Read Online Dark Places by Kate Grenville - Free Book Online Page B

I could hear her: ‘Yes yes oh yes! Yes yes oh yes!’ and a groan from Ogilvie. In this regard at least, Ogilvie’s boasts were not hollow.
    I sat with my arm expansively along the back of the sofa, considering afresh the question of women. Morrison had evidently been wrong about many things, but he had been right about one: women could never get enough of it. How could they, lacking the wherewithal for that blossoming epiphany? A man could only pity.
    Now that I had seen the true, strumpet-face of womanhood, I felt I could begin to understand those other, flutey-voiced unadorned ones who simpered above doilies in Daddy’s drawing-room. I saw now with a wonderful clarity that there was no real difference in the ultimate transaction. Only the currency of exchange was different. In the drawing-rooms, the currency was of sighing, and hankering, and it was expected that the parties would do a certain amount of speechifying about love. In the drawing-room trade, the ultimate invoice was the engraved card: Major Such-and-Such (F.R.G. ret’d) and Mrs Such-and-Such request the pleasure of the company of so-and-so on the occasion of the wedding of their daughter. Upstairs at Juliana’s there was no such sleight-of-hand: the currency was pound notes pure and simple.

Seven
    FATHER DIED in the winter, and by summer he was nothing but a pinch of dust. Nature, the great rationalist, had ensured that the race was in a position to carry on now that Father had produced a son and heir, and Father himself was excess to requirements. All my life I had languished in his shadow, but it was my turn now: Albion Gidley Singer, that seed cold in the ground for so long, had taken a hold of life at last.
    I took over Father’s chair at the Club, and agreed with old Chapman as he measured me for my mourning that it was a terrible shame, a man in his prime, and what a burden to fall upon my young shoulders. I agreed, and made my face the right lugubrious length for a son in mourning; but my mind was not on dead fathers, but on the fall of a trouser-leg and the roll of a lapel.
    Father had considered Chapman’s way with the roll of a collar quite the last word in the elegant, but I knew better: things had moved on. ‘Longer in the leg, Mr Chapman, they are wearing them longer now, and the lapel somewhat narrower, please, than the last one you did for me.’ But Chapman would not be told: he chuckled in a patronising way and said, ‘Oh dearie me no, Master Singer, Mister Singer I should say. Your father would turn in his grave if he knew I had given you a lapel like a bit of string.’
    I grew hot with impatience at that little chuckle, and the way he was so pleased with himself: there he was, creeping and creaking around his shop, taking forever to thread a needle, and positively proud of being an old duffer. ‘I am not as young as once I was, sir,’ this foolish bent man said, ‘and the arthuritis is shocking some days.’
    I was a gentleman, so I could not be entirely blunt, but I hinted, ‘Young Dingle here seems to know his business, for when you hand over to him.’ Chapman creaked and threatened to snap, straightening so he could look me in the face. ‘Oh dearie me no sir, I have my old age to think of, and my own lads to see settled before I hand over to anyone.’ I saw then that Chapman was choosing to ignore what the laws of life were telling him, and was clinging on like a shrivelled leaf to a branch. Watching myself in his mirror, a fine figure of a man splendid in mourning, I knew I could have no truck with the shrivelled leaves of this world.
    On my first day of being Mr Singer Senior, I chose not to use the respectable front door of the Business, as I always had with Father, and the stuffy hall with the tiled floor. I came in as an owner should, invisibly, through the back gate, seeing for myself the life that lay behind the aspidistras and polished brass. Coming in