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

summer. Only it wasn’t working out. The woman at the hotel didn’t really want kids and with summer holidays approaching could get a better rate for her rooms. She didn’t think she could be turned out but she wasn’t going to stay, not with that bitch.
    He asked: “Couldn’t the baby’s father help?”
    “He hasn’t got a father. He did have a father—I mean, he isn’t Jesus Christ. But he hasn’t got one now.”
    “Do you mean that he’s dead or that he’s gone away?”
    “Could be either, couldn’t it? Look, if I knew who he was I might know where he was, OK?”
    Then there had been another silence, during which she took periodical gulps of her tea and the sleeping baby stirred and gave small pig-like grunts. After a few minutes he had spoken again.
    “Look, if you can’t find anywhere else in Cromer you can share the caravan for a time.” He had added hastily: “I mean, there is a second bedroom. It’s very small, only just room for the bunk, but it would do for a time. I know it’s isolated here, but it’s close to the beach, which would be nice for the baby.”
    She had turned on him again that remarkable glance, in which for the first time he had detected to his discomfiture a brief flash of intelligence and of calculation.
    “All right,” she said. “If I can’t find anywhere else I’ll come back tomorrow.”
    And he had lain awake late that night, half-hoping, half-dreading that she would return. And she had returned the following afternoon, carrying Timmy on her hip and the rest of her possessions in a backpack. She had taken over the caravan and his life. He didn’t know whether what he felt for her was love, affection or pity, or a mixture of all three. He only knew that in his anxious and overconcerned life his second-greatest fear was that she might leave.
    He had lived in the caravan now for just over two years, supported by a research grant from his northern university, to study the effect of the Industrial Revolution on the rural industries of East Anglia. His dissertation was nearly finished but for the last six months he had almost stopped work on it and had devoted himself entirely to his passion, a crusade against nuclear power. From the caravan on the very edge of the sea he could see Larksoken Power Station stark against the skyline, as uncompromising as his own will to oppose it, a symbol and a threat. It was from the caravan that he ran People Against Nuclear Power, with its acronym PANUP, the small organization of which he was both founder and president. The caravan had been a stroke of luck. The owner of Cliff Cottage was a Canadian who, returning to his roots and seduced by nostalgia, had bought it on impulse as a possible holiday home. About fifty years earlier there had been a murder at Cliff Cottage. It had been a fairly commonplace murder, a henpecked husband at the end of his tether who had taken a hatchet to his virago of a wife. But if it had been neither particularly interesting nor mysterious, it had certainly been bloody. After the cottage had been bought, the Canadian’s wife had heard graphic accounts of spilt brains and blood-spattered walls and had declared that she had no intention of living there in summer or at any other time. Its very isolation, onceattractive, now appeared both sinister and repellent. And to compound the problem, the local planning authority had shown itself unsympathetic to the owner’s overambitious plans for rebuilding. Disillusioned with the cottage and its problems, he had boarded up the windows and returned to Toronto, meaning eventually to come back and make a final decision about his ill-advised purchase. The previous owner had parked a large old-fashioned caravan at the back, and the Canadian had made no difficulty about renting this to Neil for two pounds a week, seeing it as a useful way of having someone to keep an eye on the property. And it was the caravan, at once his home and his office, from which Neil conducted