The Long Shadow Read Online Free Page B

her voice stiffened with embarrassment as it all came back to her.
    “You’re—we were talking about Dutch Elm Disease?” she ventured, guardedly.
    “No, actually.”
    Unhelpful, but factually correct. It was Myrtle, not he, who had said that he was interested in Dutch Elm Disease. Mad about it, she’d said.
    Imogen tried again.
    “You’re—you’re Terry, aren’t you?” she said, pulling the name out of the medley of her recollections. “You’re—”
    “No, actually,” he said again, and this time even more unhelpfully. “The name is ‘Ten’, ‘T-E-R-I …’”
    “Oh.” The amendment, it seemed to Imogen, provided singularly little opening for further conversation. “I hope your trousers were all right?” she floundered on, inanely—but the whole thing seemed so insane, and especially at this time of night—“The wine, I mean …”
    What an idiotic conversation! People had no right to make you behave so idiotically.
    “Yes. They’re O.K.”
    Deadlock once more. Imogen could hear his breath gathering itself together as whatever it was he’d really rung up about came thrusting upwards towards his vocal chords.
    “Look, Mrs Barnicott, what I wanted to tell you … That is, I wanted to apologise, actually. I mean, the way I freaked … the wine and that. I’m sorry …”
    “That’s all right,” said Imogen, a trifle frostily. Why couldn’t he leave the unfortunate incident alone?
    “You see,” he was continuing—making matters worse with every syllable—“it was a shock, you see, when you told me that your husband was—that is, when I realised you were—”
    A widow. O.K., O.K. Did the young fool imagine that she didn’t know which was the word that had thrown him? Of course he’d been shocked, everyone was. But did he need to ring up at two in the morning to say so?
    She braced herself against his pity as against the recoil of a swing-door. The pity of the unscathed young is the worst of all.
    “Yes, I’m afraid—” she was beginning, cold and retaliatory—and then, suddenly, she realised that her caller was still speaking.
    “You see,” he was saying, “I hadn’t realised who you were at first—Myrtle introduced us by our Christian names only, if you remember, and of course it didn’t convey anything to me. It waswhen you told me your other name, and who your husband was—that’s what threw me. You see, Mrs Barnicott, it just happens that I know rather a lot about your husband, and about the circumstances of his death. And one of the things I know is that his death wasn’t an accident. And you know it too, Mrs Barnicott: you know it better than anyone, because you killed him.”

CHAPTER III
    A NUT, OF course. With shaking hands, Imogen listened in horror. The sort of nut who gets his pleasure from kicking those who are down: who thinks it is fun to make an already despairing widow feel even worse.
    Only as it happened he hadn’t made her feel worse. He had made her feel much, much better. At the words “You killed him!” a shaft of incredible, singing happiness had gone through her—a sensation more shocking and more inexplicable even than the accusation itself. For one dazzling, lurid second she was no longer a dreary, pitiable widow, but a glittering monster of wickedness . Come along, dear, I’d like you to meet my friend the murderess. Let them gape and stutter over that for a change. Let them gasp, and spill red wine down themselves, out of fear instead of pity. “Widow”, indeed.
    Clutching the telephone to her ear, the crazy accusation still ringing inside her skull, Imogen was filled with a dizzying sense of change, of hope, of the Outside. There it still was, the crazy, hazardous, unpredictable Outside, just as it used to be, with its nut-cases, its enormities, its random bolts from the blue. This grey capsule of bereavement, in which she had been existing all these weeks as in a padded cell, was not all that was left upon the earth after all.