Death of a Sunday Writer by Eric Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

that she was about to be propositioned, she found herself, without having suddenly fallen in love or become weakened by desire, wanting to say ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’. She needed to prove to herself that she was free to say either, and the only way to be sure of that was to say ‘yes’. She was also curious. Geoffrey was her only experience so far, and in these circumstances she felt like a virgin. It was possible that it would be completely different with someone else.
    She was vindicated by feeling no regrets whatever. Her husband had always preferred not to see what he was doing, but Ben left the lights on and made himself at home in bed, giving the lie to Circe’s legend by being completely unvulnerable in his nakedness. Lucy found the experience exhilarating.
    He disappeared in the morning before she was awake (although breakfast was included), leaving the rent on the kitchen table, and she did not expect to see him again. (If she had thought he might return, she would probably have said ‘no’ that first night.) He had been a manifestation, a sign, arriving at exactly the right moment when her new freedom needed a test. Saying ‘yes’ was a risk, but saying ‘no’ would have been a defeat. He had done his job, then; there was no need for him to appear again. But when he returned a month later after calling a day ahead, she put up a ‘No Vacancy’ sign on the morning of his arrival. This time he came with champagne and lingonberries and reassured her that on that first night nothing was farther from his mind until after he met her. Again he left in the morning before she was awake, and now she was embarked on an affair.
    A dozen times in the next six months he came back, and in the course of that time shifted from the fabulousto the real. The first story he told her about himself was almost certainly untrue, but instinct told her not to press him. At some point, she was sure, he would fade into the light of common day, but in the meantime she hugged the idea of him to herself as the secret that distinguished her from what the world saw, as evidence that she was not a part-time librarian by nature. She named him, The Trog, her trog, her huge secret that sometimes, when she was with her ladies’ book group, made her slightly giddy, wondering what they would say if she announced in the middle of a discussion of the believability of a relationship some novelist was portraying, that she had a lover, too. “Our relationship is entirely sexual,” she would say. “But we like each other, of course.” Occasionally she woke up out of a dream: she had been discovered, she had failed to pull the blinds quite closed, fire was sweeping through the house making it necesary for her and a naked, bald, brown-headed lover to leap for safety into the neighbours’ arms. It was a nightmare even in these times, for Longborough was too small not to notice what its librarians were up to.
    He was a mining engineer, he told her, separated from his wife, who refused to divorce him. During his early visits he told her about his travels. On his first visit, he had been looking for bauxite formations in Northern Quebec. The survey party had flown back to Montreal after two weeks in the bush, and he had detoured to Longborough on his way back to Toronto to let off a couple of hitch-hikers, two German teen-agers he had picked up outside Kingston.
    The second time was planned. Having found Lucy, he came to her as soon as he landed from an assignment in North Africa where he had been looking for oil. The laterstories followed the same pattern — he had been in Northern Scandinavia, or Australia, or Venezuela, where his company had been prospecting for silver or uranium or gold, and his first destination, once he was free, was Longborough.
    Lucy was naive and intensely romantic, but she was not a fool, and it was obvious to her early that Ben’s accounts of his