Judgment Day Read Online Free Page A

advantage. He was one of these men who look not exactly older than their years but as though they have profited from them rather more than most; a youngish man with the substance of an older one.
    He was recommending to his wife that she take part in local activities. He had also mentioned, in passing, that a new European connection of the firm's would mean he had to spend several days a month in Brussels.
    “I daresay you've got a point,” Clare went on amiably, “I need occupation. The local schools are fully staffed, so there are no openings for me there. Since I am no good with my needle I am not likely to start the cottage industry that will become the Laura Ashley of the nineteen-nineties. I can't stand dogs or horses so it's no good trying to crash county circles. I am totally unathletic. Gardening appalls me. So you think I should take up good works?”
    She had given up her publishing job when they moved to Laddenham. Do you mind? he had said guiltily, standing there with the letter in his hand, the letter propelling him several rungs up the ladder, the countryside's quite pretty, I'm told, are you sure you won't mind? And she had answered, truthfully as it happened, that she didn't. I am not, she had said, you must realize, particularly ambitious. Industrious, in my way, yes; ambitious, no. You will have to take on the ambition part, you're better at it. No, I don't mind. I shall be perfectly happy reading books I want to read instead of those I have to read. A period of tranquil reflection will do me no harm at all.
    She had seen it coming. In the early days of their marriage, the delectable time in London and on the European tour, she had known that this wouldn't last. Promising young men, destined for ultimate stardom, must spend a period in the thick of things, not in air-conditioned city center offices but where the objects for distribution are actually made. Light industry is mainly situated well outside London, in expanding and usually—for that reason, no doubt—unappealing towns. The Laddenham job had come as no surprise.
    He filled her glass.
    “I thought we were only drinking half. We shall have hangovers.”
    “A little dangerous living might be a good thing.”
    “All living,” said Clare, “is dangerous.”
    “You, my love, are a fatalist. You spend your life expecting the worst.”
    “A hostage to fortune.”
    “It's all this reading. You'll do your eyes in, apart from anything else. Are those the new glasses?”
    “Do you like them?”
    “They're sexy,” said Peter, “in a peculiar way.”
    “Oh, good. You think books foster pessimism, then?”
    “Well,” he said cautiously, “I've never gone in for them on your scale, so my judgment might lack bite, but on the whole I've always found real life a lot more prosaic.”
    “Are we talking about fact or fiction?”
    “Novels,” said Peter, “always pose situations which are either extreme or telescope time, as it were. Life mostly isn't like that.”
    “True, up to a point. They are supposed to tell a story, of course.”
    “History, on the other hand, which I find all over the house these days, is full of disaster, but large tracts of it, for many people, are really quite uneventful.”
    “Oh quite. In fact most of us aren't even conscious that it's going on. By the way I wish you wouldn't keep moving Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution off the shelf by the cooker. It's there for when I'm involved with tedious stirring operations.”
    “Ah,” he said, “I'm sorry. I quite like the glasses, but do you have to keep them on, I thought they were for reading?”
    “I was looking at the wine bottle label. They can come off now.”
    “It hardly bears that close inspection.”
    “I was wondering what the picture of the man stamping was. Treading grapes I suppose. Not that one imagines these were ever trod. But to get back to what we started with—you think charitable enterprises would be a good idea?”
    “There must