Read Online The Walking Stick by Winston Graham - Free Book Online

knelt awkwardly and
began to pick up the bits and put them on the tray.
    Erica said with false patience: ‘Don’t get into one of your tempers, Deborah. You’re getting excited over absolutely nothing . . . As for responsibility, of course we feel
responsible, and should wherever you lived, because love creates responsibility. We feel just the same for Sarah and Arabella—’
    ‘Not in the same way.’
    ‘Yes, in just the same way. But I agree, the essence of good family life is that every member of the family should feel free within it. It’s what Douglas has always said. It’s
the only psychological basis.’
    I went to the window fuming, not perhaps absolutely clear in my own mind yet why I was so suddenly angry, only aware that Erica had mistaken the cause. It was not the interference that I found
intolerable but this sudden judgment of his work which had taken place, casual, Olympian, absolute. I banged the window open to clear the stale smoke. Douglas was just coming up the steps. His head
shone smooth and pale and civilized in the lamplight. I realized I had very little in common with Leigh Hartley, except that, temporarily, I was on his side.
    In fact I had nothing at all in common with him; but I had never deceived myself as to that. If I was getting emotionally involved, even in the smallest and most immature way, at least it was
not without awareness of the mistake; it was against my conscious, educated judgement. One couldn’t do better than one’s best.
    On the Tuesday we met again and drove to a sort of club in Wapping, where he said artists sometimes met. It was a fairly sleazy place, with a hard-eyed manageress and brassy
barmaids, and a clientele to match. For a minute or two we saw Ted Sandymount again, and he looked thoroughly at his ease here, like a fish in water. Then after he’d gone a big man called
Jack Foil came and sat down at our table. He was about fifty with a fleshy, heavy face and thick gold-rimmed glasses in which the pebbles really looked like pebbles. He wore a signet ring on either
hand and smelled of carnation. He was a promoter and antique dealer.
    He and Leigh talked about the exhibition Leigh had had in Southwark. Jack Foil had helped him to put it on, and he thought they might arrange another in a few months. I thought Leigh was more
tentative than I’d known him before, anxious to agree with whatever Jack Foil said. Foil’s voice was not uneducated but it was deep and thick and pompous. From the size of the cigar he
smoked he must have promoted other more profitable ventures than art exhibitions.
    I was not at all made to feel unwelcome – in fact Mr Foil went out of his way with a sort of elephantine politeness to keep me in the conversation. He seemed to look with a paternal pebble
on Leigh, and I was more or less included. When he got up, grunting and hum-humming, he did in fact say, ‘Bless you, my children,’ as his parting words; but I thought his square back
looked formidable. He would be a good man to be on the right side of.
    It was an alien world. I asked Leigh if he had been born round here.
    ‘Good grief, no, I come from Swindon. My old dad is an inspector on British Railways. My mother was a schoolteacher, an arts mistress at Swindon High School; she didn’t do much
painting after she was married because she had three kids and then died. I went to Swindon Secondary Modern and first got a job as a clerk; but when old Aunt Nellie coughed up this money it seemed
time to cut loose.’
    ‘Since when,’ I said, ‘I suppose you’ve had a lot of paint and a lot of women in your life.’
    He showed his teeth in a sudden grimace. ‘Yes to number one, no to number two. There’s been one woman – one other woman. You don’t latch on, dear, you’re too
conventional, you think all artists are like those lily-necked twits your mother dragged out from under some Chelsea stone last Sunday. You think all an artist does in life is hop in and out of