Read Mrs. God for Free Online

wait here if you want to go out and bring her back. Honest, I understand—my wife’s pregnant too, she said a lot of crazy things just before I left—”
    â€œTime,” the man said, and put a hand as heavy as a bag of cement on Standish’s shoulder. “Take the cheese. I am closing now, sir.”
    Standish gulped down a mouthful of the awful beer. He stood. The barman slid his hand down Standish’s arm to his elbow. “Now, sir, please.”
    â€œYou don’t have to push me out!” Standish grabbed the wedge of cheese as the barman began to move him toward the door. The man’s face was concentrated and expressionless, as if he were moving a heavy piece of furniture.
    He permitted Standish to open the door of the pub.
    Outside in the bright gray air, Standish looked down at the empty market square with its fluttering flags. The pregnant girl had disappeared. Standish heard the clanking of heavy bolts behind him.
    â€œJesus,” he said. He looked down at the pie-shaped wedge of cheese. From somewhere came a pervasive distant thunder like the noise of a hidden turbine. It seemed to him that people were peering at him from behind curtains.
    He looked across the square. A shiny, half-flattened bag flipped across the cobbles in a moist breeze, dribbling out crumbled potato chips and white chunks of salt. The cheese in his hand had begun to adhere to his fingers.
    Of course, he thought. In a place this size everybody knows everything—that crazy woman chased them all out of the pub before I showed up. They were waiting to see how long I’d last.
    The homely little turquoise mule across the square sat in a dazzle and sparkle of water or of quartz embedded into the cobbles. Standish walked toward it along the perimeter of the square. Other people’s lives were like novels, he thought. You saw so little, you had only a peek through a window and then you had to guess about what you had seen.
    For a moment, he quite clearly saw before him the pretty quadrangle, crisscrossed by intersecting paths, that was the center of the Popham campus.
    At a scuffle of movement behind him he turned around and nearly stumbled. The crowd he had imagined was not there. In an arch between The Duelists and a tobacconist’s shop he glimpsed two people watching—a blonde woman in a red jersey and a tall man in a cap and a long muddy coat. It took Standish a moment to realize why this man looked familiar: he was the tramp who had startled him on the road to Huckstall. They vanished beneath an arch. Standish heard the footsteps of the tramp and the publican’s wife clattering down the hidden street.
    But the tramp had been twelve miles out of town. He could not have walked so far in the short time since Standish had seen him.
    They flee from me that sometime did me seek.
    He jumped at a sudden noise, and saw only the shiny bag flipping over the stones. The odd rumbling of unseen engines persisted.
    Standish looked at the darkened pub and saw the source of the mysterious sound. Beyond the top of the pub, the distance of a field away, a steady stream of trucks and cars rolled north on an elevated road. It was the motorway he had managed to lose at one of the roundabouts.
    The rest of the drive to Lincolnshire passed with what seemed to him surprising ease. The motorways swept him uneventfully toward his destination; the tangle of lines on Robert Wall’s map resolved itself, after frequent inspection, into actual roads with actual identities that led to actual places; he lost his way only once, by overshooting a badly marked intersection. By all his earlier standards, it was a difficult and confusing journey, but by the standards of the morning, it was nearly painless.
    The light faded. In the growing darkness Standish began to see dikes and canals in the fields, which even in the diminishing light were of a glowing, almost electrical green. The map led him past tiny Lincolnshire