The Long Shadow Read Online Free Page A

have to meet you at the airport, put clean sheets on your bed, ask you if you’d like hot-water-bottles, cocoa, cornflakes…. And then there you’ll still be, next day, and I’ll have to talk to you,pass you the marmalade, think what the hell to do with you. And you’re bound to want to stay for weeks and weeks, coming all the way from Bermuda, £400 return, isn’t it?
    It isn’t that I hate you, dear, it’s just that I don’t want to have to bother about you. Just like Ivor….
    *
    Just like Ivor. How Ivor would have laughed if he could have known of the wicked asides that kept coming into her head while she wrote her correct and decorous letter. She imagined the low rumble of laughter as he leaned over her shoulder, reading what she had written. She seemed to hear his rich, mocking voice suggesting outrageous postscripts and addenda:
    “Send her a row of kisses from me,” he’d have said, in the special jeering voice that he reserved for making reference to his former wives. “She won’t know, will she, that ‘X’ is the ideogram for ‘Get lost’ in Old Akkadian. Look—like this—it represents a falling man being thrust away over the threshold….”
    How they’d have laughed over it together, she and Ivor—might, indeed, have actually put the row of X’s, giggling like schoolchildren as he egged her on. Jeering at his ex-wives was something that Ivor and Imogen loved to do together, they were so good at it: it was like one of those brilliant ball-room-dancing partnerships. Somehow, it brought them very close.
    Never again. She could never be funny and wicked like this with anyone but Ivor. Funny, outrageous, in fits of heartless laughter, ruthless with love….
    Hell, she was crying again! She was sick to death of crying, and here it was starting all over again, the tears dripping soppily down on to the letter making it look all blotched and pathetic.
    Stop it, you fool, stop it!
    Pathetic. A pity Cynthia couldn’t be here watching, it would have warmed the cockles of her cliché-ridden little heart. The poor lonely widow, sitting in her empty home long after midnight, sobbing her heart out over stupid jokes that nobody would ever find funny again.
    *
    It was perhaps half an hour later—somewhere between one and two o’clock in the morning—when the telephone began to ring: and at first Imogen, in a stupor that was half misery and half sleep, fancied that it was morning: that she had overslept, allowing the bustle and clamour of the day to get ahead of her—doorbells, telephones, laundry-men, neighbours. She made as if to leap out of bed—and only then discovered that she wasn’t in bed. Had, in fact, never gone to bed at all last night … Lord, it still was last night …!
    Sitting up writing letters…. Yes, that was it. The unfinished letter to Cynthia still lay in front of her on the table….
    Ring-ring … Ring-ring … on and on. Who could it be, ringing at such an hour? And with what sort of news to impart? Imogen wasn’t afraid of bad news as a normal person is afraid. She felt immunised by grief from any further grief, and so she picked up the receiver without a tremor—with scarcely a twinge of curiosity, even. If they had said, “Your sister in Australia is dead”, or “Your stepdaughter Dot is dead”, or “Your stepson Robin”, or one of the grandchildren—she would just have said “Yes, I know”.
    It was something of a shock, though, when they didn’t say any of these things. It made it hard to concentrate. “Mrs Barnicott?” the voice kept saying, “That is Mrs Barnicott, isn’t it?”
    A man’s voice. A young man—no, a boy, really … and as he went on talking, Imogen’s mind gradually began to clear.
    “At the party …?” Of course. Myrtle’s party. That dreadful party last night—tonight—this evening—whenever it was. Who, though …?
    “Yes … of course I remember …” she hazarded, playing for time: and then, suddenly, she did remember, and