Read To Room Nineteen for Free Online

top of the stairs to get his breath, in a dark which smelled of canvas and oil and turpentine. There was a streak of light under a door; he went towards it, knocked, heard no answer, and opened it. The scene was a high, bare, studio sort of place, badly lighted, full of pictures, frames, junk of various kinds. Jackie, the dark, glistening youth, was seated cross-legged before the fire, grinning as he lifted his face to say something to Bobby, who sat in a chair, looking down at him. She was wearing a formal dark dress and jewellery, and her arms and neck were bare and white. She looked beautiful, George thought, glancing once, briefly, at her face, and then away; for he could see on it an emotion he did not want to recognize. The scene held for a moment before they realized he was there and turned their heads with the same lithe movement of disturbed animals, to see him standing there in the doorway. Bothfaces froze. Bobby looked quickly at the young man, and it was in some kind of fear. Jackie looked sulky and angry.
    ‘I’ve come to look for you, dear,’ said George to his wife. ‘It was raining and the doorman said you seemed ill.’
    ‘It’s very sweet of you,’ she said and rose from the chair, giving her hand formally to Jackie, who nodded with bad grace at George.
    The taxi stood in the dark, gleaming rain, and George and Bobby got into it and sat side by side, while it splashed off into the street.
    ‘Was that the wrong thing to do, dear?’ asked George, when she said nothing.
    ‘No,’ she said.
    ‘I really did think you might be ill.’
    She laughed. ‘Perhaps I am.’
    ‘What’s the matter, my darling? What is it? He was angry, wasn’t he? Because I came?’
    ‘He thinks you’re jealous,’ she said shortly.
    ‘Well, perhaps I am rather,’ said George.
    She did not speak.
    ‘I’m sorry, dear, I really am. I didn’t mean to spoil anything for you.’
    ‘Well, that’s certainly that ,’ she remarked, and she sounded impersonally angry.
    ‘Why? But why should it be?’
    ‘He doesn’t like – having things asked of him,’ she said, and he remained silent while they drove home.
    Up in the warmed, comfortable old flat, she stood before the fire, while he brought her a drink. She smoked fast and angrily, looking into the fire.
    ‘Please forgive me, dear,’ he said at last. ‘What is it? Do you love him? Do you want to leave me? If you do, of course you must. Young people should be together.’
    She turned and stared at him, a black strange stare he knew well.
    ‘George,’ she said, ‘I’m nearly forty.’
    ‘But darling, you’re a child still. At least, to me.’
    ‘And he,’ she went on, ‘will be twenty-two next month. I’m old enough to be his mother.’ She laughed, painfully. ‘Very painful,maternal love … or so it seems … but then how should I know?’ She held out her bare arm and looked at it. Then, with the fingers of one hand she creased down the skin of that bare arm towards the wrist, so that the ageing skin lay in creases and folds. Then, setting down her glass, her cigarette held between tight, amused, angry lips, she wriggled her shoulders out of her dress, so that it slipped to her waist, and she looked down at her two small, limp, unused breasts. ‘Very painful, dear George,’ she said, and shrugged her dress up quickly, becoming again the formal woman dressed for the world. ‘He does not love me. He does not love me at all. Why should he?’ She began singing:
He does not love me
With a love that is trew …
    Then she said in stage cockney, ‘Repeat; I could ‘ave bin ‘is muvver, see?’ And with the old rolling derisive black flash of her eyes she smiled at George.
    George was thinking only that this girl, his darling, was suffering now what he had suffered, and he could not stand it. She had been going through this for how long now? But she had been working with that boy for nearly two years. She had been living beside him, George, and he had had