The Herring Seller's Apprentice Read Online Free Page A

I realized that in All on a Summer’s Day Fairfax must have walked past the cathedral twice without a glance or a single comment. But, as I have said, the book is now out of print, and nobody is ever likely to spot that strange anomaly.
    How Fairfax manages to reconcile his idiosyncratic but nevertheless very genuine Christian piety with his secret drinking bouts and unfathomable pessimism is something that he keeps locked deep inside his policeman’s soul, and has never revealed to me.
    I had scarcely shown Elsie out of the flat, when the bell rang yet again.
    I must explain that Findon, where I now live, though large for a Sussex village, is en route to nowhere except Worthing. Friends from London did not habitually drop in on their way to and from other places. Elsie occasionally forsook her office, as she had that afternoon, to visit me rather than vice versa, but more usually I made the journey up to Hampstead to see her. Friends from Findon, such as I had, rarely called unannounced. Days, often weeks, passed without anyone ringing the bell of my small flat in Greypoint House. My immediate reaction was therefore that Elsie had left something behind or that the police had returned with additional questions. Nothing had quite prepared me for who it would be.
    ‘Rupert?’ I asked, because I was for a moment genuinely uncertain.
    Middle age is cruel to the truly beautiful. I am neither more nor less remarkable now than I was when I was twenty. But for the jeunesse dorée, middle age can prove a dramatic fall from grace.
    I had known Rupert well during his own golden-youth epoch. We had read the same subject at the same college. We were not inseparable – indeed I now realize that, in a strange way, we were scarcely even friends. But he chose, for reasons of his own, to spend a great deal of time in my company.
    He was tall, blond, aristocratic and improbably good-looking. I was tall. There was no situation, no society, no geographical location in which Rupert looked anything other than at home and at ease. I rarely felt at home anywhere – least of all when I actually was at home. Perhaps he felt my ordinariness acted as a counterpoint to his own charm and beauty. If so, it would never have occurred to him not to use this fact to his advantage, nor would it have occurred to him that he needed to offer anything in return. I remember one occasion, when we were together in a restaurant, I had thanked the waiter for some small service – possibly fetching me a clean knife or filling my glass with water. ‘You don’t need to thank him all the time in that disgustingly servile manner,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s his job, Ethelred. It’s what he’s for.’ Amusing Rupert, providing him with alcohol, making him look or feel better – these were simply the things that I was for.
    The first time I met Rupert could, I suppose, have been at the principal’s sherry party for freshers at the beginning of Michaelmas term; but large gatherings at which he was not the centre of attention were not conditions under which Rupert considered that he could be appreciated at his best. I do not remember his being at the party and quite possibly, contrary to all custom and precedent, he chose not to go. What I do recall very clearly is a day or two later, when he arrived unbidden at my rooms at college and, with only the briefest of introductions, draped himself instinctively in the only chair without broken springs and announced, ‘Somebody usually gives me a drink round about now. I don’t mind what it is, as long as it’s the best. If you don’t know what’s the best, just give me the most expensive.’ I had been trying to write an essay, did not want company and had little enough money to buy my own alcohol, let alone other people’s. That evening Rupert got through half a bottle of malt whisky before leaving unsteadily, but just as abruptly as he had arrived. I later found that he had been sick on the staircase as he departed,