Read Online Somewhere Beyond Reproach by Tim Jeal - Free Book Online Page A

shops, I trust.’ She gave me a look intended to make us brother and sister in the corrupt business of money-making.
    ‘Naturally,’ I replied flatly.
    ‘It must be awfully hard to know what to do with so much money.’
    How many times have the poor said this to the rich and generally been wrong. I wish Mrs Lisle had been then.
    ‘It demands imagination,’ I said, assuming her playfulness of tone.
    ‘A quality which so few businessmen seem to have.’ She laughed at so sad a paradox.
    ‘What a wretched lot we are. With every penny I earn I’m heaping up fodder for a damned afterlife. “It is easier for a camel to pass through …” and all that.’ I smiled disarmingly at her. Again the pursed lips. I wonder what her emotions had been when she gazed at Simpson’s window. The thought made me feel quite friendly towards her.
    ‘Well I ought to slip through nice and easily,’ she managedto say, while maintaining the appearance of her former mood.
    I could have said that there were other qualifications besides poverty. In spite of my dislike I realised that the odious woman would be a useful ally.
    At that moment the bell rang. Mrs Lisle got up to let Andrew in.
    *
    Andrew leant forward from the deep front passenger seat of the Mercedes. I looked at his face with satisfaction. He was impressed. If he knew how little the thing meant to me. News of my new opulence might well find its way back to Dinah.
    ‘My father’s sold his car,’ Andrew said with undisguised regret.
    Just when he needed it most. Quite a man for gestures. Dinah couldn’t have liked that. If the news of my wealth did get to Dinah I should have to try and see it was properly presented.
    ‘You won’t tell your mother I took you out, will you?’
    ‘Why not?’ he asked slyly.
    ‘Because I’d rather you didn’t.’
    Andrew accepted this adult evasion.
    ‘You mustn’t tell her about this car either.’
    He didn’t bother to ask why. I looked at him carefully. I felt fairly confident that both these requests would be repeated more or less accurately.
    As I let out the clutch and swung the car out smoothly into the road, Andrew asked:
    ‘How fast does it go?’
    ‘Fast enough.’
    ‘Over a hundred?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Can we go over a hundred today?’
    ‘Not in London.’
    I could keep a run on the motorway as a card in reserve.
    ‘Do you often go to the cinema?’ I asked.
    ‘Sometimes with Mummy.’
    ‘Daddy?’
    ‘Nope.’ He looked out of the window as though resenting these intrusions into an evidently deprived childhood. He turned to me and said with unexpected vehemence:
    ‘My father can’t take me to the cinema. He would if he could.’
    I wondered if this was a loyal defence of his father or a chance to self-dramatise. I waited for him to tell me about his father’s awful disability. My admiration for the child was considerable. He didn’t say another word about it. Perhaps though with a child’s longing for ‘normal’ parents, he was ashamed. I didn’t think so though.
    ‘What are we going to see?’ he asked, trying not to sound too excited at the prospect of an afternoon in the flickering darkness of a West End cinema.
    ‘A western.’
    ‘You’ll enjoy it too?’ he asked me seriously.
    ‘I’m far too selfish to take you to something I’d hate.’
    The child settled back satisfied. His earnestness appealed to me.
    *
    Andrew declined an ice-cream. I didn’t try to press him. He seemed happy to sit back doing nothing, waiting till the curtain rose.
    The theme music swelled to a crescendo as the lights went down. The curtain rose mechanically gathering up each silken pleat. An endless corn prairie was revealed. We zoomed in on the ears of corn gently swaying in the hot breeze. Then a farm house and a stream. A completely tranquil scene. Suddenly screams, the dust thrown up by the hooves of Indian horses. The corn was in flames, the timbered roof of the farm crackled merrily as the inhabitants saw their blood