A Judgement in Stone Read Online Free

your car without so much as by your leave, I reckon.”
    Jacqueline was furious. She thought Eva ought to call GilesMr. Mont, or at least, “your son.” But she was glad to see Giles, who was on half term, leave his voluntary incarceration at last to get some fresh air.
    “If you’d be so kind, Mrs. Baalham, we might start moving the furniture.”
    Giles drove down the avenue between the horse chestnut trees and out into Greeving Lane. The lane is an unclassified road, just wide enough for two cars to pass if they go very slowly. Blackthorn had given place to hawthorn, and the hedges were creamy with its sugary scented blossom. A limpid blue sky, pale green wheat growing, a cuckoo calling—in May he sings all day—an exultation of birds carolling their territorial claims from every tree.
    Pretending that none of it was there, refusing, in spite of his creed, to be one with the oneness of it, Giles drove over the river bridge. He intended to get as little fresh air as was compatible with going out of doors. He loathed the country. It bored him. There was nothing to do. When you told people that they were shocked, presumably because they didn’t realise that no one in his senses could spend more than a maximum of an hour a day looking at the stars, walking in the fields, or sitting on river-banks. Besides, it was nearly always cold or muddy. He disliked shooting things or fishing things out of streams or riding horses or following the hunt. George, who had tried to encourage him in these pursuits, had perhaps at last understood the impossibility of the task. Giles never, but
never
, went for a country walk. When he was compelled to walk to Lowfield Hall from the point where the school bus stopped, about half a mile, he kept his eyes on the ground. He had tried shutting them, but he had bumped into a tree.
    London he loved. Looking back, he thought he had been happy in London. He had wanted to go to a boarding school in a big city, but his mother hadn’t let him because some psychologist had said he was disturbed and needed the secure background of family life. Being disturbed didn’t bother him, and he rather fostered the air he had of the absent-minded, scatty, preoccupiedyoung intellectual. He was intellectual all right, very much so. Last year he had got so many O Levels that there had been a piece about him in a national newspaper, he was certain of a place at Oxford, and he knew as much Latin, and possibly more Greek, than the man who professed to teach him these subjects at the Magnus Wythen.
    He had no friends at school, and he despised the village boys, who were interested only in motorcycles, pornography, and the Blue Boar. Ian and Christopher Cairne and others of their like had been designated his friends by parental edict, but he hardly ever saw them as they were away at their public schools. Neither the village boys nor those at school ever attempted to beat him up. He was over six feet and still growing. His face was horrible with acne, and the day after he washed it his hair was again wet with grease.
    Now he was on his way to Sudbury to buy a packet of orange dye. He was going to dye all his jeans and T-shirts orange in pursuance of his religion, which was, roughly, Buddhism. When he had saved up enough money he meant to go to India on a bus and, with the exception of Melinda, never see any of them again. Well, maybe his mother. But not his father or stuffy old George or self-righteous Peter or this bunch of peasants. That is, if he didn’t become a Catholic instead. He had just finished reading
Brideshead Revisited
and had begun to wonder whether being a Catholic at Oxford and burning incense on one’s staircase might not be better than India. But he’d dye the jeans and T-shirts just in case.
    At Meadows’ garage in Greeving he stopped for petrol.
    “When’s the lady from London coming, then?” said Jim Meadows.
    “Mm?” said Giles.
    Jim wanted to know so that he could tell them in the pub that