Enough to Kill a Horse Read Free Page B

‘If that had been anyone but Fred Davin you said those things to we’d have had a scene. But you can tell what he felt, because that’s the first time I’ve known Fred Davin leave before closing-time for a good couple of years.’
    ‘And if he’d do that a bit more often, it’d do his lumbago a lot more good than all his patent medicines,’ Tom Mordue said.
    ‘Pipe down, Tom,’ Colin Gregory said. ‘It doesn’t amuse people.’
    Tom Mordue’s reply was a high cackle of laughter.
    He was a small, wrinkled, red-faced man, with a large head that was almost entirely bald and with thick, white eyebrows over small, keen, restless eyes. His mouth was almost lipless and opened, when he laughed, to show great, clumsy false teeth. He always sat stiffly upright, but he could never keep quite still and was always jigging with one foot or twisting his fingers round one another.
    After a moment he said, ‘You’re my only friend, Colin – you and Fanny Lynam, that’s to say. I love Fanny, God bless her.’ He raised his beer mug in salute to her and drank.
    ‘But what makes you do it, Tom?’ Colin Gregory asked. ‘If the old boy thinks his mixture did him some good, why not let him go on thinking it? Then it’ll probably go on doing him good.’
    ‘I can’t stand self-deception, Colin,’ Tom Mordue answered. ‘I can’t stand pretences and hypocrisy. It’s no good asking me to. I know my life would have been far more comfortable if I’d been able to make myself do it. I might have been rich, popular, sought after. But there are some things a man can’t control. They go against his nature and there’s nothing he can do about it.’
    ‘It goes against your nature to pass up a chance for a row,’ Colin said.
    He was a tall, slim, indolent-looking man of thirty-three, with a narrow, rather handsome, sunburnt face, wide, stooping shoulders, reserved grey eyes, and a lazy, good-humoured smile. He was sitting now with his long legs crossed, a pipe in his mouth and a pint of beer on the table in front of him. Nearby a big log-fire burnt on an open hearth. There was a fox’s mask on the wall above the fireplace and a badger’s above the door. Pewter pots hung in a row from a shelf. There were half a dozen other people in the bar.
    Tom Mordue, keeping his restless eyes on them, as if he were watching for another possible point of attack, found their ranks closed against him. Their backs were turned towards him and their voices were lowered. There was no show of antagonism, but merely a placid impenetrability.
    As if this had suddenly become more than he could bear, he got off his stool and muttering to Colin Gregory, ‘Well, see you tomorrow, Colin,’ he walked to the door.
    He had a rapid, jerky walk with his shoulders thrown back and his arms held stiffly at his sides without swinging at all.
    At the door he called out, ‘Good morning,’ and was answered with polite good mornings from most of the people there.
    Emerging into the sunshine of the street, he set off briskly along it, at first looking a little doubtful of himself but soon recovering his usual air of defiant self-satisfaction. He just missed meeting Fanny Lynam, who, a moment after Tom had passed, came out of Harris’s, having ordered the lobster that she wanted for her party, and went towards The Waggoners.
    Going inside and finding Colin she subsided with a sigh on the settle beside him and let a variety of parcels drop on to the table in front of her.
    ‘I thought I might find you here,’ she said. ‘I rang up your house and that passionately protective housekeeper of yours wouldn’t drop a hint as to your probable whereabouts, so I thought I could make a pretty good guess where I’d find you. Where’s Jean?’
    ‘At some committee meeting,’ Colin said. ‘What’ll you have to drink?’
    ‘Gin and tonic, please.’
    He gave the order, then told her, ‘You’ve just missed something here.’
    ‘Tom out for trouble as usual?’
    ‘Got