Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online Page A

talk to him. Or at least they were alone now.
    “Another brandy? Coffee?” Coleman sat down.
    “No, thanks.”
    “Well, I will.” Coleman signalled to the waiter, and ordered another brandy.
    Ray picked up the water pitcher and poured some into a clean glass. Neither said anything until the waiter had brought the brandy and departed.
    “I wanted to talk to you,” Ray began, “because I feel you don’t quite understand still that—” He hesitated only a second, but Coleman interrupted quickly.
    “Don’t understand what? I understand you weren’t the right man for my daughter.”
    Ray’s cheeks grew warm. “That may be. Perhaps he exists somewhere.”
    “Don’t get fancy with me, Ray. I’m talking plain American.”
    “So am I, I think.”
    “All this ‘perhaps,’ ‘I think.’ You didn’t know how to handle her. You didn’t know, until it was too late, that she was at the very end.” Coleman looked directly into Ray’s eyes, his round, bald head tilted.
    “I knew she was painting less. She didn’t act depressed. We still saw people quite often and Peggy enjoyed seeing them. We’d given a dinner party two nights before.”
    “And what kind of people?” Coleman asked rhetorically.
    “You met a few. They aren’t scum. The point is, she wasn’t depressed. She was dreamy, yes, and she talked a lot about orchards full of fruit, birds with coloured feathers.” Ray moistened his lips. He felt he was talking badly, that it sounded as if he were trying to describe a film he had seen by starting the story in the middle. “The point I want to make is that she never mentioned suicide and never talked as if she were depressed. How was a person to know? She actually looked happy. And I told you in Xanuanx that I went to see a psychiatrist in Palma. He could have seen her a few times—in fact for as long as Peggy wanted. She didn’t care to see him.”
    “You must’ve suspected something was very much the matter or you wouldn’t’ve looked up a psychiatrist.”
    “Not very much the matter. But I would have had the psychiatrist come to the house, if I’d known how badly off she was. She ate normally—”
    “I’ve heard that.”
    “I thought Peggy needed to talk with someone else besides me, someone who’d try to explain to her—what reality was.”
    “Reality?” Coleman’s tone was angry and suspicious. “Don’t you think she got a big dose of it with marriage?”
    To Ray, it was a complex question. “If you mean the physical aspects—”
    “I do.”
    “It was like reality and not reality with Peggy. She wasn’t frightened. She—” He simply could not go on with it to Coleman.
    She was just surprised. Shocked, maybe.
    “Not at all. The trouble was not that. It might have been going away from you. Having me as the centre of her life, presumably, instead of you, after all those years when she had only you.” He rushed on, though Coleman wanted to interrupt. “She was an extraordinarily sheltered girl, you must know that. Private schools all her life, very much supervised by you when she was on her holidays. You must know you didn’t give her the freedom that most girls her age have when they’re growing up.”
    “Do you think I wanted her to grow up knowing all the—the dirty side of life the way most girls do?”
    “Of course not, I do understand that. And I appreciate the fact that Peggy was not like that. But maybe she wanted more magic than I had to give her—or than there is in marriage.”
    “Magic?”
    Ray felt baffled and vague. “Peggy was very romantic—in a dangerous way. She thought marriage was another world—something like paradise or poetry—instead of a continuation of this world. But where we lived, it couldn’t’ve been more like a paradise. The climate, the fruit on the trees right outside the door. We had servants, we had time, we had sunshine. It wasn’t as if she were saddled with children right away and up to the elbows in dishwater.”
    “Oh,