Devices and Desires by P. D. James Read Free Book Online

covered with oil, were cleansed, caged and then let free. There had been a stray mongrel whom they had named Herbert, with a large uncoordinated body and look of lugubrious disapproval, who had attached himself to them for a few weeks and whose voracious appetite for dog meat and biscuits had had a ruinous effect on the housekeeping. Fortunately Herbert had eventually trotted off and to Amy’s distress had been seen no more, although his lead still hung on the caravan door, a limp reminder of her bereavement. And now there were the two black-and-white kittens found abandoned on the grass verge of the coast road as they came back in the van from Ipswich. Amy had screamed for him to stop and, scooping up the kittens, had thrown back her head and howled obscenities at the cruelty of human beings. They slept on Amy’s bed, drank indiscriminately from any saucer of milk or tea put down for them, were remarkably docile under Timmy’s boisterous caresses and, happily, seemed content with the cheapest kind of tinned cat food. But he was glad to have them because they too seemed to offer some assurance that Amy would stay.
    He had found her—and he used the word much as he might of finding a particularly beautiful sea-washed stone—one late-June afternoon the previous year. She had been sitting on the shingle staring out to sea, her arms clasped round her knees, Timmy lying asleep on the small rug beside her. He was wearing a blue fleecy sleeping suit embroidered with ducks, from which his round face seemed to have spilled over, still and pink as a porcelain painted doll, the delicate lashes brush-tipped onthe plump cheeks. And she, too, had something of the precision and contrived charm of a doll, with an almost round head poised on a long delicate neck, a snub nose with a splatter of freckles, a small mouth with a full upper lip beautifully curved, and a bristle of cropped hair, originally fair but with bright orange tips which caught the sun and trembled in the breeze so that the whole head seemed for a moment to have a vivid life separated from the rest of her body and, the image changing, he had seen her as a bright exotic flower. He could remember every detail of that first meeting. She had been wearing blue faded jeans, and a white sweatshirt flattened against the pointed nipples and the upturned breasts, the cotton seeming too thin a protection against the freshening onshore breeze. As he approached tentatively, wanting to seem friendly but not to alarm her, she had turned on him a long and curious glance from remarkable, slanted violet-blue eyes.
    Standing over her, he had said: “My name’s Neil Pascoe. I live in that caravan on the edge of the cliff. I’m just going to make some tea. I wondered if you’d like a mug.”
    “I don’t mind, if you’re making it.” She had turned away at once and gazed again out to sea.
    Five minutes later he had slithered down the sandy cliffs, a mug of tea slopping in each hand. He heard himself say: “May I sit down?”
    “Please yourself. The beach is free.”
    So he had lowered himself to sit beside her and together they had stared wordlessly towards the horizon. Looking back on it, he was amazed both at his boldness and at the seeming inevitability and naturalness of that first encounter. It was several minutes before he had found the courage to ask her how she had got to the beach. She had shrugged.
    “By bus to the village and then I walked.”
    “It was a long way carrying the baby.”
    “I’m used to walking a long way carrying the baby.”
    And then under his hesitant questioning the story had come out, told by her without self-pity, almost, it had seemed, without particular interest, as if the events had happened to someone else. It was not, he supposed, an unusual tale. She was living in one of the small private hotels in Cromer on Social Security. She had been in a squat in London but had thought it would be pleasant to have some sea air for the baby for the