Read Shadow Play for Free Online Page B

never less than dignified. He was long and lean with a face of surprising asceticism for a man who knew how to handle himself in a fight, although the lines betrayed an age well beyond forty and a malnourished youth. Ryan had also been heard to say that Bailey got promoted because he looked so good in a suit, and that was not quite fair either. Ryan could not understand his master’s obsession with fairness and conscience in a world which was supplied with neither. Bailey looked impeccable and unyielding in a suit, frightening to some, unless he was decorated with the comic effect of a black eye above. The eye throbbed with the foolishness of its own existence and Bailey had endured quite enough teasing for one day. The rest of him smarted for reasons quite unconnected. Helen West was his lover (he hated the word mistress, which implied an element of financial dependence and there was certainly none of that), and he had been gratuitously unkind to her the night before. It did not matter that the unkindness was mutual, but he had called her unreliable, selfish, self-absorbed. There were other epithets, far more extreme, from which he had refrained and the guilt was for things left unsaid, for the pathetic failure even to have a proper row with pots and pans flying. It had ended with mutual apologies and witch hazel placed on his eye by Helen, using all the kindly and remote consideration of a nurse. Today had begun with promises of killing some fatted calf to celebrate his departure which he suspected she viewed with as much relief as sorrow. The guilt had inhabited his day and led him to the supermarket which he knew, by instinct rather than information, she would visit on the way back to her place. Her turn to cook.
    He yawned. Your place, my place, no place to go. He was never in the right place to find the shirt which went with the tie. He might as well shack up in the back of a caravan in the middle of a field, that was what he had wanted to say the night before. I do not mind any of this, Helen, but could you please relinquish just a little more of yourself than you do? I admit being born forty-five years ago with the expectation that a woman might cook my supper for life; I have shed that hope and did not particularly like it when it was offered, but I would indeed like it if you occasionally volunteered, although I cook far better than you. It becomes the yardstick of what we feel about things, this business of shopping and feeding. Nor can I rid myself of a notion which you have proved absurd, namely that a woman should be soft and have an interest in babies by the age of thirty-five. You accord with none of my expectations. I love you dearly, but there are times, especially latterly, when I have to say it in order to feel it, and you do not say it at all. You have become brittle, my dearest, the sugar spun hard, but I cannot speak too loud, because ten years ago, before I recovered my compassion, let alone my sanity, I was as hard as nails.
    Guilt for things unsaid had him standing in the light outside the supermarket against the backdrop of a dozen brazen advertisements, ‘Nescafé! 10p off! Jaffa oranges! 20p!’ Absently, fond of oranges, fonder still of tangerines which reminded him of the Christmas they had just had, he went indoors and selected oranges, grapefruit, apples, potatoes. At least he would leave her with some supplies.
    He saw her behind aisle one (soaps, detergents, bleaches, toilet rolls), already overburdened with a briefcase and three white bags of bulging plastic. Even in this cruel light, she was beautifully distinctive. He saw her first in the television monitor which hung above the door; his height allowed him to see above the corridors of produce, and he had thought, Darling, you could never rob a bank, you are so unmistakable. A big wide forehead, with that faded scar disguised by worry lines, the thick, dark hair pulled back into a slide which could not quite contain it, and