The Wages of Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

softened the injustice of that. In any case, she didn’t want people concluding that she got along in life thanks to her daddy.
    She had wanted to see the dead woman and, as she had watched her father and the others enter the cemetery to begin the inquiry, she had contemplated why that was true. She decided that the human desire to confront the fact of death was natural, given that everyone had to die eventually, and that this probably became especially true during wartime, with death seeming to hover so much nearer than it normally did—though since the Germans had given up their bombing of southern England nearly a year earlier, she had not felt directly threatened by the violence and killing the war had wrought. She told herself that she should count herself lucky that she and her parents were so far from the actual war—the war as it was being fought in Russia and North Africa, and as it had been fought in Poland, France, Belgium, and Yugoslavia. And yet she did not feel lucky, exactly, but troubled that she remained protected when so many others were not.
    After her father disappeared around the side of the church and headed to the vicarage, Vera eyed Wallace discreetly. She found him very good-looking and possessed of a kind of rugged charm, despite the fact that he tended a bit toward the peacock with his well-cut suits and shined black patent leather shoes. But she’d found him to be approachable and funny, too, and seemed genuine of heart. And she detected something else in him, something buried that, she thought, he endeavored to hide from the world—a kind of vulnerability and even a hint of anguish.
    She contemplated lighting a cigarette from the packet she kept in her inner jacket pocket. She didn’t need a cigarette exactly, but she felt that the time somehow was right for one. She had begun to smoke only a week earlier, mostly as an experiment to see if she liked it, a question she had not yet decided upon an answer to. In any case, neither of her parents knew that she smoked, and she was not prepared to tell them that she did until she had decided. She knew that her father hated his own smoking and that he had tried often to quit but always found that his normally resilient will failed him when it came to tobacco. In the end, she quashed the notion of a smoke for the moment, on the chance that her father might suddenly return and catch her with a fag dangling from her lips.
    At that moment, two women and a girl approached the cemetery along the High Street, coming from the direction of the center of the village. Since the constables had dispersed the initial lot of onlookers, several people had come and gone in ones and twos—stopped and peered into the cemetery and gone on their way. Some of the children who’d earlier been climbing on the fence and been shooed away had returned, stolen another look, and run again when the constable shooed them a second time. Now, though, the constable had gone into the village with Rivers to knock on doors and Vera found herself the lone police presence by the front gate of the cemetery, a fact made all the more obvious by her ill-fitting uniform.
    Because she had parked the car perhaps thirty meters to the west of the front gate, the three approaching women did not see her at first. They slowed as they passed the cemetery. One of the women was quite large—fat, really. She was dressed in a kind of countrywoman’s getup of simple blue cotton frock and Wellingtons, her gray hair piled in a bun beneath a massive straw hat. The other woman was younger, perhaps thirty. She wore simple brown cotton slacks and a white blouse. Her hair was cut short, and she appeared to be wearing little or no makeup. She was quite pretty in an unadorned way, Vera thought. The girl was dressed in a simple tan blouse, blue shorts, and black plimsole shoes.
    As they neared the cemetery, the older woman went to the fence and stared at the proceedings within. At