The Tomorrow-Tamer Read Online Free PDF Page A

Europe could give you a perm like this one does.”
    â€œI don’t doubt that for one instant,” she said with a short laugh.
    Doree stood up, an emaciated yellow and white bird, a tall gaunt crane, her hair clinging like wet feathers around her squeezed-narrow shoulders. With her long hesitant stride she walked across the room, and held out her green lacquered hands.
    â€œSea pearl,” she said. “Kind of different, anyhow. Africa Star Chemists just got it in. Like it?”
    Shuddering slightly, Mrs. Webley-Pryce conceded that it was very handsome.
    â€œPearl reminds me,” Mr. Archipelago said, returning to cheerfulness, “the Concise Oxford stated another thing for flotsam.”
    Mrs. Webley-Pryce looked at him with open curiosity and begged decorously to be told. Mr. Archipelago applied a dab of spit to a finger and casually tested the heat of the clamps.
    â€œPrecisely, it said ‘oyster-spawn’. Think of that. Oyster-spawn. And that is me, too, eh?”
    Doree laughed until she began to cough, and he frowned at her, for they were both worried by this cough and she could not stop smoking for more than an hour at a time.
    â€œI don’t see–” Mrs. Webley-Pryce probed.
    â€œA little joke,” Mr. Archipelago explained. “Not a very good one, perhaps, but we must do the best with what we have. My father, as I may have told you, was an Armenian sailor.”
    â€œOh yes,” Mrs. Webley-Pryce said, disappointed, holding her breath as he placed the first hot clamp on her tightly wound-up hair, “I believe you did mention it. Odd–Archipelago never seems like an Armenian name to me, somehow.”
    â€œIt isn’t.”
    â€œOh?”
    Mr. Archipelago smiled. He enjoyed talking about himself. He allowed himself a degree of pride in the fact that no one could ever be sure where the truth ended and the tinted unreality began. With the Englishmen to whom he administered haircuts, Mr. Archipelago talked sparingly. They seemed glum and taciturn to him, or else overly robust, with a kind of dogged heartiness that made him at once wary. But with the lady customers it was a different matter. He had a genuine sympathy for them. He did not chide, even to himself, their hunger. If one went empty for long enough, one became hungry. His tales were the manna with which it was his pleasure to nourish his lady customers. Also, he was shrewd. He knew that his conversation was an attraction, no less than the fact that he was the only hairdresser within a hundred miles; it was his defence against that noxious invention, the home-permanent.
    â€œIt would have been difficult for my mother to give me my father’s name,” he said, “as she never knew it. She was–I may have mentioned–an Italian girl. She worked in a wineshop in Genoa. It smelled of Barbera and stale fish and–things you would prefer I did not speak about. I grew up there. That Genoa! Never go there. A port town, a sailors’ town. The most saddening city in the world, I think. Theships are always mourning. You hear those wailing voices even in your sleep. The only place I ever liked in all Genoa was the Staglieno cemetery, up on the hills. I used to go there and sit beside the tombs of the rich, a small fat boy with the white marble angels–so compassionate they looked, and so costly–I believed then that each was the likeness of a lady buried beneath. Then I would look over at the fields of rented graves nearby. The poor rent graves for one, two, five years–I can’t remember exactly. The body must be taken out if the rent cannot be paid. In death, as in life, the rent must always be paid.”
    â€œHow horrible,” Mrs. Webley-Pryce said. “Look here–are you sure this clamp isn’t too hot? I think it’s burning my neck. Oh thanks, that’s better. It’s your mother’s name, then?”
    Doree glared. Mrs. Webley-Pryce was