Read Online The Skull Beneath the Skin by P. D. James - Free Book Online Page B

buy? And he’s the only son I’m ever likely to give you.”
    Simon’s eyes were turning from one face to the other. He remembered how Sir George had looked, the features stiffening as if the muscles were bracing themselves against pain, against vulgarity. But Simon had seen the hurt, visible, unmistakable, before Sir George had turned silently away.
    She had turned to him.
    “Will your aunt and uncle mind?”
    The misery, the grievances, had spilled out. He had had to prevent himself from clutching at her dress.
    “They won’t care! They’ll be glad! I take up the spare room and I haven’t any money. They’re always telling me how much it costs to feed me. And they don’t like me. They won’t mind, honestly.”
    And then, on impulse, he had done the right thing. It was the only time he had done exactly the right thing where Clarissa was concerned. There had been a pink geranium in apot on the window-ledge; his uncle was a keen gardener and grew cuttings in the lean- to greenhouse at the side of the kitchen. One of the flower heads was small and delicate as a rose. He had broken it off and handed it to her; looking up into her face. She had laughed aloud and taken it from him and slipped it into the belt of her dress. Then she had looked at her husband and had laughed again, a peal of happy triumph.
    “Well that seems to have decided itself. We’d better stay until they come home. I can’t wait to see the owners of this wallpaper. And then we’ll take you to buy some clothes.”
    And so, with such promise, in such an exhilaration of surprised joy, it had all begun. He tried now to recall when the dream had faded, when things had first started to go wrong. But, apart from the first meeting, had they ever really gone right? He sensed that he was worse than a failure, that he was the last of a series of failures, that earlier disappointments had reinforced her present discontent. He was beginning to dread the holidays although he saw little either of Clarissa or of Sir George. Their official life together, such as it was, was lived in the London flat overlooking Hyde Park. But they were seldom there together. Clarissa had a flat in a Regency square in Brighton, her husband a remote flint cottage on the marshes of the east coast. It was there that their real lives were lived, she in the company of her theatrical friends, he in bird-watching and, if rumour were correct, in right-wing conspiracy. Simon had never been invited to either place although he often pictured them in those other secret worlds, Clarissa in a whirl of gaiety, Sir George conferring with his mysterious, hard-faced and nameless confederates. For some unexplainable reason, these imaginings, which occupied a disproportionate part of his holiday hours, were in the guise of old films. Clarissa and her friends, dressed in the waistless shifts of the twenties, hair shingled and flourishing longcigarette holders, flung out their legs in a hectic Charleston while Sir George’s friends arrived at their rendezvous in veteran cars, trench-coated, their wide-brimmed trilbys pulled down over secretive eyes. Excluded from both these worlds, Simon spent the holidays in the Bayswater flat, looked after occasionally by an almost silent Tolly or coping on his own, eating his dinner each night, by arrangement, in a local restaurant. Recently the meals had become poorer, dishes he chose were no longer available although they were served to others, he was shown to the worst table and kept waiting. Some of the waiters were almost openly offensive. He knew that Clarissa was no longer getting value for money, but he dared not complain. Who was he, so expensively bought and maintained, to talk about value for money?
    It was time to go if he wanted any luncheon. He crumpled the letter in his hand and stuffed it into his pocket. Shutting his eyes against the brightness of grass and trees and shimmering water, he found himself praying, petitioning the God in whom he no