Read Online The Murder Room by P. D. James - Free Book Online Page B

shelf. God help the ones who were plain or awkward or shy.”
    Emma said, “God help them today for that matter. The system’s as brutal in its own way, isn’t it? It’s just that at least we can organize it ourselves, and there is an alternative.”
    Clara laughed. “I don’t see what you’ve got to complain of. You’ll hardly be hopping on and off the carousel. You’ll be sitting up there on your gleaming steed repelling all boarders. And why make it sound as if the merry-go-round is always heterosexual? We’re all looking. Some of us get lucky, and those who don’t generally settle for second best. And sometimes second best turns out to be the best after all.”
    â€œI don’t want to settle for second best. I know who I want and what I want, and it isn’t a temporary affair. I know that if I go to bed with him it will cost me too much if he breaks it off. Bed can’t make me more committed than I am now.”
    The London train rumbled into platform one. Clara put down her duffle-bag and they hugged briefly.
    Emma said, “Until Friday, then.”
    Impulsively Clara clasped her arms round her friend again. She said, “If he chucks you on Friday, I think you should consider whether there’s any future for the two of you.”
    â€œIf he chucks me on Friday, perhaps I shall.”
    She stood, watching but not waving, until the train was out of sight.
    6
    From childhood the word London had conjured up for Tallulah Clutton a vision of a fabled city, a world of mystery and excitement. She told herself that the almost physical yearning of her childhood and youth was neither irrational nor obsessive; it had its roots in reality. She was, after all, a Londoner by birth, born in a two-storey terraced house in a narrow street in Stepney; her parents, grandparents and the maternal grandmother after whom she had been named had been born in the East End. The city was her birthright. Her very survival had been fortuitous and in her more imaginative moods she saw it as magical. When the street was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942 only she, four years old, had been lifted from the rubble alive. It seemed to her that she had a memory of that moment, rooted perhaps in her aunt’s account of the rescue. As the years passed she was uncertain whether she remembered her aunt’s words or the event itself; how she was lifted into the light, grey with dust but laughing and spreading out both arms as if to embrace the whole street.
    Exiled in childhood to a corner shop in a suburb of Leeds to be brought up by her mother’s sister and her husband, a part of her spirit had been left in that ruined street. She had been conscientiously and dutifully brought up, and perhaps loved, but as neither her aunt nor uncle was demonstrative or articulate, love was something she neither expected nor understood. She had left school at fifteen, her intelligence recognized by some of the teachers, but there was nothing they could do about it. They knew that the shop awaited her.
    When the young gentle-faced accountant who came regularly to audit the books with her uncle began to appear more often than was necessary and to show his interest in her, it seemed natural to accept his eventual and somewhat tentative offer of marriage. There was, after all, enough room in the flat above the shop and room enough in her bed. She was nineteen. Her aunt and uncle made plain their relief. Terence no longer charged for his services. He helped part-time in the shop and life became easier. Tally enjoyed his regular if unimaginative lovemaking and supposed that she was happy. But he had died of a heart attack nine months after the birth of their daughter and the old life was resumed: the long hours, the constant financial anxiety, the welcome yet tyrannical jangle of the bell on the shop door, the ineffectual struggle to compete with the new supermarkets. Her heart would be torn with a