Read Online The White Body of Evening by A L McCann - Free Book Online

but she didn’t let herself linger over the question of his sincerity. She thought about Albert, about how powerless she was in his hands, how vile and humiliated she felt. How dead, dead to her own pleasure. She was about to leave, but compelled by a sense of abandon welling within herself she remained in front of him, waiting for the certainty of her own desire to seize her. Winton appeared so vulnerable, as if his mask had fallen and she had seen something else underneath it. She had never seen this, this other thing, existing in a man, save for the moment at which Albert had stabbed himself.
    “To live with our eyes open,” he mumbled. “That’s all.”
    She touched his hand. She didn’t know what she was doing. But at that moment it didn’t matter. She had glimpsed something. It might have been freedom. It might simply have been the space to breathe. Whatever it was, she embraced it.
    She touched his mouth. Her lips parted slightly as she held herself for him, his hand on the back of her neck, running up through her hair.
    The next day, when Robert offered her money for groceries, she said casually that she still had some of the inheritance her aunt had left her, and that, for the moment, they could manage well enough.
    “Very well then,” he said, relieved for her sake, and for his.
    She turned away from him, unable to conceal her lack of composure as she thought about the doctor. Wasn’t she already prostituting herself? Albert had saved her from the disgrace of being a single mother left to raise a bastard son. He had also saved her from the shame of having to confront her parents with this guilt. And in return she repaid him with constant, abject submission. The shadow world of love had dissipated. She could clearly see what she had become, and it had happened well before Winton had sent her his ten-pound banknote.
    In the early hours of 1901 the calm of the house gave Anna the pause in which to trace out the tangled threads of this existence. As she waited for her brother-in-law and her husband to return home, she watched Ondine sleeping, praying that her daughter might see with her eyes open right from the outset.
    When Albert first began working out of Spencer Street Station he took umbrage at not being able to spend such long hours in the public library where he’d grown fond of the dim, yellowish glow of the old gas-jet lamps, the polished wood, and the musty smell of accumulated dust. As he slowly recovered his strength he had traded the banality of the accounts department, where books and figures had a deadening sameness, for the seductiveness of novels, poetry, essays and more obscure treasures fished out of the deep recesses of history. The secret knowledge of the library, which he imagined forming some vast, intricate system linking all the disparate faculties and inclinations of man, held him entranced as each of his obsessions ran its course, only to see another emerge in its place. The library, he came to believe, was the place in which the authentic being of man was possible, because in it all the tendrils of human possibility coiled around the essential but impossible core of authentic understanding, absolute knowledge and truth. These were, of course, literally out of man’s reach, but were nonetheless perceptible in the idea of the library – a vast, material metaphor for truth as resonant with meaning as any cathedral in the city. Behind the hundreds of thousands of words was a beginning, a world of soot and steam and shadow that stirred convulsively through the earthly endeavours of man. The word obscured this pure, sensual, brutal world, but it was also the key to it. With the faith of a religious maniac seeking insight, Albert buried himself in the library, reading books about the fall of ancient civilisations, the cults of tribal societies, the building of great cities, the secrets of nature, the powers of magic, the miracles of technology, the death of God, the birth of man and the