Death in Summer by William Trevor Read Free Book Online

myself. I got to go wandering.’
    ‘Down the shops, Pettie? I need a battery myself.’
    ‘I got to be on my own today.’
    She stands up, telling him he should rest because of his night work. He needs to sleep, she reminds him, everyone needs sleep. Albert works in Underground stations, erasing graffiti when the trains aren’t running.
    ‘Yeah, sure,’ he says, because it’s what she wants. The girls playing the fruit machines move from one to the other, not saying anything, pressing in coins and hoping for more to come out, which sometimes happens.
    ‘Yeah, sure,’ Albert says again.
    She knows he’s worried, about the job, about the rent, maybe even because she has feelings for that man. Not being the full ticket, he worries easily: about cyclists in the traffic, window-cleaners on a building, a policeman’s horse one time because it was foaming at the teeth. He worried when they found the bugle, he worried when Birdie Sparrow found a coin on the street outside the Morning Star, making her give it in because it could be valuable and she’d be accused. He said not to take them when the uncles came with their presents on a Sunday, but everyone did. He was the oldest, the tallest although he wasn’t tall. The first time he helped Marti Spinks to run off in the night they caught her when it was light, but she never said it was he who had shown her how. The next time she got away, with Merle and Bev. When Pettie’s own turn came he said he was coming too because she had no one to go with. ‘Best not on your own,’ he said, and there wasn’t a sound when he reached in the dark for the keys on the kitchen hook, nor when he turned them in the locks and eased the back door open. He didn’t flash his torch until they’d passed through the play yard and were half-way down the alley, the longway round to Spaxton Street but better for not being seen, he said. ‘Crazy’s a bunch of balloons,’ Joe Minching used to say, but nobody else said Albert was crazy, only that he wasn’t the same as the usual run of people.
    ‘You don’t go messing with the Dowlers, Albert. You leave them be.’
    ‘I only wanted to put it to them.’
    ‘You leave them be. Cheers, Albert.’
    ‘Take care now, out there on your own.’
    ‘Yeah, sure.’
    As she always does, Pettie buys the cheapest ticket at the Tube station in order to get past the barrier. Two youths on the train keep glancing in her direction. They’re the kind who don’t pull their legs back when you stand up, obliging you to walk around them: Pettie has experienced that on this line before. Ogling her, one of them holds his hands out, palms facing each other, indicating a length, as a man boasting of a caught fish might. But Pettie knows this has nothing to do with fish. The other youth sniggers.
    She looks away. The uncle with the birthmark took off her glasses the first time they were on their own. ‘Let’s have a look at you,’ he said and put the glasses on the window-sill. ‘Oh, who’s a beauty now?’ he said, and when he whispered that he liked her best a warmth spread through her that came back, again and again, whenever he said it.
    The youths get off at Bethnal Green. One of them says something but she doesn’t hear it, not wanting to. ‘Prim little lady,’ the uncle who liked her said. ‘Who’s my prim little princess?’ He told her what a cheroot was because he had a packet in his pocket. She was prim and she still is; being prim is what she wants. ‘
Never so much as a morsel takenfrom the knife’
Miss Rapp read out from the
Politely Yours
column. ‘
Return the fork to the plate between mouthfuls.’
She practised that, and Miss Rapp was pleased.
    Aldgate goes by, and Bank; Pettie closes her eyes. Wild summer flowers are in bloom, and it could be the picture on the floor but it isn’t because she’s in the picture herself. She’s in the lane with a buggy, far beyond the few houses by the shop and the petrol pump, far beyond the church