Angel by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online Page A

around with this look of fastidious distaste, how a cat might look if it found itself standing in a puddle of beery pee. My four dining chairs were good, stout wooden ones I hadn’t started to sand down yet, so I poked one forward with my foot for David and perched myself on the edge of the table so I could look down on him. But he didn’t fall for that-he stood so he could look me in the eye.
    “Someone,” he said, “is smoking hashish. I could smell it in the hall.”
    “That’s Pappy’s joss sticks-incense, David, incense! A good Catholic boy like you should recognise the whiff, surely,” I said.
    “I certainly recognise licentiousness and dissipation.” I could feel my mouth go straight. “A den of iniquity, you mean.”
    “If you like that phrase, yes,” he said stiffly.
    I made my tone conversational, tossed the words off like mere nothings. “As a matter of fact, I am living in a
    den of iniquity. Yesterday a Vice Squad constable checked up on me to make sure I’m not on the game, and this morning I said hello to one of the top-flight professionals next door when she leaned stark naked out of a window. This morning I also met Jim and Bob, the Lesbians who live two floors up, and watched them kiss each other with a great deal more passion than you’ve ever shown me! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”
    He changed tack, decided to back down and beseech me to come to my senses. At the end of his dissertation about how nice girls belong at home until marriage, he said, “Harriet, I love you!”
    I blew a raspberry of thunderclap fart proportions, and I swear that as I did, a lightbulb flashed on above my head. Suddenly I saw everything! “You, David,” I said, “are the sort of man who deliberately picks a very young girl so that you can mould her to suit your own needs. But it hasn’t worked, mate.
    Instead of moulding me, you’ve broken your precious bloody mould!”
    Oh, I felt as if I’d been let out of a cage! David had always cowed me with his lectures and sermons, but now I didn’t give a hoot about his pontifications.
    He’d lost his power over me. And how cunning, never giving me an opportunity to judge him as a man by kissing or fondling or-perish the thought!-producing his dingus for my inspection, let alone use. Because he’s so handsome and well-built and such an enviable catch, rd stuck to him, convinced that the end result would be worth waiting for. Now, I realised that he’d always been
    his own end result. I wasn’t ever to know his faults as a man, and the only way he could ensure that was to keep me from sampling other merchandise. I had had it all wrong-it wasn’t David I had to get rid of, it was my old self. And I did get rid of my old self, right in that moment when I blew my raspberry.
    So I let him prose on for a while about how I was going through a phase, and he’d be patient and wait until I came to my senses, yattata, yattata, yattata.
    I’d found a packet of Du Mauriers in the laundry and slipped it into my pocket. When he got to the bit about feeling my oats, I fished the cigs out of my pocket, stuck one in my mouth and lit it with a match from the gas stove.
    His eyes popped out on stalks. “Put that thing out! It’s a disgusting habit!”
    I blew a cloud of smoke in his face.
    “The next thing it will be hashish, and after that you’ll start sniffing glue-“
    “You’re a narrow-minded bigot,” I said.
    “I am a scientist in medical research, and I have an excellent brain. You’ve fallen into bad company, Harriet, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize winner to work that out,” he said.
    I stubbed the cigarette in a saucer-it tasted vile, but I wasn’t going to let him know that-and escorted him outside. Then I marched him to the front door.
    “Goodbye forever, David,” I said.
    Tears came into his eyes, he put his hand on my arm.
    “This is utterly wrong!” he said in a wobbly voice. “So many years! Let’s kiss and make up, please.”
    That