Read Over the High Side for Free Online

and was ‘morbidly jealous’, apparently no children. Not much money and plenty of frustration; the bossy querulous tone was unattractive. However …
Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital June 4th
    Dear old silly Father –
    I’m on night duty this month and have time for letters, though not that much I warn you since next week I have an important exam, indispens. for SRN. Your letter gave me pleas. – your being sunny and serene means I worry less about you and worries heav. knows I have enough. Poor Mal has such rot. luck – he went for a radio which we were all cert wld be neg. and that accurs Tierney said there was still a shad. rnd the apex – really hvng tb. nowadays is too absurd & its only T’s dnd incomp. that he didn’t shake it off long ago.
    Sorry many interrup. I have a whole squad of priv rms as well as the ward & must study too. Yr sugges studying at home isn’t v. clever you know – one no lgr gets the maids & gvrness & all that folk we had when we were little! The new kindgrt – thk heav. Francis goes to school in Spt. – is v. handy, but Lil is nowhere nr old enough to be given rsponsblty at home and cnot ‘take them off my hands’ as you so blandly put it! Mal does his best I mst say but he’s often away in winter & when at work at home is blind & deaf to all but his wrtng & he too is chldsh enough heav. knows blast I have to fly –
    Later I hv been so much delayed that I will send this as it is More news soon yr Ever Loving
    Agatha.
    The last file was different from the others. For a start it was twice the size, and the writing was more interesting. Van der Valk was no expert, and he despised graphology anyway – something much believed in by earnest German businessmen! – but this struck him as elegant, incisive, intelligent. The first two had been rather stupid. Agatha’s large slightly backward-sloping ‘lecture-notes’ had more character perhaps – but this one … Anastasia … the youngest? All three were saints mentioned in the Mass in those lists one always skipped. She had the same convent upbringing, the same fluent pietistic jargon, but there was, he felt at once, more to her.
    The writing was rapid and hurried, strongly sloped, but legible and well formed. There was a powerful will, an aesthetic sense, a feeling for form. The words had wide even intervals, that made reading agreeable and, he did not know why, attractive.
Belgrave Square April 11th
    Dearest Papa,
    I have not, I know, written for some time; writing has been difficult and painful. Poetry as you know has been impossible to me for some years, and yet this winter I was moved to begin again. But on the paper nothing would come; the old familiar gap. This time it took a new form, for my whole arm was paralysed, as it were, frozen. A pen brings me no peace.
    Winter was shadowed. E. is drinking less, but knows that unless he maintains – at best it is intermittent, at worst the schrechlich existence that needs – bears – no description – then he will not hold his job. I wonder if he sees – really sees – how close he is to the kind of dégringolade that ends in the Salvation Army Hostel. I myself see little chance; he is characteristically sanguine and optimist at all times. The lendemain he is abject with apologies and resolutions and seems genuinely to believe that each time is the last. I envy him his illusions. The physiological cross that I have to carry complicates existence … to finish with the woes, yes, my health is irregular, but nothing to cause concern: rassurezvous.
    I have not yet read the book (I prefer to put it off than to read it badly). I have a disinclination to effort which annoys me, which I combat, not always well. Lack of conviction … Speaking of books I have one on which I should value your opinion, which I send you. The translation is stiff, and reads awkwardly, but the thought I