The Walking Stick by Winston Graham Read Free Book Online Page A

want to get
involved with you ! Are you a complete fool? Do I have to spell it out all over again? Now leave me alone! For God’s sake leave me alone!’
    Mrs Stevenson picked up the shepherdess, and her hand shook as if she were using it as a pepper pot. ‘My – er – my dear young lady . . .’ I took the scent bottle gently
from her and put it in safety on the counter. ‘My, oh my, oh my! . . . Are you sure? You look very young . . .’
    ‘Yes, I’m sure. But I can get it confirmed if you care to wait.’
    ‘I can hardly believe it. My dear mother would, I’m certain, be quite surprised. You know’ – her Adam’s apple moved up and down – ‘you know, I’d
thought about – about £20. I’m a little short of – of money, you know. I thought about £20. I thought to myself . . .’ She went on talking, like the long-faded
Caruso in a recitative. There was a smell of Wincarnis on her breath. The gramophone would soon need rewinding.
    ‘Let me give you a receipt,’ I said. ‘It’ll be the twentieth in the morning, Mrs Stevenson. Your address is? . . . Yes, of course you can come to the auction if you want
to. No, just come to the front door in Grafton Street at about 9:40 and explain to the Commissionaire.’
    When I got back to the department Maurice Mills and three or four others gathered round in admiration of the prizes. So often, all too often, it was the other way round – people came in
with precious possessions handed down from grandparents, highly prized, convinced of their certain value; and then you had the job of disillusioning them – the heirloom was paste or imitation
or otherwise worthless. Worthless. Worthless. Like my friendship with Leigh Hartley. Utterly worthless and foredoomed. But these two little figures were exquisite, much sought after, the work of
rare, delicate craftsmen. One smoothed them, cosseted them, would hardly be able to bear to see them sold.
    A fatal mistake. One mustn’t get attached, not even to Chelsea figures.
    ‘Have you been out with Leigh Hartley again?’ Erica asked. ‘Why don’t you invite him in? I suggested it before, you know. If he’s an artist Douglas and I would find
him interesting.’
    ‘Maybe, sometime.’
    ‘When am I going to see you again?’ he’d asked. I said: ‘Don’t you ever take no for an answer?’
    ‘Why don’t you ask him for drinks next Sunday?’ Erica said, fingering the rather handsome pearls she always wore. One would have hardly thought her dressed without them.
‘Arabella will be here and there are sure to be a few other young people around.’
    The Chelsea figures were beautiful, but you couldn’t spend all day admiring them. Back to the old grind of cataloguing. (But it wasn’t really a grind because every piece was
different and many beautiful.)
    Weak – how weak could one get? That was the precise moment to finish it, inside his car just parked near the brass plate which read J. Douglas Dainton, MRCS, LRCP, just as I reached for my
stick to get out. But I hadn’t finished it. Perhaps I hadn’t wanted to at that precise moment. Of course later I’d certainly wanted to, sitting in my bedroom thinking it
all over, telling myself I was a feeble fool, but by then it was too late. I’d said: ‘Oh, perhaps next week.’ ‘What day?’ ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘Make
it Monday.’ ‘I’m going out Monday.’ ‘Tuesday then.’ ‘All right, Tuesday.’
    ‘I don’t think he’s quite your type,’ I said to Erica.
    ‘My dear Deborah, when I think of some of the very advanced young men Arabella has brought home . . . Douglas and I, as you know, pride ourselves on being able to talk to the young in
their own language. It’s an attitude of mind.’
    Everything, it seemed to me, was an attitude of mind. Sex included. My two sisters differed about this. Sarah had had at least six young men passionately attached to her in the last few years,
but at twenty-seven had given herself to no one. ‘When