Read The Widow for Free Online Page B

round. And the other – the one on the quay?’
    â€˜Much better, despite the Ill smelling bad. But far too dear. Nicer. Sunnier. Less wasteful. Easier to keep clean. But out of the question.’
    â€˜One takes a mortgage.’
    â€˜One does no such thing. You marry me because I don’t compromise with my beliefs. A refusal to make banks rich by borrowing money is among them.’
    â€˜Good. But isn’t paying rent capitalism, then?’
    â€˜The old woman depends on renting that house: it’s her one resource.’
    â€˜Mm,’ said Arthur. ‘I’m sure she’s a slum landlord, sweating Turkish immigrants all over Strasbourg. Very well, we agree. I like the Observatoire too. I can bike to work.’
    â€˜I bike too. And it’s not much farther than here. Now we have to cook.’ Arthur got a potato-peeler pushed in his hand. Arlette said, ‘I should like an eye-level oven. Oh dear, all this is going to be very expensive.’
    There was silence. The dinner was good: the salad, made byArthur, outstanding, or so she said. They did the washingup.
    â€˜I’ll get you a machine.’
    â€˜I don’t want a machine; they’re a con.’
    â€˜I see,’ said Arthur, thinking gloomily that he was destined for a career of washing-up.
    â€˜It’s blown clear,’ said Arlette watering her plants. ‘We can go for a walk.’ Almost as eccentric in Strasbourg as in Los Angeles, but Arthur loved walking, bless him.
    He gathered for a spring at this frightful woman.
    â€˜I’ve something important to discuss. It can become peripatetic later. It’s about a job.’
    â€˜I’m not going to give up my hospital work. Yes it is monotonous, repetitive and frequently useless, but I’m not going to potter round the Rue de l’Observatoire polishing floors.’
    â€˜Listen carefully, dearest girl. Apart from a lack of enthusiasm for a wife bustling about in her white overall and her clinical vocabulary, smelling disgustingly of ether, I have an ambition to see you share in my work.’
    â€˜Preposterous. No training or experience. What should I be? – a typist.’
    â€˜Kindly let me speak. I don’t want you in the office. I do want you to have your own interests and responsibilities. I have people in the office. With the training, and mentality, and speaking the pitifully illiterate jargon. Now I have huge areas of work that are necessary but bitterly dull. Others I don’t approve of a bit, imposed by political pressure. We are subjected of course to lobbying. I am a mammon of iniquity. To gain some slight freedom, for work I consider valuable, I accept roughly seventy per cent of tripe. Par for the course, about. I should like to enlarge my freedom, in fields that interest me. Now suppose – I have not thought this out but that is my present purpose – you were to do freelance work as a kind of advice bureau. Don’t frown; hear me out. A small experimental laboratory.’
    â€˜A plaything of yours.’
    â€˜By no means. Let me put the arguments: I’ve done that much thought.
    â€˜Plaything in no sense. You have your expertise and I have mine. What’s a marriage for? Rhetorical question. You’re an amateur? I need only say that professionals including me, are narrowed dulled and desiccated by their own professionalism.
    â€˜Expertise? There are very few dogmas worth mentioning. One is that the only way to acquire it is to do experimental field work. I believe you to be unusually well qualified. The other sort is the book sort. We possess a vast library. Most textbooks are in any case out-of-date as soon as written. Virtually all the good stuff comes to my desk.
    â€˜There exist already innumerable advice bureaux? Two sorts; those that are free and those that ain’t. Public ones? – social assistants; admirable women, overworked and underpaid. Choked with regulations,