Online Free PDF

rent-paying neighbours. For his was a noble squat, set in a handsome if decaying terrace, populated largely by people of his own age and background, the only difference being that Chay lived there free.
    Anthony and Barry’s views regarding their father had varied over the years, and it was only in the past seven orso that they had begun to realise that he was somewhat out of the norm for ordinary fathers. Chay was still very much a child of the sixties, the kind of relic that Anthony and Barry recognised from historic television footage of the black-and-white era. Barry rather admired his father’s bohemian lifestyle as one to which he, too, aspired, but which he knew he could never brave. The tree-lined streets of suburbia, which he could denigrate in the cosy comfort of the canteen at the sixth-form college, offered too much of a warm, known haven.
    Anthony viewed him somewhat differently. He had never taken his father very seriously, had never much liked him, and stayed out of his way as much as possible. During his vulnerable years at university he had referred to his father as ‘an artist’, when asked. That was all very well, so far as it went. But only that day, and in the light of the prospects which he imagined were opening up before him, Anthony realised that Chay could become something of a serious social handicap.
    Chay Cross was a thin, spindly man of forty-one, with the eager, faded countenance of the ageing hippy, rootless and feckless. He smiled a lot, a serene, knowing smile. His history was one of hedonistic self-justification. He had inherited and squandered money; borrowed from his family until they were weary; indulged in every lunatic experiment conceivable – physical, spiritual and chemical; embraced several religions, from Christianity through Buddhism to Bahá’í and back again; dabbled with all known drugs, and several less well known, from mescalin to cocaine. He had used, cheated and discarded friends, lovers and family. Hehad embarked upon various artistic careers with neither the desire nor the ability to succeed, it seemed, in any of them – painting, sculpture, weaving, writing, poetry, metalwork. He satisfied his vanity by achieving smatterings of knowledge and endless terms of reference, catchphrases, the breathed names of the successful, their cast-off canvases and clay, their ex-lovers. He was a man of immense superficiality, anxious for the approval of the supposed arbiters of taste and intellectual and artistic fashion, seeking always to tap the vein of the present trend. At the same time, he managed to cultivate an image of eccentric naivety, purporting to disdain material wants and cares. He was, in truth, a complete fabrication of a man, a fact of which Anthony was all too readily aware.
    The first shock that greeted his sons that evening was their father’s newly shaven head. For as long as they could remember, he had worn his hair, which had of late become grey and thinning, to his shoulders, occasionally tying it back with ponytail bands bought at the women’s haircare counter at Boots. But tonight they saw his rather pointed, knobbly skull gleaming unpleasantly through grey, bristly, day-old growth. It gave Chay’s neck a strangely elongated look, and somehow aggravated the irritating quality of his bland smile.
    ‘Oh, very cool, Dad,’ said Barry, giving him a glance and then heading for the kitchen with the wine. He was hunting out Chay’s new woman. Anthony was too startled to say anything. He was aware from his grandmother that he was supposed to look like his father, and had spent anxious, furtive half-hours at his grandmother’s house, scrutinisingold photographs of his father to see if it were true, and if there was any frightful possibility that he might, in middle age, look the way Chay did. The shaven head expanded the possibility alarmingly.
    He followed his father into the long attic room that served as living room, dining room and bedroom, and tried to