Read Online The Stone That Never Came Down by John Brunner - Free Book Online Page B

when a mere teenager had played the piano in a brothel (disgusting!), and a book whose heroine, so the sender claimed, was “no better than a tart”, and an excerpt from a so-called marriage manual which recommended practices so revolting they had almost put her off her lunch.
    “Tarquin, kindly bring me a glass of sherry,” she said at last. “I believe I shall need it to help me finish my stint today.”
    “Of course, milady, right away.”

    “Oh, it’s going to be a wonderful Christmas!” Harry Bott exclaimed to the children clustered around his knees: three of the four, the youngest still being a toddler and currently lying down in his cot. He took another sip from his mug of Guinness and wiped away the moustache of foam it donated to him. “Tomorrow we’re going to see Uncle Joe in his big house, and there’ll be presents for you all and a lovely tree with lots of lights on it, and–oh, lots of marvellous things! Are you looking forward to it?”
    “Oh, yes!” chorused the children, who were very fond of their father because in spite of sometimes being irritable he was always producing toys and gifts for them which other kids’ parents swore they could not afford.
    “And, come to think of it”–he looked at his oldest son Patrick–“you’re being confirmed next Easter, aren’t you? So maybe you ought to come to midnight Mass with us. See what you’re letting yourself in for. What do you think, Vee?”
    “What?” Busy pegging out baby-clothes on a line across the kitchen ceiling, too damp from the spin-drier not to be aired before re-use.
    “Oh, what a fiddle-face! What’s wrong with you, woman? Let’s have a smile now and then! Christmas is supposed to be a happy time!”
    For a long moment she stared at him; then she let fall the blouse she was holding and rushed weeping from the room.
    “Oh, well, if that’s how she feels …” Harry said with a shrug. “Here, Pat, give me some more Guinness, will you?”

    Valentine Crawford stared dully at the screen of the TV, which was currently showing the Pope addressing a huge crowd of unemployed in Rome; banners bearing words he could understand even without speaking Italian bobbed over the people’s heads, demanding lavore and giustizia! The sound, of course, was not turned up. The room was crowded, and a record-player was blasting away, and people were dancing frantically and sometimes getting entangled in the. paper streamers that decorated, the ceiling, and in the kitchen next door the women were busy readying cold fried fish and sweet-potato pie and rum-and-Coke was flowing by the gallon, and he was thoroughly miserable in the midst of all the frenetic artificial gaiety.
    “Val!” Suddenly materialising before him, Cissy, looking gorgeous in her best party-dress–all the more so because it had been last year’s best dress, too, and since then she had grown in some interesting places. “Don’t just sit dere, man, looking like someone done t’ief yo’ savings! Come an’ dance with me!”
    –And don’t you come the island-talk with me. I know as well as you do you were born right here in England same as I was …
    But that wasn’t fair. Faking a smile, he nodded and rose and later, for a while, he was able to join in the game of make-believe that everybody was sharing, the pretence that tomorrow everything would really be all right and it would be possible to walk down the street without buckra bastards spitting at your feet and buckra busies stopping and searching you on principle.
    Not to mention buckra bitches accusing you of rape.

    “Good news for you, Chief,” Sergeant Epton said as David Sawyer entered the office which they shared.
    “Such as what?” Sawyer countered sourly. It was not quite as cold as it had been last week, but the sky was still shedding intermittent sleet, so that every time the wind did drop back below freezing-point the streets acquired a fresh glaze of ice, which was bound to lead to record