Read Online A Tree on Fire by Alan Sillitoe - Free Book Online Page B

and thought it should have. Before, men used to give her money buy her drinks and meals, now they expected her to pay for them, because her father was supposed to be rich and lavish. Nobody had done a thing for her this last year. It was as if she’d lost her purpose in life. All the force and wiles seriously expended piecemeal on other men now became one long ploy against her father, though, of course, in this relationship she could never play that final card of sexual attraction that she often had with others.
    It rained in the village, and still needed forty minutes for a bus to the station. With a souped-up Mini she could reach Boston in thirty, while this way it was a day trip. Who would imagine that when your own father had seven thousand pounds in his current account (she’d been through his papers and seen his bank statements) he’d be so mean as to refuse you a secondhand Mini for a measly three hundred? What was he expecting to do with such a fortune? Shoot himself and leave it to a dog’s home? He was harder than nails. When she’d got pregnant last year, hoping he’d set her and Ralph up in a new house, since they would have to get married, he’d thrown a fit and made her have an abortion, and on top of it all met Ralph and punched him in the face for what he was supposed to have done, but actually hadn’t because another man had done it. So Ralph was chary of venturing up that neck of the county now, and she had to traipse all the way down to dismal Boston for a glimpse of him. What could you do with such a father? He was too knowing to do you any good at all. He’d never considered what damage an abortion did to you psychologically, especially at a time when all she’d wanted was to settle down with Ralph in a nice house and really have a kid if that was the price she had to pay for it. I can’t stay in a house like The Gallery all my life, she thought, with such terrible black upchucks going on all the time. Not that I really wanted to get married, for Jack Christ’s sake. Trust Dad to see through that one and get me off the hook. A trick that came today and went tomorrow. But what do I want to do with my life? I’m eighteen already and might be dead before I’m twenty-two. It’s all right reading Huxley and Lawrence (and those dirty books Dad brought back from Paris – he’d cut my throat if he knew I’d got at them as well) and brooding in my room over their slow-winded lies, but I suppose one day I’d better make up my mind and do something. Dad’s always on at me to get a job, and so I’d like to if one had any interest in it, but not like I did for six months in that estate-agent’s office, typing cards all day with particulars of houses on them to stick in the window, with Mr Awful-Fearnshaw trying to get his hands up my thighs.
    Thank God for bus-shelters, anyway. He isn’t good for much else. I suppose the highest I can hope for is to be either a nurse, or a teacher, but I don’t want to be anything yet, except something good and worthwhile when I do, so that I can be of use to somebody in the world. I’ve got my School Cert, so I can get my A levels and go to University, because I know that’s what Dad would really like.
    Miss Bigwell stopped in her new A40: ‘Want a lift?’
    â€˜I’m going to Louth,’ Mandy said, ready to take anything to get out of the rain and sit between four wheels. Always prone to dislike someone before she could possibly grow to like them, Mandy made an exception for Miss Bigwell, for whom she had a vague admiration. In the old days, that is to say two or three years ago, half-frozen in her winter mittens, she sometimes made her way to Miss Bigwell’s cottage at the end of the village with a book of raffle-tickets hoping to sell a few at a shilling each for a painting of her father’s. Because Miss Bigwell usually bought half-a-dozen and at the same