The Stone That Never Came Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

world wars with all their accoutrements from poison gas to atom-bombs. Taking their cue from him, his class had burst out laughing, and the laughter spread, and the visitor was prevented from completing his talk.
    Whereupon, the next day, the headlines, bold and black: teacher “corrupting children”, parents claim. And, after the lapse of a week: “atheist teacher” sacked after row.
    There had been a petition raised by his pupils for his reinstatement, and even now, a year later, some of them occasionally called on him. But if they were found out their parents created hell, so the visits were growing fewer.
    –And what do those smug clerks at the Employment Exchange have to say to me through their glass screens? Armour-glass, naturally, because now and then somebody loses his temper at the way they sneer from the security of their Civil Service posts. Why, that I’d make twice as much at a factory bench in Germany! But I don’t want that. I want the job I’m trained for, the one I’m good at. Besides, the Germans have started to send their Gastarbeiter home to Yugoslavia and Greece and Spain, and some of them are being forced to go.
    It had been in the news a few days ago, not prominent.
    –Come to think of it, this hospital reminds me of the Employment Exchange. All these people sitting in rows with hopeless looks on their faces … But that’s wrong. It’s a place of healing. It should be a happy place. It should be as splendid as a great cathedral, built of the most magnificent materials and lavish with the master-work of fine artists. Instead, look at it. Barely ten years old, and falling apart already. Thrown up as cheaply as possible, and you can tell just by looking at the staff they don’t enjoy working here. Christ, I’m glad I’m only visiting!
    He wondered in passing whether anybody had explained to these people waiting that the delay was due to the police being called to the doctor’s vandalised office. Probably not.
    –I hope I’m not heading for another bout of suicidal depression like yesterday’s. If I hadn’t run across that guy Morris …
    He had been to a private school a few miles north of London to be interviewed for a job he had seen advertised, and had known the moment he got there that he was having his time wasted, perhaps deliberately, for the place was plastered with Moral Pollution stickers. On the way home he had felt he must have a drink, despite the prohibitive price of liquor, so he had wandered at random into a pub, and …
    –Fantastic fellow, that Morris. Must have an amazing memory for faces. I mean, to have recognised me from those lousy pictures that appeared in the papers. But it was so reassuring when he asked how I was getting on. The mere fact that someone I’d never met should care about me …!
    The conversation had taken off like a rocket, and lasted long past the point at which he should have gone home to meet Ruth, with whom he had a date.
    –But it was such fun talking to him!
    For more than three hours they had chatted away–and gone on drinking, mostly at Morris’s expense because as usual Malcolm was broke. They had reviewed the state of the world, the government’s incompetence, the hypocrisy of the Moral Polluters, all the subjects Malcolm felt most strongly about … plus one other, new to him, which Morris had reverted to several times.
    –Can it really be on the cards that we’ll see a military coup in Italy, like the Greek one? And that a junta of generals would try to pull them out of the Common Market?
    Morris had predicted that, and he’d talked about a certain Marshal Dalessandro whom Malcolm had never heard of, and one way and another he had painted a dreadfully gloomy picture of the immediate future. He had said in so many words, “Like the First and the Second, the Third World War is going to start right here in Europe.”
    –And I said, “Do you really think there’s no hope for us at all?” And he looked at me for a bit, with