Read Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then for Free Online Page A

slept in the room that had been his and Jean’s - impossible as his bedroom after her death - and he couldn’t very well open that door. In his own room, once Pat’s, a little room with ballet dancers cavorting on the walls as appropriate for an eleven-year-old, he sat on the bed and felt the tiredness ebb away, leaving him as alert as at eight in the morning. He could be weary to the point of collapse, but let him come in here, be alone with himself, and immediately he would be filled with this frightful, degrading urgency.
       He put his head in his hands. They all thought he missed Jean as a companion, as someone to talk to and share trouble with. And so he did, terribly. But what assailed him most every day and every night, without respite, was sexual desire, which, because it had had no release in ten months, had become sealed-up, tormented sexual madness.
       He knew very well how they all thought of him. To them he was a cold fish, stern when confronted by licence, mourning Jean only because he had become used to marriage and was what Wexford called uxorious. Probably, if they had ever thought of it, they imagined him and Jean making love once a fortnight with the light out. It was the way people did think about you if you were the sort of man who shied away from dirty jokes and found this permissive society foul.
       They never seemed to dream that you could hate promiscuity and adultery because you knew what marriage could be and had experienced it to such a degree of excellence that anything else was a mockery, a poor imitation. You were lucky but . . . Ah, God, you were unlucky too! - cast adrift and sick when it was over. Jean had been a virgin when he married her and so had he. People said - stupid people and the stupid things they said - that it made it hard when you married, but it hadn’t for him and Jean. They had been patient and giving and full of love and they had been so fulsomely rewarded that, looking back as from a desert, Burden could hardly believe it had been so good almost from the start, with no failures, no disappointments. But he could believe it because he knew and remembered and suffered.
       And if they knew? He was aware what their advice would be. Get yourself a girl friend, Mike. Nothing serious. Just a nice easy girl to have a bit of fun with. Perhaps you could do that if you’d been used to kicking over the traces. He had never been any woman’s lover but Jean’s. Sex for him had been Jean. They didn’t realise that telling him to get another woman would be like telling Gemma Lawrence to get another child.
       He took off his clothes and lay face downwards, his fists carefully clenched and pushed under the pillow.

Chapter 4

    If Mike made the slightest effort at an apology, Grace decided, she wouldn’t say a word. Of course, he had to work and many times he couldn’t get away without putting his job in jeopardy. She knew what that meant. Before she came to be his housekeeper she had had men friends, some who were just friends and some, a few, who were lovers, and often she had had to break a date because there was an emergency on at the hospital. But the next day she had always phoned or written a note to explain why.
       Mike wasn’t her lover but only her brother-in-law. Did that mean he owed her nothing, not even, common politeness? And had you the right to stand up your children without a word, even when your son was trembling with nerves at nearly midnight because he couldn’t believe he’d got his algebra right and old Parminter, the maths man, would put him in detention if he hadn’t?
       She cooked eggs and bacon for the lot of them and laid the dining table with a clean cloth. Not for the first time she wished her sister hadn’t been such an excellent housekeeper, so correct and near-perfect in everything she did, but at least slackened to the extent of serving breakfast in the kitchen. Living up to Jean made life a bit of a burden.
       She