The Scapegoat Read Online Free PDF Page B

personally I did not find London gay when I was in exile there for a time in the war, but at any rate the city is vast and free. It does not hang about your neck like a rope.’
    His voice changed, becoming hard, and there was resentment in his eyes, and exasperation – it was the first sign he had given that he too had his personal problem which he did not wish to face – and he leant forward across the table and said, ‘You have all the luck in the world, and you are not content. Your parents died many years ago, you told me, and you have no one to make any claim upon you. You are a free man, to wake and eat and work and sleep alone. Count your blessings, and forget this nonsense of la Grande-Trappe.’
    Like all solitary people I had become glib of tongue and indiscreet too soon, warming to sympathy. He knew all the little dullnesses of my life, and I knew nothing of his.
    ‘Very well, then,’ I said, ‘now it’s your turn for the confessional. What’s your trouble?’
    I thought for a moment that he might be going to tell me. Something wavered in his eyes, a flicker of uncertainty, then it was gone again and in its stead the tolerant smile, the lazy shrug.
    ‘Oh, me!’ he said. ‘My one trouble is that I have too many possessions. Human ones.’ And his gesture of dismissal as he lit a cigarette was a warning not to question further. I could be introspective if I liked, exploring my own black moods; but I must not probe his. We had finished eating, but we went on sitting there, smoking and drinking, and the chatter of the laughing boys with the bicycles came in great gusts above the tortured singing from the radio, with the scraping of chairs and the arguments of the workmen at their game of dice.
    I fell silent, having suddenly no more to say, and I was aware of his eyes upon me all the time, bringing a strange discomfort. When he said he must telephone home, and got up andleft the table, I was relieved, as if his absence made it easier to breathe. When he returned I said, ‘Well?’ more as a comment than a question, and he answered briefly, ‘I told them to send the car in to fetch me tomorrow.’ Calling the
patron
, he paid the bill, brushing my feeble attempts aside, and then seized my arm and pushed me through the singing youths into the street.
    It was dark, and raining once again. The street was empty. There is nothing gloomier than the fringe of a provincial town on a wet evening, and I murmured something about finding the car and going on my way and what an experience it had been to fall in with him, but he went on holding my arm and said, ‘I can’t let you go like this. It’s too unusual, too bizarre.’ We came once more to the entrance of his shabby, dim hotel, and I looked through the still open door and saw there was no one behind the desk. He noticed it too, and looked over his shoulder and said quickly, ‘Come upstairs. Let’s have one more drink before you go.’ His voice was urgent, insistent, as though we had little time to lose. I protested, but he half led me up the stairs and across a passage. He took a key out of his pocket, and opened the door, and switched on the light of the small drab single room. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘sit down, make yourself at home,’ and I sat on the bed because his open valise was on the chair. He had thrown out his pyjamas and hair-brushes and a pair of slippers, and now he brought out his flask and was pouring cognac into a tooth-glass. Once again the ceiling hit the floor as it had done in the bistro, and it seemed to me that what was happening was fated, inevitable, that I should never be rid of him or he of me: he would follow me downstairs and come with me in the car, and I should never shake him off. He was my shadow or I was his, and we were bound to each other through eternity.
    ‘What’s the matter? Are you ill?’ he said, and his eyes were peering into mine.
    I stood up, torn between two desires – one to open the door and get away