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

I marry,’ she had said to me once, ‘I shall marry for love and I don’t believe in being second-hand goods.’
Arabella at twenty I knew was already sleeping with someone.
    And what about their middle sister? Chance is a fine thing. Who wants to sleep with a girl with a shrivelled leg? It turns you up really to think of it. Just imagine in bed, one nice leg and one
thin, cold one. Then what the hell did Leigh Hartley want?
    Lot 242. Brown glazed stoneware jar. Kwang Yao. Lot 243. Meissen May flower vase, blue, mounted in ormolu. Pâte dure.
    Arabella had said: ‘I don’t in the least feel I shall be second-hand goods. That doesn’t enter into it. Sex is only like anything else. If you kiss someone you don’t have
a second-hand mouth. Aren’t we born to live?’
    For what purpose had Leigh Hartley been born? There were plenty of pretty girls around, glad of a robust young man and not particular about an accent, without him picking on me. Leave me alone
in the quiet, evenly balanced, interesting life I’d found for myself.
    ‘I wish these patent medicine firms would leave one alone,’ said Erica, screwing up a handful of pamphlets. ‘I feel like writing to our MP about it. Do they really think
we’re so ignorant as to suppose that the more complicated the synthesis the more likely the cure?’
    Lot 251. Persian Ewer, white ground; with pattern in Iranian copper lustre, eighteenth century.
    Lot 252. Wedgwood . . .
    What was the synthesis in my case, and what the cure?
    John Hallows, who was the youngest director and dealt with jewellery, came in just then with a ruby ring he wanted Maurice Mills’s opinion of, and I slid off my stool to look at it too. It
had come in by registered post today from Norwich. The registered cover had been for £20 and the likely value of the ring about £600. People often did that sort of thing.
    I stood talking to them, conscious that my leg was aching a bit. Odd, for it seldom did. ‘Stick your leg out,’ the physiotherapist had said. ‘Straighten it! Push . Just a
couple of inches toward the sling.’ One fairly sweated in those early days, trying, trying. Odd that one had absolutely no control over that piece of bone and muscle that used to be a part of
one’s personal body. It just hung there like the discarded tail of a lizard. But the trouble was it wasn’t discarded. You couldn’t leave it behind and you couldn’t do
without it. Of course I was very lucky compared to many I saw.
    ‘Sitting in at the sale tomorrow, Deborah?’ John Hallows said. ‘We’ve got some pretty luscious pieces coming up, apart from the Leipzig emeralds.’
    John Hallows was the type of man I would have liked for a brother: good-looking, kind, sharp as a needle in his job, but very alert to other people’s feelings. We liked and respected each
other.
    ‘I don’t care for morals,’ Arabella had said on her eighteenth birthday. ‘Morals are what other people think you ought to do. I only care what I think myself. I’m
not going to be anybody’s easy lay, but if I want to go to bed with a man I shall do so.’
    ‘Darling, you may think you’re your own best judge,’ Sarah said, ‘but there’s only so much to life, only so much experience, whether it’s sex or any other
sort. And if you fritter you fritter. And as you fritter you cheapen. What do you say, Deb?’
    What I had said I couldn’t remember because anyway what did it matter to me? But I was very lucky. ‘She’s been very lucky,’ Mr Adrian had said, ‘complete recovery
of her breathing and of the right leg, and muscles of the left hip are perfectly sound. Wastage will probably not develop much above the knee. She’ll be able to lead a full life.’ Odd
to hear doctors being advised by doctors. Mr Adrian was the great man on polio. He kept people with paralysed throats alive by performing tracheotomies on them and pushing a tube into their
windpipes. Then they lay there like stranded fish for the rest of