Read Online Red Joan by Jennie Rooney - Free Book Online Page B

understand the charges against you. And when they can’t provide it’—Nick snorts derisively at this and continues typing on his phone—‘then we’ll think about compensation.’
    And there it is again: that brief pause in time between one thing and another, in which Joan can only look at Nick and wish with all her heart that this moment might be suspended indefinitely, held in time for ever.
    But it cannot. She knows it cannot. There is the sound of a car pulling up outside, doors opening and then slamming shut, smart heels clipping up the path. Bang on time.
    Nick starts at the noise. ‘Are they here?’ He strides to the window and pulls back the curtain. ‘Is that them?’
    â€˜Please, Nick. Please go.’ Joan’s voice is perilously loud in her own head. She cannot allow him to stay. She has to protect him from this. ‘You can slip out the back and I won’t even have to tell them you were here. I’ll call you later once it’s all sorted out.’
    Nick turns to her and shakes his head. He steps forward and places his hand on Joan’s shoulder. ‘Don’t be silly, Mum. I’m not going anywhere until that Control Order has been removed and they’ve promised they’re never coming back.’
    â€˜But aren’t you expected in court today?’
    â€˜I’ve just emailed Chambers now. They’ll send one of the juniors to cover for me.’
    â€˜Please, Nick,’ Joan whispers, her voice suddenly unsteady. ‘Please go. I’ll be fine.’
    â€˜No.’
    Â 
    What a bad sign it is to get the
Cambridge Book of Romantic Verse
out of the college library. Joan sneaks it up to her room, hiding it under her physics textbook, so that she can read it in bed after cocoa, the only time when she feels it is acceptable to spend a little time wallowing. She has seen Leo a few times since the incident with the bicycle, but each of these times has been casual and unplanned so she has taken to dressing more carefully for science practicals than is strictly appropriate and keeping her powder compact in the breast pocket of her lab coat, just in case. He tends to drop in when he has finished his work for the day, which could be at any time from lunchtime onwards, and on each occasion Joan has found herself rushing to finish so that she might walk home with him and listen to his most recent thoughts on planned economies while also observing the smoothness of the skin around his eyes and the perfect, almost unnatural, definition of his lips.
    He tells her: ‘It’s not that Stalin wants to
control
the economy. The nuances are all wrong. A better translation is that the economy is being
steered
.’
    And: ‘The stakes are too high in the USSR for anything to go wrong. There’s no room for trial and error. Poor countries can only bet on certainties.’
    And: ‘Variety is a luxury for the rich. To provide an abundance of one thing for one set of people while at the same time failing to provide sufficient food and warmth for others is a gross miscalculation of planning.’
    And: ‘An unplanned economy is a slow, inefficient system. No individual acting alone can reap enough reward to justify the risks of expansion. Yes, it happens. But not often. And not quickly enough to make the leap from feudalism to industrialisation in one generation.’
    His manner on these occasions is intense, deliberate, and it is this quality that convinces Joan that Leo Galich is by far the most intelligent man she has ever met.
    The poems are silly, she knows that. She has never been one for poetry. She considers that there is something unsatisfactory about it, and finds herself wondering why hopeless love must always be rendered in rhyme. In her opinion, there is more romance in science than in poetry—in knowing that bodies will always move towards each other in space, in the relentless certainty of pi and in the