To Room Nineteen Read Online Free Page B

George.’
    ‘Show you?’ he said, almost stammering. ‘Show you?’ But he held her, the obedient child, his cheek against hers, until she slept; then a too close pressure of his shoulder on hers caused her to shrink and recoil from him away to the edge of the bed.
    In the morning she looked at him oddly, with an odd sad little respect, and said, ‘You know what, George. You’ve just got into the habit of loving.’
    ‘What do you mean, dear?’
    She rolled out of bed and stood beside it, a waif in her white pyjamas, her black hair ruffled. She slid her eyes at him and smiled. ‘You just want something in your arms, that’s all. What do you do when you’re alone? Wrap yourself around a pillow?’
    He said nothing; he was cut to the heart.
    ‘My husband was the same,’ she remarked gaily. ‘Funny thing is, he didn’t care anything about me.’ She stood considering him, smiling mockingly. ‘Strange, ain’t it?’ she commented and went off to the bathroom. That was the second time she had mentioned her husband.
    The phrase, the habit of loving, made a revolution in George. It was true, he thought. He was shocked out of himself, out of theinstinctive response to the movement of skin against his, the pressure of a breast. It seemed to him that he was seeing Bobby quite newly. He had not really known her before. The delightful little girl had vanished, and he saw a young woman toughened and wary because of defeats and failures he had never stopped to think of. He saw that the sadness that lay behind the black eyes was not at all impersonal; he saw the first sheen of grey lying on her smooth hair; he saw that the full curve of her cheek was the beginning of the softening into middle age. He was appalled at his egotism. Now, he thought, he would really know her, and she would begin to love him in response to it.
    Suddenly, George discovered in himself a boy whose existence he had totally forgotten. He had been returned to his adolescence. The accidental touch of her hand delighted him; the swing of her skirt could make him shut his eyes with happiness. He looked at her through the jealous eyes of a boy and began questioning her about her past, feeling that he was slowly taking possession of her. He waited for a hint of emotion in the drop of her voice, or a confession in the wrinkling of the skin by the full, dark, comradely eyes. At night, a boy again, reverence shut him into ineptitude. The body of George’s sensuality had been killed stone dead. A month ago he had been a man vigorous with the skilled harbouring of memory; the long use of his body. Now he lay awake beside this woman, longing – not for the past, for that past had dropped away from him, but dreaming of the future. And when he questioned her, like a jealous boy, and she evaded him, he could see it only as the locked virginity of the girl who would wake in answer to the worshipping boy he had become.
    But still she slept in a citadel, one fist before her face.
    Then one night she woke again, roused by some movement of his. ‘What’s the matter now , George?’ she asked, exasperated.
    In the silence that followed, the resurrected boy in George died painfully.
    ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’ He turned away from her, defeated.
    It was he who moved out of the big bed into the narrow bed inthe study. She said with a sharp, sad smile, ‘Fed up with me, George? Well, I can’t help it, you know. I didn’t ever like sleeping beside someone very much.’
    George, who had dropped out of his work lately, undertook to produce another play, and was very busy again; and he became drama critic for one of the big papers and was in the swim and at all the first nights. Sometimes Bobby was with him, in her startling, smart clothes, being amused with him at the whole business of being fashionable. Sometimes she stayed at home. She had the capacity for being by herself for hours, apparently doing nothing. George would come home from some crowd of