The Beast by Hugh Fleetwood Read Free Book Online

hope for?—soul-searching and a change of heart.
    However, as he went into the phone booth, and took a dime from the pocket of his neat sober suit, he finally putthe forces of darkness in general, and Colleen Lane in particular, out of his mind, and turned his thoughts to more positive things. In other words, he dialled the number of the only close friend he had in the world; the friend whom he normally saw once a week, on Sundays, but whom he saw more frequently in those periods of the year when he was, as it were, between engagements. His friend’s name was Lucy Minute, pronounced Minit, and she had wanted to marry him for as long as she had known him; which was eighteen years. One day perhaps, he thought, when—and if—he felt that he had done his duty forever, he might settle down and want to marry her himself. For he was very fond of her. Only—how could he settle down, and how could he, as long as he lived, ever dare say that his duty was done? For surely, the second he made such a claim, his life itself would be done.
    ‘Lucy? Charles.’
    It was late, of course, and he apologized, in his quiet gentle voice. Still, if she wasn’t doing anything, or didn’t have any guests, or wasn’t planning on having an early night, or—might he come up for a drink?
    Sure he could; he must. He knew that he could always come, whenever he wanted; and she wasn’t doing a thing. Only some boring old accounts for one of the relief organizations she helped out with, and she could do those any time. Oh, she was happy that he’d called …
    As if she hadn’t seen him for months.
    In spite of this tone, however, there was nothing pathetic about Lucy, even if she liked to affect pathos at times; liked to play, a little too consciously, the part of the lonely single woman who worked as a secretary in the day, whose free time was devoted to the less visible and obviously noble aspects of ‘good works,’ who loved the theatre butnever went unless Charles went with her, and who had been brought up by a strict father to believe that a woman’s role in life was not only that of—exclusively—wife and mother; but if possible a wife and mother as self-denying and totally unselfish as her own had been, who had died soon after giving birth to her only daughter. But there was something a little too earnest about her role-playing ; something that tipped the scales a little too far on the side of mortal seriousness, so that the final result, the final impression she made, was of being if not comical, at least ironical. She was too self-deprecating; too altogether aware of how very far she was from fulfilling anyone’s fantasies—even the fantasies of the compassionate, who would have liked to see her as the lonely single woman who worked as a secretary in the day and whose free time was devoted to the less visible and obviously noble aspects of good works …
    She lived in a small, impeccably clean apartment in the East 70’s, and when she opened the door to Charles at nine-fifteen, was dressed and made up as if she expected him to take her out to some reasonably fancy restaurant. But Charles had never seen her when she wasn’t dressed and made up like this, so he simply kissed her on the cheek, smiled, said quietly ‘How are you?’, and made no comment on her appearance. (Not only because he was used to seeing her look smart, but also because the results of her dressing up were so somehow wrong that he wouldn’t have known what comment to make if he had wanted to. Lucy was slim, with a good body, and a face that could once have been beautiful—though it never had been. The trouble was she worked for some high-powered businesswoman whom she adored; and always adopted—or tried to—this woman’s style of dressing and wearing herhair. Only what suited the one—though she wasn’t unlike Lucy physically—emphatically did not suit the other; and the hair pulled severely back into a knot at the back of her neck, the extremely