Read Online The Pyramid by William Golding - Free Book Online Page B

again.”
    “Oh I don’t know, you know. He’s always been up and down you know. I was the same.”
    “A steady, calming routine. He ought to go back to school for the last three weeks or whatever it is.”
    “I won’t. I’m not a schoolboy any more!”
    “Show us your tongue, old son.”
    “For God’s sake!”
    “Don’t speak to your father like that!”
    “I want to go away.”
    “ Now ,Oliver—!”
    “I do. Anywhere.”
    “Well,” said my mother kindly. “You’re going to Oxford, aren’t you? Only a few weeks’ time—”
    “Storm in a teacup,” said my father gruffly. “Needs a good clear-out, that’s what the boy needs.”
    “He was always up and down. Even as a baby.”
    My father stood up again, and plodded towards the dispensary . His mutter was cut off by the door.
    “I’ll just go and get him a—”
    I stood up too, my legs trembling.
    “Where are you going, dear?”
    I slammed the dining room door brutally. I stood, still trembling, looking at our battered piano with the worn music stool before it. I swung my left fist with all my force into the shining walnut panel between the two brass candle-holders and it cracked from top to bottom.
    “ Oliver !”
    I was wrestling with the chains and locks and bolts of the front door.
    “Oliver—come back! I want to speak to you! All because we won’t buy you a—”
    I slammed the front door too, and heard its immediate replication from the church tower. I got our iron gate open, and stood on the cobbles by the chain rails round the grass. I saw Mrs. Babbacombe carrying her inclined smile at me along in front of the railing before Miss Dawlish’s house.
    *
    I only came to myself a little when I was sitting on the coping stone of the Old Bridge. My throat was drier than it had ever been and my left hand looked like a boxing glove.
    I began to wander aimlessly round the town. I saw, from far off, Evie leave the Ewans’s house after surgery and hurry back to Chandler’s Close; and sneered to myself. But then I saw her come back, past the vicarage, and vanish down an alley that led to Chandler’s Lane behind our garden. Still jeering and sneering at myself I went another way round, to see where she had got to, but Chandler’s Lane was empty. I began to search it, without hope; but searching was something to do.
    So strong is habit, even in as small a place as Stilbourne, that the last time I had been to the farther end was when I had been pushed in a chair as a small child. There was a wooden hut at the dead end on a piece of waste land, huddled under the slope up to the escarpment. I examined it curiously for I had never seen anything like it before. It was a Roman Catholic Church, and the notice outside said that Mass would be celebrated there whenever possible. This made me smile, despite my storm, for I had never met the Roman Catholic Church outside a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus. I began to laugh. Evie came out of the hut. She had a duster in one hand and began to flap it vigorously.
    “Hullo, Evie!”
    She glanced round, saw me, and caught her breath.
    “I’m busy.”
    I laughed again, jeeringly.
    “I can wait. Got nothing to do.”
    “Oh go away, Olly! Unless—”
    “Unless what?”
    “Nothing.”
    She went back inside. I stood, examining the notice, the carved figure and sneered. I was fixed in a sneer.
    After about twenty minutes, Evie came out again, brushing the front of her skirt down. I noticed that she had tied her silk square over her hair. The celebrated, the notorious cross hung outside her cotton dress. She paid very little attention to me but locked the door behind her and set off to walk back to Chandler’s Close as if I were no more than a bush.
    “You been having a Mass or something, Evie?”
    She gave a little laugh and walked on.
    “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “Come for a walk, then.”
    “No.”
    “Ha! No motor bike.”
    “I been helping him as