Read A Gun for Sale for Free Online

gave up the search for a third-class carriage, opened a door, dropped her
Woman and Beauty
on the only seat and struggled back to the window over legs and protruding suitcases. The engine was getting up steam, the smoke blew back up the platform, it was difficult to see as far as the barrier.
    A hand pulled at her sleeve. ‘Excuse me,’ a fat man said, ‘if you’ve quite finished with that window. I want to buy some chocolate.’
    She said, ‘Just one moment, please. Somebody’s seeing me off.’
    ‘He’s not here. It’s too late. You can’t monopolize the window like that. I must have some chocolate.’ He swept her on one side and waved an emerald ring under the light. She tried to look over his shoulder to the barrier; he almost filled the window. He called ‘Boy, Boy!’ waving the emerald ring. He said, ‘What chocolate have you got? No, not Motorist’s, not Mexican. Something sweet.’
    Suddenly through a crack she saw Mather. He was past the barrier, he was coming down the train looking for her, looking in all the third-class carriages, running past the first-class. She implored the fat man: ‘Please, please do let me come. I can see my friend.’
    ‘In a moment. In a moment. Have you Nestlé? Give me a shilling packet.’
    ‘Please let me.’
    ‘Haven’t you anything smaller,’ the boy said, ‘than a ten-shilling note?’
    Mather went by, running past the first-class. She hammered on the window, but he didn’t hear her, among the whistles and the beat of trolley wheels, the last packing cases rolling into the van. Doors slammed, a whistle blew, the train began to move.
    ‘Please. Please.’
    ‘I must get my change,’ the fat man said, and the boy ran beside the carriage counting the shillings into his palm. When she got to the window and leant out they were past the platform, she could only see a small figure on a wedge of asphalt who couldn’t see her. An elderly woman said, ‘You oughtn’t to lean out like that. It’s dangerous.’
    She trod on their toes getting back to her seat, she felt unpopularity well up all around her, everyone was thinking, ‘She oughtn’t to be in the carriage. What’s the good of our paying first-class fares when …’ But she wouldn’t cry; she was fortified by all the conventional remarks which came automatically to her mind about spilt milk and it will be all the same in fifty years. Nevertheless she noted with deep dislike on the label dangling from the fat man’s suitcase his destination, which was the same as hers, Nottwich. He sat opposite her with the
Passing
Show and the
Evening News
and the
Financial Times
on his lap eating sweet milk chocolate.

Chapter 2
    1
    RAVEN WALKED WITH his handkerchief over his lip across Soho Square, Oxford Street, up Charlotte Street. It was dangerous but not so dangerous as showing his hare-lip. He turned to the left and then to the right into a narrow street where big-breasted women in aprons called across to each other and a few solemn children scouted up the gutter. He stopped by a door with a brass plate, Dr Alfred Yogel on the second floor, on the first floor the North American Dental Company. He went upstairs and rang the bell. There was a smell of greens from below and somebody had drawn a naked torso in pencil on the wall.
    A woman in nurse’s uniform opened the door, a woman with a mean lined face and untidy grey hair. Her uniform needed washing; it was spotted with grease-marks and what might have been blood or iodine. She brought with her a harsh smell of chemicals and disinfectants. When she saw Raven holding his handkerchief over his mouth she said, ‘The dentist’s on the floor below.’
    ‘I want to see Dr Yogel.’
    She looked him over closely, suspiciously, running her eyes down his dark coat. ‘He’s busy.’
    ‘I can wait.’
    One naked globe swung behind her head in the dingy passage. ‘He doesn’t generally see people as late as this.’
    ‘I’ll pay for the trouble,’ Raven said. She