Wrote For Luck by D.J. Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

striped jacket there was already sweat welling up in the arm-pits of his shirt. The shirt was too small for him and there was a red crease showing where it dug into his neck. If he took his shirt off when they got to the beach it would look as if he had tried to hang himself. ‘Did you ask Mr Banahan about the secretary’s job?’ she asked, and Huey frowned again, not liking – for all the pride he took in working for Mr Banahan – to be reminded of these things on a day given over to pleasure. ‘Sure I did,’ he said. ‘You don’t think I’m the type of guy to let a chance like that slip, do you? You bet I asked him. And he was nice as pie. Told me what a fine young man I was and how he appreciated my efforts, butthat everything was pretty tough right now and they needed a qualified man. So I guess it’ll go to some cake eater who’s done his time at night school, yes sir, and not to yours truly.’ It was a long speech for Huey and the tomahawk of his Adam’s Apple went working up and down again as he said it. She had only once been to the apartment on the East Side, where his mother lay in bed all afternoon eating candy out of a paper bag and his father sat listening to the boxing matches on the radio. Mostly they sat in cafés together, or prowled around the early evening streets.
    The number of people in the streetcar had thinned out by now. The priest had gone, and the man in the blue overalls who smelled of fertiliser. There was a black puddle on the floor that looked like spilled ink. The advertisements that ran along the car at the level of her head were for carbolic soap and pocket zip-fasteners and a magazine called
Modern Pictorial
which promised to ‘lift the lid on Hollywood’. The remaining passengers were all destined for the lakeside, too. They had bundled up towels under their arms, and some of them carried little wicker baskets and flasks. She wished she had had a wicker basket to bring, but Mrs Christie had said they were unnecessarily expensive. There were six or seven couples in the same degree of proximity as Huey and herself, and she examined them surreptitiously, one by one, and decided that three of the men were better-looking than Huey and three worse, and one of them – a bald man with almost no eyebrows and variegated teeth – so ugly that it was a wonder he was allowed out. The streetcar was slowing down in sight of its final stop, and she found herself lapsing into her favouriteday-dream, which was of being married to a grey-haired but still youthful man in a dark suit, who called her ‘Ruth’ and ‘my dear’ instead of ‘Ruthie’ and established her in a neat plasterboard house with a white picket fence somewhere in the Sixties, where the coloured maid sometimes brought her drinks on a silver tray and Mrs Christie occasionally, but only occasionally, came to supper on Sunday evenings, when there would, additionally, be ‘company’. She knew that it was foolish to chase these phantoms, but she could not help it. They had sustained her through her time at Lonigan’s and she suspected they would see her through her time at the college at Wheaton as well.
    There was a pain in her right hand where she had been clutching the arm-rest of her seat, and she massaged it with the fingers of her left. The streetcar had slowed practically to a halt and the people around her were stirring, rather as if they had been woken from sleep. A girl a yard or so away from her with a pair of zealously plucked eyebrows that made her look like Betty Boop said: ‘Gee, Stan, will you look at the way the sun shines off the water?’ and the boy she was with grinned and said: ‘Fritzy, you’re a poet and you just don’t know it.’ The girl’s dress was made of cheap, plain cotton, and she wondered how she had come by Stan, who had a shock of dark, unruly hair and was wearing a college football sweater. They stepped cautiously from the streetcar at a point where the sand had come nearly up to