To the Dark Tower by Francis King Read Free Book Online

Dartmouth after a week?"
    "Yes. I think I must. I’ve studied my subject from close quarters. Now I shall have to move away. I can’t get it into focus otherwise."
    I feel suddenly curious. "What is your novel about?"
    He smiles, watching the two women in the corner, stomachs stuck out, calves bulging, cascades of ash-blonde hair undulating round plump shoulders. "I never like to tell people about my work until it is finished. I don’t know why. I feel that if the secret is shared it somehow evaporates."
    "I see."
    But the explanation does not satisfy me.
June 10th , 1937
    Cauldwell has not appeared all to-day. Clark tells me that when he called him at eight he was up, dressed, and at work. He asked not to be disturbed. At midday he went to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich and a cup of tea. He hasn’t been seen since.
    "I hope the gentleman’s all right, sir," says Clark, when giving me this information.
    "That will do, Clark."
    He limps out, disapproval on every line of his face.
June 11th , 1937
    Another swimming lesson: Cauldwell improves. But when, in a moment of high spirits, I try to duck him he leaves the water and sulks over a book. His back is peeling from the sun: even to look at it is excruciating. But perhaps he will tan afterwards.
June 13th, , 1937
    All last night Cauldwell was pacing his room or roaming about the house. Eventually I put my head out of my door. "For Heaven’s sake!" I bawled.
    Silence.
    This morning, when I take The Times out to the summer-house I find him asleep there. He has dribbled on to the cushion of his chair, and waking up, he gives a sort of grunt. Then he sees where he is, and apologises.
June 14th , 1937
    This evening I take out all the old family albums. Cauldwell has asked to see them. He put them on the floor, then kneels beside them, completely absorbed. There is a nostalgia in this, which I try to combat. How the past tyrannises over one—I with photographs of Lucy on horseback, Lucy with her three borzois, Lucy in a wheel-chair; myself self-possessed and arrogant, leaning over a ship’s rail, in bathing-trunks, in khaki, in dusty field-boots, then lying on my stomach, a baby, pink, cherubic, callipygous; Judith and Dennis snapped in Italy, both naked, tanned, immodest, with a glaucous sea behind them. I have tried to rid myself of this horla, the past. I have tried to bundle it away with the lockets, rings, daguerreotypes, letters. But the sight of these faces revivifies it. It is still potent.
    Cauldwell always asks questions. "Who’s that? ... And she was the sister of him ? And this is you, of course... No? ... Your brother, then..."
    Here is S. N. George, in the days when he was an Oxford dandy, rather too conscious of looking like the picture of Swinburne in his college hall; here is one of my A.D.C.’s, a boy of eighteen, whose babyish face was blown off in the trenches; Eckworth, diplomatic attaché, supercilious, erratic, who cut his throat with a razor; Rolf, whom we thought a genius, but who married a dull woman and begot dull children on a small property in Cumberland; Andrée, smiling with ingenuous voluptuousness as she poses on a veranda; youthful faces, troubled faces, yellowing features corroded by time, fashions and gestures of a lost era—these could once incite anger or pity, contempt or lust, all dead, all forgotten, all bundled away between the heavy covers.
    "May I keep this?" Cauldwell holds up a picture.
    It is a photograph of me, a young man of eighteen in an open-necked shirt, with a week’s growth on my chin, staring arrogantly into the camera. I am frowning, eyes screwed together, brows furrowed, deep lines running vertically on each side of my mouth. In my hand I hold a riding-whip which I am flicking against a booted leg. My face is plumper, lips fuller, more sensual.
    "Why do you want it?"
    He shrugs his shoulders. "I feel it must be very like you at the time... It is, isn’t it?"
    "Yes. I suppose it is. You can have