Read Shroud for Free Online

hurriedly, she hung up. I shivered; the bath water drying off had left my old skin stretched and chill. My hands were shaking too, a little, but not from the damp or the cold.
    I dressed, impatiently, as always now. With the years I find these necessary morning rituals increasingly irksome. For whose benefit was I putting on this shirt, this linen suit, this tie that was too short and too broad at the end and made me look, as I could see from the mirror, as if my tongue were hanging out? The old should have a special garment, something like a monk’s habit, simple and functional, and suitably presageful of the winding-sheet. I ran my fingers through the crackling strands of my unruly hair, without visible effect; I never wanted to let my hair grow wild like this, especially when it began to turn white, but I felt it would be expected of me, the famous Mijnheer de Professor from the doddery, woolly Old World. Suddenly, like a soft blow, the memory from childhood came to me of my mother wetting a fingertip and smoothing down the comma of wiry hair on the crown of my head that always a moment afterwards would spring up again. I recalled too the curiously voluptuous shiver of disgust I would experience when she was helping me into some new item of clothing, a blouse, or knee-breeches, or a crisp navy-and-white sailor suit with the pasteboard price-tag still dangling from a buttonhole. What was the cause of that inner recoil? An excess of intimacy with my mother, under the chrysanthemum-smell of whose face powder I could detect a medley of more intimate and more exciting odours? No, that is not it, I think; what made me flinch, surely, was an over-consciousness of self, the sudden, ghastly awareness of being trapped inside this armature of flesh and bone like a pupa wedged in the hardened-over mastic of its cocoon. Immediately, again, came the demand:
What self ?
What sticky imago did I imagine was within me, do I imagine is within me, even still, aching to burst forth and spread its gorgeous, eyed wings?
    The lift was an old-fashioned, rackety affair, the sight of which twanged another vaguely nostalgic string at the far back of my memory. I could hear it coming down from above, stopping at every floor and flinging open its gate with a noise of mashing metals, as if successive armfuls of wire clothes-hangers were being crushed between giant steel claws. When it reached me, though, there was no one in it. The lobby too was empty, the reception desk unattended. Through a partly open door behind the desk I spied the manager from last night, eating a sandwich, sitting hunched at the corner of a table on which there was a typewriter and untidy mounds of papers. He was tieless today, with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled and the collar open on a tufted triangle of bulging chest. Was he, out of costume like this and in slight dishevelment, was he, I wondered, more himself, or less? He was going at the sandwich with the concentrated ferocity of a dog that has not been fed for days. When he saw me looking he did not acknowledge me, only scowled, his jaw munching away, and leaned out sideways and pushed the door shut with his foot. I was about to walk on when there rose unbidden before my mind’s eye the image of the coffee mug, the one I had left on the table in the lounge when the taxi arrived to take me to the airport. I saw it all that way away, on what was now the dark side of the world, the rim marked with a dried half moon of gum from my morning mouth, the coffee dregs turning to a ring of furry brown powder in the bottom, just standing there in the darkness and the silence, one among all the other mute, unmoving objects I had left behind me in the locked house, and it came to me, with inexplicable but absolute certainty, that I would never return there. Shaken, I faltered, and put a hand to the desk to steady myself. A clerk came out of the office and looked at me. To cover the moment’s infirmity I asked for a map of the