Ripped by Frederic Lindsay Read Free Book Online Page A

'we'd just got married, and he brought me here from London. You were almost the first person I saw on the local television. You were talking about your childhood in Moirhill, and how poor you had been . '
    'We were all poor then.'
    'That's right,' she said, delighted. 'You said that then. I remember.' Her voice took on the faintest colouring of the broad drawling accent of Moirhill, which he knew he had never lost. 'We were all poor then, but we were happy. There was a great sense of sharing. I think that's what the young people have lost.'
    'I say more than my prayers,' he said, not hiding his pleasure. 'But if you ask me my philosophy, I'll tell you - make time for people. I'll pass the time with a brickie's labourer, if I feel like it. I can tell what foot a man kicks with – what religion he is, understand? –Just by looking at him . It's a kind of instinct. Crack a joke . I can tell a Paddy before he opens his mouth. And I talk to them the way I talk to you. They respect me for it. I can get on with the highest and the lowest – that's good business – and it's not bad Christianity either.'
    'It's odd,' she said. 'You remind me of a man I knew – oh, years ago.'
    He stood up, very easily for a man of his age considering that the chair was low and well cushioned; but then he had had the foresight to manoeuvre himself to the edge first. Things were going well. She would not be the first wife of an ambitious man who, while the driver Denny read his paper somewhere, had obliged him. Only, with changing places to sit beside her on the couch, he found himself looking at the chair he had been in and the little bookcase beside it and the window behind. Side by side on the three cushions, facing the same view, they might have been a couple sitting together on one of those long seats just by the entrance when you got on to one of the old tramcars. The idea distracted him, but he could not share it; even if she had belonged to the city, she was too young ever to have seen the high trams sway and rattle through its streets. With an effort, he reminded himself of what she had said.
    'I hope you liked him.'
    When she laughed, the little muscles moved in her throat. Something sharper, less willed, less under his control , added itself to his usual anticipation. His mouth dried .
    'He was a businessman too. I thought he was rich, but living in a village what did I know? Once we were in London, the money soon went. “ Rich one day, poor the next,” my sister told me later he'd left debts everywhere round the village. He'd have been bankrupt if he hadn't run off with me. Or they'd have put him in jail.'
    'Your sister?' He was surprised. For some reason, he had taken it for granted that she was someone alone, without ties from the past.
    'That was years later,' she said casually. 'I didn't see her for years after I had run off.' 'What age were you then?'
    'Sixteen. I was sweet sixteen.' Had she been drinking? She seemed different from the woman he had met on Saturday night at his party. He had known wives who drank to pass the endless boredom of afternoons.
    'I can't picture your sister,' he said. 'Is she like you?' He laughed out of his dry mouth. 'If she was here, I could sit between you on this couch. It's big enough. It's the right size.'
    'No, that wouldn't be possible. My sister is dead.' Her mouth turned down as if she would weep. 'I'm sorry.' And she laughed. 'I don't have a sister. A friend told me that – about running off with a businessman . I never had a sister.'
    He stared at her in bewilderment. He became angry. Behind all this assurance, his body knew that it was old. He did not understand this change in her. She glittered with suppressed excitement. It made him angry that she should remind him he was old.
    'You didn't stay long on Saturday. Too many people for you? I like a lot of people round me on a Saturday night. You left early. Were you fighting with Malcolm?'
    'I didn't really feel like going at all.' She