Read Rituals for Free Online Page B

were something, and most of them were clearly not happy with what they were.
    "Do you want to stay in that office then?"
    "No."
    Office! An upstairs room in a residential area, with a madman on the ground floor who thought he was the director of something and who needed him to be his staff. The man bought and sold something, and Inni wrote the letters to and from. Letters of air, business without substance. Usually he spent the day reading, looking out over the back garden, or thinking of distant journeys — without much yearning, for he knew he would make them anyway some time. It was an existence which would stop all by itself one day, and perhaps this was that day.
    "Don't your parents give you any money?"
    "My mother hasn't got any and my . . . my stepfather doesn't give me any."
    *       *
    Smoke and hazelnut. What do you want to be? On that afternoon his life had begun, and he had never become anything. He had done things, certainly. Travelled, written horoscopes, sold paintings. Later, with that glass of whisky in his hand still recurring in the realm of his memory, he thought that that was precisely it: his life had consisted of incidents, but these were not coordinated into any kind of idea about his life. There was no central thought, such as a career, an ambition. He simply existed, a son without a father and a father without a son, and things just happened. In fact, his life consisted in manufacturing memories, and it was therefore all the more regrettable that he had such a bad memory, because this made his already fairly long voyage even longer; all those empty gaps gave it an almost unbearable slowness sometimes. So he told his friend the writer that his life was a meditation. Was it because of the glass of whisky or because on that afternoon he had become a Wintrop financially that he regarded his life as having started on that day, and all that had gone before as a preamble, as half-dark prehistory into which only excavations could provide any insight at all, assuming anyone wanted to bother?
    "Therese, why don't you give the boy some money? Your family took everything away from his father."
    The red blotches multiplied. It had begun as a whim, an attack of family-mania inspired by boredom, this visit to the unknown nephew who looked as if he might be something special, who had contradicted her father. He now sat here with a face like many of the others wandering about the pages of her photo album, though probably with a personality different from most. He was not free from arrogance or from melancholy; he was articulate but clearly without ambition; and he was doubtlessly lazy, intelligent, mocking, and constantly observing. And now, her whim must be translated into hard matter, and to be precise, into the kind of matter from which the Wintrops were least happy to part — money.
    "I would have to see if I can raise anything," she said. "You know what it's like with these things."
    But it had been a commanding voice that had laid down the law, the same voice that would say, as soon as she had gone, "She is a stupid woman, and she pesters me, which is what I can't stand."
    She readjusted something invisible in her lap and overturned an imaginary vase, actions that froze when Arnold Taads's voice continued: "I shall think of a fair arrangement. One doesn't let people of one's own kind waste their time in offices."
    "Will you come to Goirle with him then, next weekend?"
    "You know I hate going there and that I find your husband's company hard to bear, but yes, I will come. I shall bring Athos with me, but on no account will I go to church. If you send the car, we shall be ready to leave at eleven o'clock on Saturday."
    The eye sought Inni.
    "And you hand in your notice, because that job of yours is pointless, that is obvious. You should spend a year reading or travelling. You are not suited to be a subordinate."
    Sub-or-di-nate. A word of four syllables was indeed given, by this voice, four individually