Without Prejudice by Andrew Rosenheim Read Free Book Online

undergraduate, but just hanging in there by the skin of his backside if his tutor’s report was anything to go by.
    ‘I bet he’s doing good.’
    ‘I’m not sure he’d share your confidence. My boy’s a bit wild.’
    ‘Wild?’ Duval looked concerned for the first time. ‘You want to nip that in the bud.’
    Robert shrugged. ‘He’s an adult now, Duval. Legally at least. He tends to listen to his mother more anyway. We didn’t have the friendliest divorce in the world, and he sided with his momma.’
    Duval was sobered by this. Then his face brightened and he asked, ‘But you married again then?’
    ‘That’s right. She’s English, but she’s here too. And we got a little girl, Sophie.’ We got, and a moment before momma – he heard his voice slipping into the half-black patois he’d used as a boy with Vanetta. Stop it, he told himself. Duval might think he was making fun of him.
    ‘A little girl – ain’t that sweet?’ Duval seemed to muse happily on this. The waitress delivered his pie, and his eyes shifted to his plate. ‘Say,’ he said, as he lifted his fork, ‘I meant to tell you, I went out to Hyde Park after I was released, had a good look around. It has changed, hasn’t it? You see that new building behind your place on Blackstone?’
    ‘I haven’t, actually. I haven’t been out there since we moved back.’
    Duval looked disappointed. ‘You haven’t been out there at all? You should, you know. Sarnat’s is gone.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Robert measuredly. It had been gone for twenty years, turned into a restaurant.
    ‘And the Christian Science church got turned into a mosque for the brothers of Islam.’
    ‘That was a while back.’ Way, way back, he wanted to say.
    ‘Well, it ain’t no mosque no more. Place was all closed up, and the back entrance had barbed wire and a padlock big as my head. You know what I was doing there, don’t you?’
    Should he? ‘What was that, Duval?’
    ‘Oh, come on, you must know,’ he said. Then perhaps sensing he’d only be disappointed again, he went on. ‘I was going to see the Secret Garden. All these years I could imagine it, and then when I get there it was all locked up.’
    Christ, thought Robert, he must have known it wasn’t real. Of course they’d just been kids, when you could believe almost anything, but by now Duval had to know it had just been a fantasy.
    Duval said, ‘I was going to go through the alley by the apartment and have a look that way, but they got a big gate up there too. I didn’t know really how I could explain myself if they asked what I was doing there.’
    I can see that, thought Robert. It was not that there was anything physically threatening about Duval: he remained a beanpole; there was no evidence of weightlifting, no bulk there. But there was something disconcerting about his deep gaze, and how he stifled any laugh. The way his conversation veered around topics, moreover, suggested that the internal verbal mechanism of social discourse was slipping in and out of gear, like a car jerkily driven by a learner.
    Duval reached inside his jacket and drew out a thin billfold of faded leather. ‘I got something to show you,’ he said with a sly smile, and handed over a small snapshot – it was framed by a tiny margin that had gone brown with age.
    Robert peered at it, then held the photo up to the light. In the middle of the tiny square he could make out Vanetta, standing in a kitchen, facing the camera in a white skirt and a dark blouse. She had her arms around a boy on either side, and he could see that it was the young Duval, dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers, as if for church. He wouldn’t have been more than eight or nine, and his front teeth stuck out as he smiled for the camera.
    On Vanetta’s other side the boy was white, shorter than Duval, with dark hair and dark eyes. Robert realised it was a picture of himself.
    ‘That’s us,’ he exclaimed. Why was he so surprised?
    ‘You remember when