Read The Man Whose Dream Came True for Free Online Page B

traced a pattern on his thigh. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. Not yet anyway. He doesn’t want me to get married. I told you.’
    ‘That’s just damned selfish.’
    ‘It would be no good talking to him. You don’t know what he’s like. I’ve got my own money, but he won’t let me use it to take a flat in town or anything like that. Most of it just stays in the bank.’
    He wanted to say that she was over twenty-one and a free agent, but refrained.
    ‘And when I do marry he wants it to be some ghastly local. There’s a boy he keeps talking about, the son of one of his friends. Marriage to him would be good for business, might even mean a merger.’ She said it without irony and repeated, ‘I’ve got my own money.’
    Again he refrained from speaking, this time from asking how much. She went on, looking up at the ceiling, speaking in a singsong voice.
    ‘You don’t understand about Daddy. I can’t explain it myself, but if he told me I was to have nothing to do with you I should have to do what he said. Do you know what I dream sometimes? I dream I’m a princess and shut up in a castle where I’ve got everything anybody could want except freedom. People come and try to free me, to let me out because they’re in love with me, but there’s an invisible barrier round the castle and as soon as they pass over it their view of me changes and they see me as an old hag, toothless and dirty, so they go away. And in the dream nobody ever gets past the barrier and at the end of the dream I look in the glass and I’ve become what they believed me to be, filthy and dressed in rags and old.’
    ‘That’s just a dream. There aren’t any barriers. You can do what you like.’
    ‘Oh, but I can’t. Someone else has to do it, someone has to help me.’ She turned and clung to him, pressed her naked body to his. ‘Help me, Tony.’
    With everything arranging itself better than he could have hoped, he knew the importance of not saying a wrong word. It seemed best to say the serious thing he had to say lightly. ‘Here’s some news, Princess. Prince Charming’s arrived, and guess how he got past that invisible barrier? With a special licence.’
    ‘A special licence,’ she echoed wonderingly.
    ‘I’ll get one on Monday. You come up to London and, hey presto, the deed’s done, the princess is free.’ He bounced off the bed, went into the bathroom. Her voice followed him. He put his head round the door. ‘What’s that?’
    ‘It won’t make any difference to you? I mean, to your job and all that.’
    ‘Everyone will be delighted.’
    ‘Shall we live here?’
    ‘Or take a bigger flat,’ he said recklessly. ‘Come on, let’s celebrate, go out on the town.’ He felt an overwhelming euphoria at having pulled it off, a debt of gratitude towards the girl who was going to provide him with a permanent income.
    They went on the town. He told her that he hardly ever used the Jag in London, driving was such hell, so they took taxis. Over dinner he learned that fifteen hundred a year was settled on her through a trust, although she couldn’t touch the capital. There was quite a bit of money in her bank account, she didn’t know exactly how much. He confided a few vague details of his stockbroking job, saying that it paid well but he was bored with it and thought of striking out on his own, starting a gambling club perhaps, which was a surefire way of making money. It seemed premature to mention that she would be providing the capital. He suggested that it would be fun to take a look at a club and they ended up in the Here’s Sport Club in Soho. Her eyes were wide as he bought a hundred pounds’ worth of chips and gave half of them to her. She asked if he could afford it.
    ‘This is celebration night, Princess.’ He had called her Princess the whole evening. ‘There’s plenty more. Anyway, we’re going to win. We’re playing my system, and it works best with a partner.’
    ‘Was that why you lost