Read Online A Beauty by Connie Gault - Free Book Online

elsewhere and light still flared in a few windows after ten o’clock. And they had street lamps to dull the glitter of the stars overhead and take the edge off the darkness, and here and there a few trees to look blacker than the night.
    Down a side street, in one of those small bungalows that look as if they were built for a spinster (picket-fenced, huddled to the ground, window in the door to peer through), Albert Earle, the district’s one paid fireman, was visiting Peg Golden in her bed. Her bed had brass railings at head and foot and the mattress rested on metal springs, although it wasn’t resting right now; it was shifting and squeaking and Peg was moaning so loud Albert was afraid her neighbours, whose house was only a few feet away, would come over and complain that they couldn’t sleep. They had made a fuss once before when Albert and Peg had shared a bottleof rye whisky and got to singing. The neighbours were an old couple, seventy at least, and it seemed they required a full eight hours in spite of having no jobs to go to or family dependent on them. Such as Albert had, he reminded himself. He went to work on Peg, two fingers deep inside her, his arm like a piston thrusting while she rose to meet him and he stared into the wall, thinking only that he really needed to get home and get his own rest.
    “Albert,” she said, pulling back, although not completely away. She had a deep voice for a tiny woman, and could make him jump when she said his name.
    “Sorry.”
    “I’m not a machine.”
    “Sorry.”
    “And stop apologizing, for heaven’s sake.”
    “Okay, okay.”
    “How do you think it makes me feel?”
    He ducked his head down between her legs and gave her his full attention, knowing fairly well how that made her feel. A few minutes later, she said goodbye to him cheerily, standing at the open door in a flowered silk dressing gown that dragged on the floor because she hadn’t taken the time to hem it. She watched him slink along the sidewalk through the shadows of the sleeping houses, as if anyone cared if they did see him. He was a substantial man, not very good at slinking. He had nice, square hands; she’d liked that first about him. His hands were always warm. And he was a calm person, that was something she needed – and kind.
    Charlesville was big enough only half the population knew everything about everybody else, and Peg was a newcomer; she’d lived there only four years. So even though she owned and managed the one ladies’ wear store in the district, she knew only about a quarter of all there was to know about the townsfolk.As soon as the rumours had started about Albert dropping by her house late in the evening, there had been an increase in window-shopping, and a few of her so-called customers – in case she didn’t have enough information to judge him – went further than gawking and filled her in. They let her know that as a boy he’d been so good-natured and so kind-hearted and so bad at all team sports, his nickname in the schoolyard had been Girlie. And of course they had to tell her that he had a wife, although she was, each one of them said, as good as dead. Peg didn’t ask why that was, but they told her. His wife was incarcerated. Betty Earle; it would be years before she’d be home, if she survived prison. She’d killed their baby daughter, born with so many deformities you’d think she couldn’t have lived. Smothered her with a pillow. Just a bundle of pain, that’s all she was, the women said. Someone had come up with that description, and it had evidently impressed them all. They’d each intoned it as if the phrase had popped into their heads that moment. Then they looked down at their dusty shoes and their dusty wrinkled ankles (since they all wore dreadful beige cotton stockings they got cheap at the Red and White store), and shook their heads. And that was how easy it was for them to rid themselves of the child’s little life and Betty Earle’s dilemma,