Read Online The Death of William Posters by Alan Sillitoe - Free Book Online Page B

advertising nob, nursing on and off, and God knows what else. Mine’s been tame, stuck in one place, factory, house, pub, same pals, brands of ale, glorying in a pushbike and then a car, dull when you think of some people. With all her books and records she’s a better educated person, and they’re the people who move and live exciting lives. Things happen to you, the more you know, the more you think.
    Rain had stopped brewing itself into the derelict garden. The brimming waterbutt became still, reflecting the sky growing lighter above the hillock, and clouds as if ready to get a move on at last. He walked along the path, smelling the fresh damp air, soddened grass and the distant whiff of rotting tree bark; sedge underfoot was clean and heavy after the night of saturation. Wind jumped the trees, flicked the outer edge of emptying twigs left and right. In Nottingham the streets would be on the move, main roads flooding well, yet there was a sense of movement around this silent garden which he was beginning to understand.
    He stepped back into the kitchen, meaning to get his pack and go. Pat stood by the table, having glanced at his scrawled note. She wore a long dark-blue dressing-gown, her face pale from sleep, hair falling loose. His entrance made her jump: ‘I thought you were already off’ – not meaning to sound so brusque.
    She was more relaxed, lines on her face, a smile less bright, less stern and sure of herself than she seemed last night. Straight out of sleep, a recent battleground of dreams, she wasn’t yet accustomed to daytime and the presence of this man she had given shelter to. He made her feel as if she was in a strange place, a home not her own that she had woken up in out of a dream. Her senses were overdrawn, exposed, isolated from what surrounded her. She wanted him to vanish, then to stay. There was something pleasurable in the power facing her, so that she distrusted it but could not retreat. Some people, he thought, get up after a night’s sleep; other people recover from it, and you can see it on their faces – as it was on hers. He stood close: ‘Not yet. I made myself comfortable for breakfast.’
    His hands were on her elbows, moved up her back. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’
    The answer was a massive rockface, a cauterization of all social feeling, a force that no will or protest could stop. He pulled her to him, face against the side of her neck. ‘This’ – kissing her warm smooth skin, feeling her body slowly pressing. Her head drew back, eyes closed. ‘No, leave me, for God’s sake.’
    Her lips were hard, opening so that her teeth were against his, and neither could speak. She forced herself away, saying anything that would preserve her from him until the right moment; whenever that would be. ‘Not now. Stay though, if you like. I have to dress and go to the stores in the village.’
    He sat in the parlour reading a book to the background of the Clarinet Concerto and a coal fire scorching his ankles, finding it pleasant the way she took the fact of their morning kisses so coolly, being accustomed to this as a time of snap and quarrel, a canyon separating you from the woman you’d just been funny with. But she acted as if they’d done nothing, or as if they’d been courting a year already. Nevertheless Pat found it strange the way he seemed at home so soon, took to a book and Mozart as if he’d been familiar with both all his life. Maybe this was what he’d craved since leaving his wife: a new home, though he’d never admit it. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do with myself while you’re shopping,’ he joked. ‘I can’t wait till you get back.’
    â€˜Read a book,’ she said, busy with a shopping list. ‘Put a record on.’
    And he hardly noticed her return: ‘What are you reading?’
    He looked at the cover: ‘The